Managing the commons in the knowledge economy Decentralised Citizens ENgagement Technologies FP7 - CAPS Project no. 610349 D-CENT Decentralised Citizens ENgagement Technologies D3.2 Managing the commons in the knowledge economy Carlo Vercellone Francesca Bria Eleonora Gentilucci Giorgio Griziotti The work leading to this publication has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007- 2013) under grant agreement n° 610349. author’s view and that the Commission is not information it contains. FP7 – CAPS - 2013 D-CENT D3.2 Managing the commons in the knowledge economy v1 Contents 1. Executive summary ................................................................................................................................................ 4 1.1. Common and commons between theory and history. Elements for a methodological introduction ........................................................................................................................................................... 5 2. From the theory of public goods to the new political economy of commons: a historical and theoretical perspective ............................................................................................................................................ 10 2.1. The Samuelsonian theory of public goods as failure of the market ................................................. 10 2.1.1. Private goods and the issue of externalities................................................................................... 10 2.1.2. Public or collective goods as market failure .................................................................................. 11 2.1.3. Mixed goods: club goods and common goods .............................................................................. 12 2.2. Garret Hardin and the tragedy of the commons ................................................................................. 12 2.2.1. The postulate of impossible self-governance of common goods: reductive hypotheses ... 13 2.2.2. Commons and overexploitation of lands: Hardin’s argument disproved by the facts ........ 14 2.3. Ostrom’s approach: the definition of common goods within the intrinsic characteristics of goods and social structure of the governance of common ....................................................................... 16 2.3.1. Common-pool resources: closed access versus res nullius ....................................................... 16 2.3.2. Ownership of commons considered as a bundle of rights ......................................................... 16 2.3.3. A new type of public and common goods based on the concept of subtractability ............ 18 1.3.4. Principles of management and the cooperative concept of an individual: beyond homo oeconomicus ..................................................................................................................................................... 19 1.3.5. Conclusions: open and unresolved issues of the new political economy of commons ....... 20 3. Cognitive capitalism and the Common in the singular approach ............................................................. 23 3.1. The theoretical and methodological principles of the Common in the singular theory ............. 24 3.1.1. From the intrinsic characteristics of goods to work as the ontological foundation of Common ............................................................................................................................................................ 24 3.1.2. From common goods to the Common in the singular: a new theoretical perspective ...... 26 4. Common and commons in the contradictory dynamics between KBE and cognitive capitalism ..... 28 4.1. From a welfare state system towards a commonfare system ........................................................... 29 4.1.1. Intangible capital and knowledge-based economy: the driving role of welfare institutions .... 29 4.1.2. Resistance to the movement of privatisation and commonfare model experiments .......... 34 4.1.3. Culture commons the Teatro Valle Occupato and the Fondazione Teatro Valle Bene Comune ............................................................................................................................................................. 39 4.1.4. Legal commons: recording the concept of Common and common goods in the working rules themselves of local public authorities .............................................................................................. 41 Page 2 of 109 FP7 – CAPS - 2013 D-CENT D3.2 Managing the commons in the knowledge economy v1 4.2. The knowledge-based and digital economy between the dynamics of commons and the new enclosures .............................................................................................................................................................. 45 4.2.1. Knowledge as a public good and product of a specialised sector: the Fordist paradigm .... 45 4.2.2. The development of cognitive capitalism and the crisis of the Arrowian and Mertonian paradigm of knowledge .................................................................................................................................. 47 4.2.3. Patents: a necessary evil or a useless evil? .................................................................................... 50 4.3. The information revolution of the PC and the Net: in the beginning was the Common ........... 54 4.3.1. The spirit of Common: the meeting between the Mertonian culture of open science and the hacker ethics .............................................................................................................................................. 57 4.4.Copyleft and common property in the free software movement ..................................................... 60 4.5. The metamorphoses of cognitive capitalism and integration of the criticisms of the multitudes: can the spirit of Common be diluted inside a new spirit of capitalism ......................... 66 4.6. The problems of the sustainability and autonomy of information commons: tendencies and countertendencies ............................................................................................................................................... 66 4.7. The maker movement. A return to dawn in the logic of the commons? ....................................... 71 5. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................................. 75 References .................................................................................................................................................................. 80 Annex 1. Intellectual property rights and private appropriation of traditional knowledge and seeds. The case of the land commons ............................................................................................................................. 89 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................................................... 97 List of websites ................................................................................................................................................. 98 Page 3 of 109 FP7 – CAPS - 2013 D-CENT D3.2 Managing the commons in the knowledge economy v1 1. Executive summary This report presents an in-depth analysis of the concept of common goods and of possible political and management variation in the context of a knowledge-based economy. The research presents an initial critical review of the literature together with a concrete analysis of the development of the commons and common goods. The report will be organised in three sections. In the first, entitled "From the theory of public goods to the new political economy of the commons" we will see how, for Ostrom's new theory of the commons, what remains as a central element defining common goods is the particular nature of certain goods, in continuity with the ahistorical and static approach to classification of goods (private, public, common, belonging to a club) driven by neo-classical inspired economic theory. In the second section we will develop the approach of Common in the singular drawn up with the contribution of numerous studies in the theoretical framework of cognitive capitalism. The third will deal with the historic and empirical analysis of the origin, sense and principal stakes at play in the dynamics of the common, starting from the key role of the transformations of labour at the foundation of a knowledge-based economy. Throughout this journey, in the three sections different crucial aspects relating to the forms of regulation open to guarantee the sustainability of the commons and promote its development as a new central form of economic and social organisation will be faced systematically. This research offers an exhaustive theoretical framework, tackling all the conceptual and historical issues on the evolution of the theory of common goods. At the same time however, it offers practical and regulative examples of models of self-governance of commons, in the context of the knowledge-based economy. This analysis offers the D-CENT project possible models of democratic management of resources and common infrastructures that are at the base of the experience of shared democracy in Spain, Iceland and Finland, with the aim