The increasing role and the diversity forms of Commons for production and preservation of essential goods and services

The theme of the commons is meeting a growing interest in the economics and management literature as well as other disciplines such as sociology and philosophy (Dardot & Laval, 2014, for example). This interest can be explained by theoretical advances but also by the development of multifaceted practices that aim not only to initiate new forms of governance but also the deployment of activities making it possible to offer open and shared access to common goods. With its long tradition of studying organizations and forms of governance serving the collective interest in the field of public economy and social economy, CIRIEC is part of this process of promoting theoretical and practices advances that can contribute to a beneficial deployment of the commons and public goods. A book on the joint production of public goods and commons (CIRIEC, Bance, 2018), and the CIRIEC research conference on social economy held in Bucharest in 2019 conducted recently such analyses. This special issue of APCE is a continuation of this research by focusing in particular on the question of the variety of commons dedicated to open and shared access to essential goods and services. According to Coriat (2020), the SARS-Cov2 pandemic is not just any pandemic, a rare event in the image of the famous “black swan” or those crises which, as we are told, only occur once a century. On the contrary, it confirms that we are entering a new era, the Anthropocene, in which health crises and climate change will become part of the daily life of humanity. Considered by some economists as an exogenous shock, these pandemics actually appear to be endogenous to our economy. Indeed, humans are penetrating further and further into the heart of forests, coming into contact with wildlife viruses. By destroying biodiversity and the variety of species and by favoring monocultures, mono and factory farming (plant or animal species specially selected for large-scale production), we are destroying what constitutes a natural barrier to the spread of these different viruses (Epstein, 2001; Rodo et al., 2013; Wu et al., 2016). And globalization, linking all areas of the planet, via rail, sea and air routes, accentuates these effects (Coriat, 2020). Today, the major challenge is—while persevering in the fight against the rise of social inequalities in income and economic assets (Piketty, 2013, 2019) caused by the new public management as well as the affirmation of the owner ideology, persistent and multiple that characterize our societies—to protect our great common goods, the forests, the seas, biodiversity, the poles…, in the face of the extractivism that organizes their destruction. This will protect us because by destroying nature, we shall run straight into the wall, through climate change and now through the generation of epidemics and pandemics (Botzen et al., 2020; Epstein, 1999; Manzenedo & Manning, 2020). It is therefore now a question of transforming these great common goods into what Elineor Ostrom calls “Commons”, namely common reservoirs of resources endowed with governance that ensures their permanence and integrity. Indeed, the theory of the Commons developed with the work of Elinor Ostrom (1990) and her disciples has shown the relevance of governance as well as the social utility of the production of shared and jointly managed goods. They radically challenged Hardin's common goods curse thesis and took the opposite view to the property rights theory initiated by Alchian and Demsetz (1972). In this sense, the criteria of rivalry (the consumption of the good by one individual negatively impacts the consumption of the good by another individual) and exclusion (concerning the question of access to the resource) take on a completely different dimension insofar as rules and governance of Commons are precisely aimed at reconciling use and preservation of the resource. As Coriat (2015) shows, however, exclusive and private access to resources has increased in recent decades, particularly on knowledge and technology; the most tangible manifestation being the rise of patents in the life sciences or software. The growing importance of exclusive private rights over productive resources and essential goods and services leads to the term “Tragedy of the Anti-Commons” according to Heller (1998). To preserve the collective interest, it is necessary to guarantee and develop open and shared access for essential goods and resources, in particular through the public domain or production by the Commons. Various forms of production of common goods have been deployed in recent decades to offer alternatives to exclusive property rights and to allow open and shared access. This is particularly the case with open technology and free software. The joint production of public goods by public and social and solidarity economy (SSE) organizations is another way of expressing the pooling of resources to produce public goods (CIRIEC, 2018). The historical activities of SSE organizations, implemented in various ways throughout the world, also allow making productive resources and/or goods and services available to a greater or lesser number of beneficiaries. The deployment of Commons leads to an analysis of their characteristics and the ways in which stakeholders are involved in the work, explaining how they contribute or can contribute for open and shared access to resources or goods and services, particularly if they are essential. It also leads to the clarification of the forms of governance at work in order to grasp their contributions and potentialities in terms of the expanded production of public or common goods. This also leads to the clarification of the characteristics of new organizational forms that make it possible to involve stakeholders jointly and more broadly in governance. It is also a question of examining the economic repercussions and the future prospects of resource joint management practices. Finally, it is useful to explain the contributive capacity of these governances on the emergence of new paradigms of collective action, in particular through collaborations between or with public authorities. Over the last ten years or so, since Elinor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, the notion of Commons has given rise to a rapidly growing literature. In this special issue, the seven research papers contribute to highlight the new deployment of Commons in various forms and their modalities. Indeed, they show that the governance of different kind of resources (food, natural, labour or monetary) by the Commons is definitely a new approach to public management, which favors the involvement of the actors directly concerned. The different studies and illustrative cases presented in this special issue prove that the capacity of (local) actors to self-organize to “govern” a variety of common resources forms by producing the system of rules adapted to the local context allows to ensure sustainable exploitation, which neither the State nor the Market can ensure The first two papers recall the historical, geographical, economic and legal principles of the principle of “Commons” as well as the return to prominence of this theme in current research. Both researches establish a link between the practices and institutions specific to the Social and Solidarity Economy and the properties of common goods. Following in the footsteps of Federici (2012), Fournier (2013), Linebaugh (2009) and Bollier (2016), the two authors of the first and second papers of this special issue believe that commons can be drivers of societal transformation. The politically strategic term “communing” gives to the governance of common-pool resources the meaning of a social adaptive process (trials and errors) that can potentially challenge the