Session 12. 3. A.

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.