Shrinking Commons: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
The Shrinking Commons
What do we mean by common property?
What resources do we continue to hold in common?
What is their fate?
The commons have been described as a drama, even - famously - a 'tragedy'. Their fate, their future, has never seemed more parlous, with climate change, population growth, and competition for scarce resources seemingly threatening our greatest common property, the planet itself. Enclosure - once seen as the end of the commons - is touted by some as the only way to protect precious environments subject to encroachment. At the same time, undergirded by a general anxiety that the natural, social and political commons are at risk from the encroachments of capitalist expansion, hyper-consumption, and corporatist politics, critics of enclosure grasping for a new counter-narrative, propose a new global commons as the only solution to pressing global problems. The commons, far from disappearing, and irreducible to merely 'public goods', remain central to material struggles and utopian imaginaries of collective ownership and wellbeing.
Yet what exactly is meant by the commons today? How do we define them? How are they formed, and for whom? What are the prospects for new commons and new forms of 'commoning'? What political languages and narratives about what is held 'in common' should we seek to endorse?
This symposium addresses these questions, following developments across three historically vital 'passage points': the ownership, availability and condition of land and nature; the technologies and infrastructures of collective provisioning; and the structuring of publics and their rights. Participants - drawn from the natural and social sciences, and from diverse disciplines ranging from architecture, anthropology, geography, environmental science, urbanism, sociology, and philosophy - will explore the processes behind the shrinking commons, but also demonstrate their survival and expansion, as well as the development of new and emergent commons. The Symposium also features four public lectures with keynote speakers reflecting on the loss and the promise of global commons.
Throughout, we consider the material, discursive and ideological implications of things being held, managed, and imagined 'in common'. Our ultimate aim is to encapsulate the breadth of contemporary change and to find within it the terms and sites of a new language of collective presence and shared returns.
The symposium is organized by the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge.
Much discourse in the field of organ and tissue donation suggests that people (in the UK) fear a constant shrinkage of the public virtue of altruism, which therefore needs propping up. It identifies an agent of such shrinkage: people are fearful of the inroads of commerce and monetary motives. At the same time the rates of different kinds of donations and for signing the organ donation register keep climbing all the time. This would be an interesting arena to contemplate, since what is public and what is private is blurred, not least in the involvement of families and relatives where other-interest and self-interest overlap. Otherwise put, there is a flourishing way in which these elements are being combined (is for instance the new Welsh legislation for organ donation opt-out creating a new commons?).
As an ideal and material space, the ‘urban commons’ is often understood in relation to either defence or to the production of new collectives. The commons is both something in need of defending, and a generative source for practising ways of living with difference, developing new forms of collective life, and collaboratively producing new urban resources and imaginaries. In this paper, I seek to stretch the geographies of the urban commons through attention to everyday metabolic processes that both defy distinctions of urban-rural and body-global, and which become known and politicised in often strikingly different ways. More broadly, the paper seeks an alternative engagement with both the ‘urban’ and the ‘commons’ and their conceptual and political relation. It does so in relation to research on informal settlements, especially in India.
Global development geographies have always been characterized by skewed access to dignified and stable livelihoods and public services. Yet since the late 20th century, the distribution of development resources and social programmes of protection have undergone significant shifts, resulting in the shrinking of social provision and ever greater conditionality. While philosophy advocates consideration of ‘equally vulnerable human beings’ in a global horizon (Rawls, O'Neill), development interventions have become ever more targeted at particular subpopulations, who are represented as more vulnerable and at risk than other groups. Access to shrinking aid resources and social protection are additionally set around by strict conditionalities that elicit certain behaviours and dispositions among recipients. The paper argues that development's shrinking commons consolidates an affective disavowal of co-responsibility and connection, resulting in the erasure of common agendas between development professionals and project beneficiaries, between donor and recipient, and between global north and south. The paper examines development's uneven geographies at various scales from global aid flows, through to globally-deployed social protection schemes (which substitute for universal welfare), and examples of on-the-ground projects to illustrate these points.
