Workshop ‘The Value of the Commons’

From the 20th until the 22nd of March, the NWO project Private Property and Political Power in a Liberal Society will organise the workshop The Value of the Commons. This workshop, that is part of the sub-project Common Property: The New Commons, will take place in English.

In this interdisciplinary workshop, philosophers, legal scholars, social scientists and historians will present their recent research on common property regimes. These are arrangements in which a group of interdependent users of a resource, manage that resource together. Things can be a natural resource, such as in communal forest management, but it can also be a local amenity, such as a community garden or a library managed by local residents.

Commons in an open society

Common property regimes form an alternative to other institutional arrangements, such as private or corporate property and public regulation. This raises a normative question: when should a good by governed by a common property regime? The speakers will address this question, by examining how common property regimes can affect or promote different values. What effect do they have on a fair distribution of goods? What is their significance from the point of view of democratic theory? And what can commoners learn from their cooperative activities? These are some of the questions that will be addressed.

Speakers

The speakers are Erling Berge (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Hanoch Dagan (Tel Aviv University), Constance McDermott (University of Oxford), Tine de Moor (Utrecht University), Albert Weale (University College London), Stuart White (University of Oxford), Marc Goëtzmann (Université Nice Sophia Antipolis), Nicole Rogge (Martin-Luther Universität Halle Wittenberg) and Yara Al Salman (Utrecht University).