Global Commons

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Definition

1. Wikipedia:

"Global commons is that which no one person or state may own or control and which is central to life. A Global Common contains an infinite potential with regard to the understanding and advancement of the biology and society of all life. e.g. forests, oceans, land mass and cultural identity and hence requires absolute protection."
(Wikipedia: Global commons)


2. UNEP:

"The ‘Global Commons’ refers to resource domains or areas that lie outside of the political reach of any one nation State. Thus international law identifies four global commons namely: the High Seas; the Atmosphere; Antarctica; and, Outer Space. These areas have historically been guided by the principle of the common heritage of humankind - the open access doctrine or the mare liberum (free sea for everyone) in the case of the High Seas. Despite efforts by governments or individuals to establish property rights or other forms of control over most natural resources, the Global Commons have remained an exception.

Historically, access to some of the resources found within the global commons, except for a few like fisheries, has been difficult and these resources have historically not been scarce to justify the attempt for exclusive control and access. However, with the advancement of science and technology in recent years it has made access to resources in the Global Commons easier, leading to an increase in activities in these resource domains, some types of which lack effective laws or policies to control and regulate such uses.

Antarctica is facing rapid environmental degradation due to human pressures such as pollution, and the effects of global warming. Furthermore, the doctrine of mare liberum (free sea for everyone) allows for the dumping of wastes and over fishing in the high seas. The indication of this trend is that the impact on the resources and the environment of the Global Commons will also most likely worsen in the not distant future if a business as usual situation prevails. Such a trend of environmental degradation will take its toll on sustainable development and poverty alleviation."
(http://staging.unep.org/delc/GlobalCommons/tabid/54404/Default.aspx)

Description

Charlotte Hess:

"Global commons are the oldest and most established “new commons”. There is a large body of literature on the global commons and the foci are broad—from climate change to international treaties to transboundary conflicts. For instance, a search on “global commons” in the Comprehensive Bibliography of the Commons (Hess 2007) results in 4183 hits. I am just going to give a very brief overview of this vast terrain in this paper.

Some of the early works on global commons are those by Christy and Scott (1965) looking at competition for the fisheries of the high seas which “are the common wealth of the world community;” Boot (1974) examining global commons and population and economic inequity; Bromley and Cochrane (1994) discussing global commons policy. Soroos has been researching and writing on the global commons for over thirty years. Oran Young is a leading scholar on global governance and international regimes. Buck (1998) is a respected commons scholar who has written one of the best introductions to the global commons. Other general works surveying global commons are Cleveland (1990); Dasgupta, Maler and Vercelli (1997); Bromley and Cochrane (2004); McGinnis and Ostrom (1996); Young (1999); Baudot (2001); Barkin and Shambaugh (1999); Karlsson (1997); Bernstein (2002); Byrne and Glover (2002); Cairns (2003, 2006); Vogler (2000); and Joyner (2001); Nonini (2006a)." (http://ssrn.com/abstract=1356835)

Source: Charlotte Hess. Mapping the New Commons,2008 [1]

Typologies of the Global Commons

From James Quilligan in People Sharing Resources" [2]

  • Noosphere: indigenous culture and traditions, community support systems, social connectedness, voluntary associations, labor relations, women and children's rights, family life, health, education, redness, religions and ethnicity, racial values, silence, creative works, languages, stores of human knowledge and wisdom, scientific knowledge, ethnobotanical knowledge, ideas, intellectual property, information, communication flows, airwaves, internet, free culture, cultural treasures, music, arts, purchasing power, the social right to issue money, security, risk management
  • Biosphere: fisheries, agriculture, forests, land, pastures, ecosystems, parks, gardens, seeds, food crops, genetic life forms and species, living creatures
  • Physiosphere: the elements, minerals, inorganic energy, water, climate, atmosphere, stratosphere


Status

Revisiting the Global Commons: Towards a Planetary Commons

Louis Kotze et al. :

Revisiting the Global Commons:

"The idea of the commons (or commoning) responds to the concern that people who rationally pursue their self-interest are more likely not to work in favor of the common good if they believe that there are no, or little, restraints imposed on the exploitation and use of shared resources (56–61). To avoid a situation where the commons are depleted at the cost of its users and the resource itself, “collective action is needed to maintain the commons and the interest of the group that relies on it” (62, p. 27). This, in turn, has led to designing systems of innovative collaborative governance at local scales and calls for those at larger scales (59, 61, 63).