This paper considers the geographical implications of the recent increased prominence of transnational instruments of law. Prompted by work celebrating the emancipatory potential of forms of jurisdiction that exceed the territoriality of the state, this paper refocuses attention on the material and bodily practices through which transnational law is realised. In particular the paper examines the extent to which the institutionalisation of international humanitarian law is creating new rights claims and challenging forms of state violence. Drawing example material from the European Court of Human Rights the paper explores the forms of network and affiliation established by the court in order to complete legal deliberations. These material investigations point to some of the limits to transnational law, whether on account of absent democratic oversights, the forms of social barriers that limit participation or the challenges to the bureaucratic capacity of the legal process. Tracing these processes, the paper holds in tension the normative claims of a moral locus beyond the state with the enduring ways in which established forms of territoriality incur upon new spaces of law.
Professor Katherine Gibson, Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney Postcapitalist practices of commoning and a performative politics of assemblage
9 September 2014
We are currently witnessing both the destruction and formation of vastly different ways of constituting community, as some commons are enclosed or destroyed and others emerge and grow strong. As we face the challenge of acting 'as a species' within the multi-species community of life on this planet, it is ever more evident that our lack of ability to 'common' our atmosphere, to care for and take responsibility for what presently exists as an open access, unmanaged commons, threatens our very existence. It is time to rethink the possibilities for collective action, not only as a public with voice and vote, but as a community-without-essence in which making and sharing a commons is a living, participatory and never-settled commitment. Katherine Gibson argues for a reinvigorated language and politics of the commons, one that can bring to visibility practices of everyday commoning that operate at multiple scales from the planetary to the local.
Alun Anderson, Senior Consultant, New Scientist Who can own the Arctic?
9 September 2014
By 2030 Arctic summer ice may be gone for good. Who can own the wealth that the retreating ice reveals? Environmental groups say it should be preserved for the world. Indigenous people insist that the Arctic can never belong to anyone else. Arctic nations seek to reserve power for themselves. Distant governments see commercial opportunities, whilst unexpected new links appear. At the same time, nature shows scant respect for agreements that divide the commons. As waters warm, fish flee north, disregarding fishery zones - leaving coastal nations searching for principles by which to parcel out this uncontrollably shifting commons. These phenomena are local manifestations of changes to the largest of our global commons - the atmosphere. Alun Anderson argues that the scale and time-course of climate change challenges human comprehension, whilst the fragmentation of academic disciplines and the failure to create a true digital commons militate against an appreciation of the Arctic's message.
Professor Natalie Fenton, Goldsmiths College, University of London 'Politics in Common' in the Digital Age
8 September 2014
In opposition to the neoliberal destruction of solidarities, a new progressive collectivism has begun to emerge, re-establishing the idea of the demos in a way that challenges many of the assumptions of liberal democracy. The internet has played an important role in these emergent publics, enabling the return of a critical discourse based on inequality and the destruction of public goods. But it has also revealed crucial problems in the realization of mediated solidarity and collective politics, and in particular the difficulties with the notion of 'political value' in this new commons. Natalie Fenton explores these issues in relation to pluralism and horizontalism, freedom and autonomy, solidarity and the problem of 'politics in common' in the digital age.
Professor John Urry, Lancaster University Offshoring as a way of undermining the Commons?
8 September 2014
Offshoring has become a pervasive feature of contemporary societies, posing huge challenges both for governments and citizens. Elements of contemporary offshoring come in diverse forms - in work, finance, pleasure, waste, emissions, energy, security, and taxation - but each generates new patterns of power, reducing responsibilities for a privileged and powerful 'offshore class,' and undermining the possibilities of democratic governance. The offshore secret worlds that result directly or indirectly undermine various kinds of 'commons'. But can offshoring of these commons, and the dark side of globalization, be resisted and reversed? John Urry explores the potential for 'reshoring' such commons, for strengthening democracy and for promoting low carbon futures.