Session 1. 23.

This paper explores the concept of the commons of the sky in the context of the emergence of convenience-based delivery drone networks above more and more cities around the world. Beyond evident safety concerns, the seemingly relentless expansion of commercial drone operations raises significant environmental, privacy, amenity, and participatory governance issues. These are now attracting rightful attention as critical to effective and ethical regulatory responses (e.g. Zenz 2024). This paper contributes to that critical scholarly movement, by providing a new way of understanding tech imperialism manifested through drone operations. Using the example of Google’s delivery drone enterprise in Australia (Zenz and Powles 2024, in press), the paper frames delivery drones as a particularly visceral embodiment of the patterns of privatisation that accompany incursion by Big Tech into our lived environment, particularly in the context of smart cities (e.g. Sadowski 2021). It proposes that such drone expansion constitutes a modern form of a very old and effective commercial and legal strategy: enclosure and hence expropriation of the commons, committed through collusion with state interests, for private (corporate) use and benefit. Consistent with more traditional land-grabs, expropriation of the sky is supported by its characterisation as a vacant and unused resource. Big Tech’s ambitions to transform this 'dead space' in commercially viable ways seems, in that light, a highly positive development. Drawing on historical, doctrinal and socio-legal perspectives, this paper explores the powerful, countervailing implications of identifying this strategy, and reconceptualising ‘the sky as commons’, for law, regulation and society.

Commons and Anti-commons in Kapuas Hulu, Indonesia
Moira Moeliono and Linda Yuliani
Can local communities resist the anti-commons processes as promoted by private sector and the state? In Kapuas Hulu, Indonesia, some communities are trying. People in the Labian-Leboyan watershed initiated a forum to rehabilitate the watershed by replanting the native tengkawang (shore sp) tree. Another forum is attempting to solve the waste problem whereby collaboration from upstream to downstream is needed to manage the water commons. In parallel communities are trying to regain the control over their resources though the national social forestry program.
These ‘commoning’ processes are gaining attention, especially in the face of privatization including privatization of public services. Even though Kapuas Hulu is in a remote area, the increasing dominance of neoliberal economics as well as of the application of artificial Intelligence in business as well as governance and education, will affect the human dimension of development.
In this paper we present the three cases and critically assess the effectivity of community efforts in the face of conscious as well as unconscious acceptance of the anti-commons.

The use of chemical pesticides and mineral fertilizers in agriculture continues to present a serious governance problem. Pesticides and fertilizers as private goods help farmers increase yield and protect plants from pests. However, their overuse harm shared benefits from public goods such as soil, biodiversity, and human health. The ‘invisible’ chemical commons emerging from the interaction of pesticide and fertilizer use with economic development, land use decisions, and climate change have underappreciated consequences for both humans and nature. Appropriate policy framework to guide farmer behavior with due consideration to the complex set of tradeoffs between food, climate, biodiversity, and human health while also ensuring equity is largely missing because of several unknowns. For example, monitoring the use of chemicals and their environmental fate is extremely challenging; a detailed picture of their mobility across time and place is largely missing; current institutional designs that encompass both economic and regulatory measures for public decision-makers, and collective actions for individual farmers are yet to deliver successful examples. To address this problem, we present emerging research from India and Uganda and invite panelists working on chemical commons from different fields, geographies, and scales. We aim to initiate a dialogue around the following question: What theories, concepts, and methods from commons research can help to understand chemical commons?