Managing the commons in the knowledge economy

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 of achieving middle and long-term sustainability. Specifically speaking, the analysis submitted here reports: (1) research into the market of identity and the opposing claim of social data as digital common goods and the need for public and common infrastructures of information and communication not based on the logic of the market and surveillance (D3.3); (2) models to implement a commons currency of the common that can support the activities of social movements and productive communities (D3.5); (3) the final report (D1.3) on models of sustainability and the general impact of this project. Many of the examples proposed here, from the re-municipalisation of water, the self-management of cultural spaces to the free software and makers' movement, illustrate collective practices that establish new spaces, institutions or norms of participative and democratic sharing. These examples represent practices of re-appropriation and management of the common, new practices of labour, creation and production based on collaboration and sharing. Moreover, from the concrete experiences analysed here, the idea emerges that the concept of common goods can constitute a concrete alternative, and that includes on a legal footing (Rodotà, 2011). Therefore the common is the product of a social and institutional structure that demonstrates forms of governing and social co-operation that guarantee its production, reproduction and spread. The new institutions of the common that emerge from these constituent practices constitute a general principle of self-governance of society and self-organisation of social production, proposing a new division between common, public and private. Obviously, the success of these new practices is a complex process that must rely on institutions which accord and guarantee reproduction over time and space of the commons and common goods: ways of management based on self-governance and collaborative economics; relationships of exchange based on reciprocity and gratuitousness; legal regimes that, like the invention of copyleft for free software, guarantee the accumulation of a stock of common-pool resources (CPR); distribution norms that permit the active involvement of the commoners in the development of the commons, guaranteeing a basic income, for example. In this context, it becomes more and more essential and urgent to define the terms of an alternative model of regulating a knowledge-based society and economy at the centre of which the logic of the commons would perform an essential role.