Panel 12.3. Ethics and the Commons

The term commoning has acquired a variety of meanings. However, despite the intuitions that many scholars have that commoning has a normative orientation aligned with community building, justice and sustainability, there are no clear conceptual frameworks detailing the values and ethics of commoning practices. Empirically examining commoning practices needs clear frameworks to be able to descriptively and normatively identify and document commoning practices, while also being able to differentiate commoning from other less or non-desirable collective action and community building activities (e.g., organized crime; anti-democratic or discriminatory political movements; collusion). Current research has focused on community-level collective action processes that embody, enable, create or sustain resources held in common, that is the commons. Others emphasize the practices and performances of becoming in common as commoners, entire communities, and their environment. Despite these differences, similar values often underpin commoning - which may include the aim to transform outcomes (e.g., solidarity, fairness, care for the environment) - have yet to be synthesized into a working framework. In this Chapter, we ask: what does an ethics of commoning look like that allows for the realization (and further shaping) of those values? And how can we account for what it means to do commoning (ethically) well? But also, how can we provide orientation to commoning? To address these questions, we introduce a framework that allows for articulating the three interwoven components of an ethics of commoning: (a) values of commoning, directed towards social justice and environmental sustainability; (b) alternative value practices, that engage with the materiality of the world outside of dominant ones; and (c) individual and collective capacities for commoning, based on practical wisdom and virtue ethics. We use the framework to articulate and analyze the ethical dimensions of commoning. Through the idea of commoning wisdom, we use the framework to provide orientation and inspiration about how to think about the ethical work embedded in the practice of commoning.

This article discusses the commons through the lens of Theravada Buddhism and reflects on their relation regarding ethics and practice. First, we introduce the commons as a social system of self-organization and governance and as a way of sustainable living observed in both traditional and contemporary contexts. Simultaneously, informed by practiced examples of Buddhist commons from Cambodia, we highlight how the commons find culture-specific expressions and are compatible with the Buddhist tradition. Specifically, focusing on the Right Livelihood (sammā-ājīva) from the Noble Eightfold Path of the Pali Canon, we discuss how Buddhist ethics – i.e., interconnectedness, moderation, compassion, and generosity – align with the collaborative nature of the commons. Through the comparative understanding of both Buddhist and Commons’ perspectives, we aim to contribute to the relevant literature that challenges the unsustainable global-Western paradigm of economic growth and individualism.

In the face of commons grabbing and privatisation, the defence of the commons has been a rallying flag for environmental justice (EJ) movements and an object of inquiry for EJ scholars. Conversely, commons studies have rarely explicitly drawn on ‘justice’ as an analytical concept or vocabulary of action. While the latter may result from the initial focus of commons studies on the conditions that support sustainable commons governance, commons scholarship is evolving and embraces today multiple tangential fields. In this chapter, we scrutinise and unpack how justice and commons have been empirically, normatively and conceptually articulated within different bodies of scholarship working on commons. Our objective is to identify trends and research gaps and to reflect on promising research avenues to further advance the consideration and conceptualisation of justice in commons studies.

We first examined the role of institutions in different theories of justice and how early research conducted under the Bloomington school has considered and conceptualised justice in its analytical tools. We then conducted a historical narrative review of the diverse literature on commons that explicitly mentions justice, including institutionalist studies of the commons and critical studies on commons and commoning. We examine how these strands have framed and conceptualised justice, which forms of injustice have they highlighted and which ones have been under-addressed, with a particular attention to gendered and intersectional forms of injustice.

Our results evidence a dramatic increase in how commons have been articulated with justice issues since the mid-2010s and suggest that the literature drawing from critical studies has played an important role in renewing and reinvigorating how justice has been considered in commons studies. In particular, critical commons scholars have examined new research objects and broadened the dimensions and the subjects of justice initially considered. We conclude with research perspectives to further constructive engagements on justice within the commons literature.

Most scholars of climate change policy agree that although ethical considerations are an essential feature of all public policy debates, they are fundamental in a particularly direct and obvious way to climate-change policy. Ethics often involves weighing conflicting principles or interests. Simply, addressing climate change requires ethical consideration from multiple perspectives, as it involves balancing competing interests such as environmental protection, economic development, social justice, and individual rights. However, it is unclear to what extent and how ethical frameworks like consequentialist and deontological reasoning inform or influence climate change mitigation, adaptation, and resilience policymaking proposed by the Paris Treaty Agreement along with some specific conference of the parties (COPs). For instance, scholars like Dietz et al. (2007) agree on the claim that some ethical perspectives be considered to address issues of mitigation, adaptation, and the long-term task of building resilient economies and societies. The rationale is that climate change involves interest groups and stakeholders whose climate policy advocacies and preferences are divergent in the public policy debate related to global warming, specifically when it involves complex ethical considerations and principles. Presumably, taking power imbalances and disparities in influence into account, ethical arguments, or at least some moral disagreements among different interest groups are expected to arise when choosing between economic development and environmental sustainability. Using Analysis of the policy-related data, I expect to navigate the complexity of ethical frameworks identified in the Paris Agreement and conference of the parties’ document from a polycentric approach standpoint. On that account, I hope to join the public policy debate on interest groups and stakeholders’ sphere of influence and polycentric governance.

China is experiencing one of the world’s fastest aging processes, with rural areas aging more rapidly, profoundly, and under vulnerable conditions, making rural elderly care both critical and complex. Urbanization has intensified these challenges, as young people migrate to cities for work, leaving many elderly individuals living alone. Meanwhile, the development of elderly care institutions in rural areas is further constrained by limited economic resources and traditional cultural norms.

In response, mutual-aid elderly care models have emerged, including collective housing for seniors, community kitchens, and organized visits by local women or younger seniors to assist isolated elderly individuals. However, these models face sustainability challenges when financial support declines, resulting in a “decline dilemma.” Simultaneously, external resources—such as policies, projects, and organizational support—struggle to integrate effectively within villages, leading to a “suspension dilemma.” These dilemmas reflect the collective action challenges inherent in developing rural elderly care systems, rooted in the complex, nested institutional structures within villages.

This study delves into the “black box” of village-level collective decision-making using Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework and the theory of multi-layered nested institutions, developing an Actor-Action Situation-Interaction Pattern framework. The village is conceptualized as a platform for multi-tiered elderly care, with clans, families, village committees, local organizations, and rural elites identified as key actors. These actors interact within both formal and informal governance structures, informal networks, based on kinship, geographical proximity, and shared events, intertwine with formal networks composed of village committees, resident groups, and households, forming the village’s nested governance system.

These actors and networks, in conjunction with external variables—such as endowments, economic conditions, and institutional frameworks—across different action scenarios, including external resource inflows, village-based endogenous care development, and mutual embedding of internal and external resources. These interactions shape the content and quality of elderly care services and influence the design of service models and the construction of service networks within China’s rural elderly care system.