Session 12. 15.

How do we – and how should we – engage with the natural environment through the concepts of rights and responsibilities? In this presentation, Michael Cox will discuss how he addresses this question in his recent book, Common Boundaries. In the book, Cox develops the theory and practice of environmental property rights, moving beyond simplistic assumptions that do not reflect the diversity of arrangements we see in the world. Recognizing this diversity will help us craft better responses to environmental problems in the future with an interdisciplinary foundation in what has worked, or not worked, in the past. Synthesizing a variety of methods and disciplines, Cox explores rights-based environmental policies as well as different cultural approaches to environmental ownership.

While the commons is often seen as the collective management of resources, it is instructive to see commons as dynamic social organisms engaged in symbiotic relationships with other living systems. This helps situate commons within an animate Earth and reveal the role of inner, subjective agency — feelings and cognition — in the stewardship of commons. The revised, updated edition of my 2014 book Think Like a Commoner surveys a broad array of contemporary, digital, traditional, and Indigenous commons to show how recurrent patterns of commoning play out in diverse contexts — local communities, urban life, digital networks, and ecological landscapes, among others. Inevitably, effective commons become entangled in the complications of political economy, state power, law, and capitalist norms, which require commons to learn how to prevent market enclosures and protect the generative power of their commoning.

This open-access e-book https://doi.org/10.4060/cd4289en provides a human-centred perspective, building on the expanding horizon from biological management to inter- and transdisciplinary governance. Of particular interest to commons scholars and practitioners, the volume engages with the enclosure of the aquatic commons through the privatization of resource rights. The rapid growth of the “Blue Economy” marginalizes small-scale fisheries and threatens the ability of oceans to meet SDG1 (No Poverty) and SDG2 (Zero Hunger) goals. Ostrom’s design principles for collective action indicate that fishers need to be able to exclude other uses/users; without this ability, collective action and community-based conservation cannot work.