At the global level, commons have been defined as large areas on Earth that lie beyond the national jurisdictions of states where no sovereign rights vest and that are shared by all states. These global commons have usually been considered either res nullius (owned by no one) or res communes (owned by everyone), or their status has been ambiguous or disputed (64). They are large areas from which all states and people benefit and in which they accordingly all have interests, although they are too extensive, important, and complex for any one state to govern on its own (65). Their uniqueness lies therein that they are “domains that have an inherent value for humankind and the planet, and therefore have assumed a non-national status in international relations” (16, p. 423).

There is no overarching global commons governance regime; each of the four global commons (the high seas and deep seabed, the atmosphere, outer space, and Antarctica) is treated differently and governed by individual treaties, with Antarctica presenting the most coherent, and the high seas and deep seabed the most complex regime (SI Appendix, Table S1). These regimes have some generic characteristics that are shared to a greater or lesser extent and that are beneficial for governing shared areas. For example, sovereignty should be restricted, and global commons cannot be appropriated by anyone; all states should be involved as stakeholders in their governance and must share equitably in benefits; they must be used for peaceful purposes; and states have a shared and differentiated responsibility to protect the commons for their collective good (66). The governance regimes aim to foster collaboration, constrain behavior, promote compliance and honoring of obligations, and increase reputational costs for norm-breaking behavior (15). To a more limited extent, they also offer mechanisms whereby states are forced to relinquish some of their sovereign claims and accept external costs associated with resource use, degradation, and depletion (67, 68).

Innovative and well-intended as they are, the global commons have limitations. Among other issues, and with exceptions, the principal motivation behind global commons regimes is not so much focused on promoting sustainability as on facilitating equitable use (67, 68). Even in the case of Antarctica and outer space, where the preservationist ethos is strongest, rules against utilization are to a significant extent intended to maintain the geopolitical balance. Most global commons regimes have also been designed on the back of interstate processes that promote states’ political interests, and not because of evolving scientific criteria that would support the declaration of new commons or improved governance (17). This is problematic because a principal concern regarding global commons is not only to control risks of depletion by certain groups at the expense of other people but also the risk for all future people around the world when the commons lose their capacity to regulate the livability of the Earth system. Relatedly, not all global commons sufficiently address multiple global inter- and intragenerational injustices among and between species that arise from the dominance of the global North and increasingly restricted access and scarcity for the global South (69, 70).

The global commons also do not provide a workable solution for areas of common concern that lie within state borders (71). Earth system components that contribute vital ecological functions for the benefit of everyone do not respect national borders; they ultimately affect everyone and the entire Earth system itself. The Amazon rainforest, which is also classified as a global tipping element (6), is one example, where deforestation and ecological degradation contribute to global risks associated with the release of carbon from forest dieback and loss of CO2 uptake capacity, biodiversity loss, changes in critical freshwater flows, and pathogen spillovers from wildlife to humans (72–74). At the same time, unsustainably high greenhouse gas emissions in wealthier countries and their growing demand for natural resources generate excessive external pressures on the Amazon and other ecologically fragile regions. This, in turn, reduces the space for developing countries to flourish while threatening the stability of the Earth system. The global commons framework does not address this challenge and dismisses the nature, size, and ecological boundaries of biophysical systems that interact within and across Earth’s life support systems, which overlap spatially and have diverse characteristics (1, 75–77). It is furthermore focused on specific areas, but not on governing Earth system functions that characterize each of the commons (20–22, 78). As a legal and political concept, the global commons, in terms of scale and how this maps onto jurisdictions “do not align […] with the often unclear boundaries and complex interactions, loops and interdependences of social-ecological systems, and […] this mismatch affects the resilience of these systems” (32, p. 266). While they might have guided sovereign states in the past on what to do about large areas lying outside of their jurisdictions, the way global commons have been constructed and are currently understood are inadequate for tackling Earth system oriented challenges in the Anthropocene. In the next section, we propose the planetary commons as an alternative to the global commons approach. In contrast to the global commons, the planetary commons recognize the complexities and interdependencies inherent in the Earth system and acknowledge the potential of an all-encompassing commons approach that extends its focus beyond facilitating equal access to resources, to one that is focused on safeguarding critical Earth system regulating functions."

