Events

Thursday, January 19th, 2012 • 15:00 • Conference Room, ECLT

“Commons Goods: a matter of sustainability”

by

Enrico Giovannetti

Professor, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy

ABSTRACT

The Nobel Prize to Elinor Ostrom and the referendum movement in Italy have aroused new interest in Commons Goods’ issue. The reflection on the economic nature concerning this kind of goods has now come to the fore although the actual debate is flawed by serious analytical distortions. There is, therefore, the risk of calling for ineffective economic policy or, worse, harmful social actions. The analytical point of view, that I would like to present in the workshop, is the definition of Common Goods: not just like given resources but as social processes able to manage and re-generate the economic potential of goods and by this in the end becoming an economic resource. The basic problem lies in the classification made by orthodox economists to Common Goods as a “rival” in the consumption, but with the impossibility of excluding other agents from their private use. In particular, such a classification is based exclusively on the economic definition of individual rights of property that, on an epistemological level, excludes different possibilities. An example of this analytical limit is the confusion between “access” and “utilization”. Very often, such an epistemological point is also framed by the critics of such an economic theory itself. In particular, the actual debate is exclusively based on “universal/free rights” vs. “privatization” regarding the access to resources and not as social control/responsibility on a sustainable management of a costly economic process.

The concept of economic process, a proposal for sustainability definition and the discussion of a few case studies will be presented in the course of the workshop with the particular aim of generalizing Ostrom’s results to a larger set of issues as well as institutional/entrepreneurship actions.

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