Public goods and commons, some preliminary reflections

Starting from the economic debate about the notion of public and collective goods, the paper tries to illustrate part of the discussion on public goods and the definitions of the commons, in order to provide some insights about this topic, and to give an overview of emerging processes related to facts, theories on governance of the commons, their potential limits and the related policies. The first part acknowledges that a conception of human beings’ nature and related intrinsic motivations is behind each definition of collective goods and each solution to address the free-rider problem. From this standpoint, different definitions of the commons and collective goods imply diverse understandings of democracy and of the role of the State and the market. Since both the Commons and the public goods share the feature of non-excludability, the next part lingers on the potential outcomes of the strengthening of property rights and the attribution of bundles of rights to common resources, as proposed by several authors. A second part is dedicated to the idea of the Commons within the threefold (economic, social and environmental) crisis. Nowadays this topic is crucial in Italy and many other countries, since an involvement of communities and civil society is increasing around the issue of the Commons, both as a theoretical and a practical issue. The second part of the work rises two points: (i) that Ostrom’s celebrated definition of common pool resources can’t contain the manifold experiences related to the commons and their management (and that new reflections on this topic are required); (ii) that actual circumstances and the emphasis on the Commons are pushing for a change in human self-perception and the conception of identity and citizenship potentially leading to new social and economic outcomes.