(https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2301531121)

Discussion

On the contradictions in defining the Global Commons

Paul Hartzog writes:

"My paper logics its way to the conclusion that we cannot define global commons of things like "air" and "sea" without also acknowledging "land" which destroys the notion of the territorial sovereignty of the nation state. In other words, as long as there are states, no acknowledgment of global commons can happen.


I.e.:

"The current international gathering of nation-states cannot afford to recognize the atmosphere and the oceans as global commons (using scientific criteria) because to do so would immediately and irrevocably destroy land as private property, since land would qualify as a global commons. There is no escaping this conclusion; either the global commons are all interrelated in a single system or they are not. We cannot change our thinking about some of the parts and not others. Furthermore, since the entire paradigm of nation-states is predicated on the acceptance of bounded excludable territories, it is likely that we cannot construct global commons without de-constructing the nation-state system.

The nuts and bolts of it is that we currently define global commons using political criteria and not scientific criteria, because, as said above to use scientific criteria would force the inclusion of land, and the consequent de-construction of territorial boundaries, both private property and territorial sovereignty."

Successful Global Commons need Social Capital on a global scale

By Kaitlyn Rathwell:

"We can start now building trust, reciprocity, shared and enforced rules and norms and social networks that can cross scales (e.g. local, regional, National, global) as necessary. Doing this could help maintain community cohesion and create transparency and accountability for managing shared resources.

In an era of globalization, there are many resources that we share with the entire globe. For example, air quality and fish in the oceans. Increasing the scale of the common resource issue to the global scale also increases the complexity of the issue (Ostrom 1999). The management of resources necessarily occurs at the local scale, but in some cases (e.g. climate change) this accumulates to create a global impact. Therefore we must poor energy into building both our social capital at the community scale and at the global scale.

We need to build social capital at the global scale (difficult to do with our colonial history and ongoing international power differentials). Reciprocity and trust can be fostered by commitment to and enforcement of treaties and international agreements. At the same time we need transparent and elaborate social networks so information can be exchanged from the local to the global scale and back again. We need to ask important questions like who will be in charge of enforcing rules are followed at the global scale? What kind of social networks can we create to maintain transparency and accountability for enforcing global rules? What are the rules and norms that we want for management of the global commons?

This is of course an incredible challenge! So how can you be an agent of social capital in your communities and our global community? Lets take it back to my water example and the freshwater from the Aberfoyle Aquifer that I love to drink. I have to take action to build the social capital of the community that manages my water. I will have to be an active participate in decision-making and actions on the ground to build trust and reciprocity through action with others influencing water. And I will have to put pressure on institutions above me to be supportive of our attempts as community water management.

I have started doing this, and so can you! I am a volunteer for the local WellingtonWaterWatchers NGO here in Canada, I have sent a letter to the government here with my concerns about Nestle’s request, and I am building a network and communicating the issue by writing about it here and sharing it with you. Thus, I continue my pursuit as a ‘shameless optimist’ with the belief that we can dodge Hardin’s famous tragedy by working together to build social capital in our communities and for our globe." (http://www.shareable.net/blog/social-capital-and-the-commons)

More Information

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