Ian McShane on the Australian Take on the Commons
Is there a distinctive Australian take on the idea of the commons?
Description
"Scholars of the commons are now active in many areas of the social sciences. Analysis of 'new' commons such as information and the internet has supplemented the conventional focus of this area on physical resources.
Awareness of the limits of markets and the state has brought renewed attention to communal management regimes. Commons historians have drawn attention to effective and enduring examples of local-level stewardship, and governance theorists see a role for commons institutions in dealing with future complexity and uncertainty.
Australian scholarly output in this field is relatively modest and limited in scope. Most of the 200 or so Australian-focussed citations in an international commons literature database are concerned with physical resource management. In this paper I argue that more adventurous, vernacular and inter disciplinary approaches to the subject are constrained by limited critical overview of the field. The paper contributes a historical perspective to this task, tracing the rise, fall and rise of interest in the commons in Australia.
This talk was presented as part of Swinburne's Institute of Social Research lunchtime seminars." (http://apo.org.au/audio/there-distinctive-australian-take-idea-commons)