commoning

Commoning is the social practice of creating, governing, and sustaining shared resources or services, known as the commons. It emphasizes collective responsibility and ongoing renegotiation of who can use a resource, how, and under what conditions, rather than simply the resource itself or the institution that owns it.

Practitioners organize through participatory decision-making, mutual monitoring, reciprocity, and conflict-resolution mechanisms. They establish rules-in-use, boundary definitions, and provision-appropriation arrangements that are adapted to local conditions. Governance tends to be iterative and nested, with local rules guiding everyday use and higher-level coordination handling larger-scale impacts.

Commoning spans physical and digital realms. It encompasses land, water, forests, urban spaces, as well as knowledge and cultural resources such as open-source software, Wikipedia, and other knowledge commons. The approach often foregrounds reciprocity, care, and collective learning as essential elements of sustainable management.

Historically, the idea draws on traditional and medieval commons and has been revived in debates about the governance of shared resources, including fisheries, parks, and digital infrastructures. Critics question its scalability and potential vulnerabilities to free-riding or appropriation by powerful actors, while proponents argue that commoning can foster resilience, legitimacy, and inclusivity beyond market or state-centered models.

In scholarship and practice, commoning is seen as a process rather than a fixed regime: the ongoing making and remaking of social relations, norms, and institutions that enable a resource to be used, cared for, and expanded by the community that depends on it.