dominant profit logic of capitalism. In the paper of Salustri, Social and solidarity economy and social solidarity commons: Towards the (re)discovery of an ethic of the common good?, the author demonstrates the dynamics of the Commons and their multifaceted nature through an overview of the recent and older literature and reminds how they have often been co-owned and co-governed according to shared rules and norms. The author then introduces the concept of Social and Solidarity Commons (SSC), defined as “all those relational practices that contribute to the accumulation and regeneration of human and social (as well of other types of) critical capital”. Due to the intangible character and the hardly quantifiable nature of these SSC, he notes that there is a risk that self-interested choices could be detrimental to their realization (because of the intrinsic fragility of collective interests due to free riding opportunities, asymmetries of information and lack of coercion for instance). To counter this possibility and restore a fair and generative fruition of the SSC, he stresses the potential role of SSE institutions. He thinks mainly about cooperatives that may be “entitled to their communal ownership and may charge for violating community-owned rights over the resources third-party activities that may limit or damage the communally owned SSC”. But the non-profit organizations are also in the equation. Indeed, the paper ends by giving some Italian examples where SSE organizations play a fundamental role in anchoring communing practices to people's basic and daily needs, focusing on solidarity actions and their importance for their continuity. He concludes that even if SSE institutions are necessary to foster an ethic of the common good, they could be however not sufficient: self-interested individuals could not participate in commoning practices, as they could not be able to fully internalize the benefits achieved (for instance for binding constraints). The second paper written by Guttmann, Commons and cooperatives: A new governance of collective action, starts by noting that environmental and inequity challenges remain unresolved despite the growth of the SSE sector. They even continue to intensify. Confronted with this observation, the author believes that it is possible, through a clearly defined system of governance, to allow collective choices that are more effective/efficient than those obtained by the capitalism's profit logic. These communitarian responses through which social actors can band together as third force between market and state can lead to better defense of the public interest and social justice. This second paper provides an answer to the question of how the forms of governance being deployed with the Commons make it possible to broaden cooperation between actors or between organizations in order to transform the society. To this end, the author analyzes the complementarity between Ostrom's eight “design principles” and the seven cooperation principles of the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) in order to call for new forms of governance in an organization. This combinatorial approach brings a new form of commons and thus governance in the sharing of essential resources, goods and services. The idea of combining common goods and cooperatives (despite differences in terms of purpose and in their respective modus operandi) as a means of strengthening the Third Way between the market and the state is the main added value of this second paper. Three case studies of actual experiments in forming such alliances shed more light on the potential such alliances carry for their engaged participants as complementary modes of anti-capitalist organization. The next four papers are illustrations of the deployment of new forms of commons. Three qualitative and one quantitative research studies demonstrate the resilience of these new forms of organizations. Whether in the management of labor, food, natural or financial resources, each paper demonstrates that the capacity of (local) actors to self-organize to “govern” these common resources by producing the system of rules adapted to the local context allows to ensure sustainable exploitation. The third paper written by Charmettant and Renou, Cooperative conversion and communalization: Closely observed interactions between the material and the mental, reminds that various authors, including Elinor Ostrom but also more recently Nyssens and Petrella (2015), have shown that the legal form of cooperative has many of the characteristics of a Common. The research is particularly interesting because it highlights Cooperative Conversion (CC), whereby conventional enterprises become employee-managed enterprises (LMFs), and views it dynamically as a process of communalization. After having provided overall data that allows us to understand the (relative) importance of the phenomenon in France, the three types of conversion are presented (takeover of a SA in liquidation, CC of a SARL handed over by a former CEO and conversion of a NPO in a LMF after the development of a commercial business) although in the field survey carried out over six firms involved in CC, only the first two cases are met. These in-depth and detailed studies of the different communalization processes (in terms of ownership of assets, decision-making bodies, forms of management, and modalities of pay/reward, among others) make the originality and the added value of this third contribution. Obstacles to these conversions exist and the importance of the ethical nature of collective action is apparent. Authors also point out that beyond the cooperatives in conversion, all collective organizations face questions about their collective becoming and the individual's position in the collective. It is only exacerbated in the CC processes. One of the key findings of this research is that “a Common can be successfully created if the constituent processes are consistent with the overall goal”. The road is as important as the destination. Lapoutte explores a new kind organization is the fourth paper Résilience d'une méta-organisation: le cas d'un commun de l'alimentation. The paper deals with the food issue as a common good. The author discusses the concept of meta-organization (MO: organizations or associations whose members are themselves organizations) and their role in the governance of sustainable innovation. By studying a local food policy council located on the territory of the City of Lyon, the author tries to verify the resilience capacity of an MO carrying a food Commons project. Indeed, the issue of sustainable food and, as a corollary, the food governance of territories has become a major challenge for groups bringing together public and private partners, generally of the civil society type. The particular interest of this research is double. Firstly, the author presents results from a qualitative study of a form of organization rarely analysed in the literature. Secondly and starting from the theory of Weick (1993) and the grounded theory, the author discusses the relationship between MO resilience and social transformation. The analysis shows that the context in which Lyon's MO operates implies contrasting forms of resilience: a good capacity to absorb external shocks, a good renewal of activities but still limited appropriation. Limited because the formalization of the MO is extremely flexible in order to allow freedom of action, it does however not really allow the association actors to situate themselves and collective governance to take place. This paper contributes thus to the knowledge of this “policy-shaper” type of MO, that is, to the elaboration of public policies. Finally, the research concludes by how SSE and public together this Common of food, the in the development of the Commons. 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