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This chapter explains how Elinor Ostrom’s work on natural common-pool resources has limited lessons to offer intellectual property scholars, virtually none of which is normative. Her body of work provides an object lesson in how carefully structured conceptual, methodological, and analytical tools, such as her Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, can assist in (1) understanding information flows under alternative institutional arrangements; (2) diagnosing problems in existing institutional arrangements; and (3) predicting, in at least some cases, the outcomes of changes in institutional arrangements. Her work offers little or no normative guidance for the structure of intellectual property systems or knowledge commons. Scholars need to bear in mind that in Ostrom’s work on common-pool natural resources, in contrast to “knowledge commons,” “open access” was often the problem to be solved, rather than a solution to a problem of too little access to information.

This chapter sets out the knowledge commons framework that forms the foundation for the case study chapters that follow, and it provides not only an explanation of its purposes but also a guide to applying it. The framework builds on the Institutional Analysis and Development approach pioneered by Elinor Ostrom and her collaborators for systematically studying commons arrangements in the natural environment. The systematic approach to case study design and analysis provided by the knowledge commons framework is intended not only to structure individual case studies in a useful and productive way but also to make it possible eventually to produce generalizable results. An improved understanding of knowledge commons is critical for obtaining a more complete perspective on intellectual property policy and its interactions with other legal and social mechanisms for governing creativity and innovation.

Francisco Seijo draws on Niccolò Machiavelli to take issue with contemporary greens who argue that radical decentralization – in the form of eco-anarchism or bioregionalism – is most conducive to ecological sustainability. Machiavelli sees changing fortune as destabilizing the conditions for peaceful coexistence among small polities and providing an impetus for political expansion. Drawing on lessons from Machiavelli’s account of Rome, Seijo argues that the challenges of security and large-scale ecological problems make a loose, federative partnership between a large central government and its constituent smaller polities superior to radical decentralization. However, Seijo rejects Machiavelli’s emphasis on expansion as violating notions of ecological limits and ultimately finds a federative model in Elinor Ostrom’s call for multi-level governance of common pool resources.

The chapter distinguishes between two traditions of studying commons: the Ostrom School focuses on solutions that embody local knowledge to solve collective action problems without individual property or state regulation; the open commons school explains the ubiquity of open commons in complex modern economies. Like traditional economic theory, the Ostrom School sees open access commons as tragic. By contrast, literature arising from information economics and Internet studies shows that open commons, or, symmetrically privileged freedom to operate vis-à-vis core critical resources, play a central role in the institutional design of contemporary economies, in particular providing infrastructures and supporting innovation and information production. The rich institutional and contextual IAD method of the Ostrom School is a promising avenue in the design of sustainable open commons, but its application requires recognition of how the problems and opportunity space explored by the open commons school differ from those that gave rise to the IAD approach.

Issues about corruption and other forms of bad government have become central in the social sciences. An unresolved question is how countries can solve the issue of transformation from systemic corruption to the quality of government. Based on Elinor Ostrom’s theory of common pool resource appropriation, a new theoretical model for explaining this type of institutional change is developed. Sweden during the nineteenth century is used as an illustration by showing how the country made a transition from being largely patrimonial, nepotistic, and corrupt to a modern, Weberian, efficient, and impartial state structure. In addition to the “national trauma” of losing a major war, this chapter stresses the importance of three additional factors in Sweden: previous changes in courts and the legal system; recognition of the problem by the main contemporary political actors; and the new liberal ideology that made an important impact on the Swedish political scene.

Chapter 8 looks at several more worries about, and objections raised to, markets and business. This chapter focuses specifically on concerns raised about how markets can induce us to misvalue things—valuing some things too highly, valuing other things not enough. Chapter 8 argues that it is not things but rather people and their choices that should be valued. It also argues that one can advocate both liberty and virtue, that is, respecting people’s right to choose while retaining the moral authority to criticize—though not interfere with—their choices. It argues that working for wages is not plausibly similar to slavery and hence, contrary to some critics’ claims, should not be described as such. Finally, the chapter discusses tragedies of the commons and explores the ways that honorable business might address and mitigate some, if not all, of them.

This chapter considers the spatial dimensions of ecological governance. It explains that space is of central concern to rational ecological governance and discusses Elinor Ostrom's opinion that ecosystem-based governance is one of congruence between a natural ecosystem and the unit of governance for that system. This chapter analyses ideas on ecosystem management in order to formulate operational criteria for evaluating Sweden's performance in terms of spatially rational ecological governance. It also argues that the idea of nested enterprises does imply that multi-faceted interests and uses of shared natural resources can be organised into a proper response to problems of ecological governance.

This chapter examines the basic institutional similarities between innovation commons (as a species of knowledge commons) and the eight core design principles, or rules of the commons, that Ostrom discovered. It explores the innovation commons through the lens of these rules that enable a group to form under uncertainty, and that make cooperation a safe and effective strategy within that group. The question is explored in terms of the core problems a commons must solve: identity, cooperation, consent, monitoring, punishment, and independence. The chapter then examines these rules in the broader context of multilevel selection theory, arguing that group selection operates over innovation.

This chapter concerns how the global emissions budget should be shared, critiquing the equal per capita emissions view (EPC). First, it is explained how theorists have used claims about natural resource rights to formulate the atmospheric commons argument for EPC. Then, drawing on the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Elinor Ostrom’s work on common-pool resources, it is shown that these arguments invoke a misleading analysis of climate change as a global commons problem. Accurate understanding of how climate change results from overuse of a global commons suggests that proponents of the commons argument for EPC overlook potential territorial claims to the climate sink. Two options for EPC theorists who wish to maintain the view in the face of this critique are identified, but both turn out to necessitate deeper engagement with the question of how rights to the world’s resources should be assigned.

How Fisheries Are Managed. In traditional fisheries management, local communities controlled a certain defined area, a form of exclusive access to the resource that relied on a cohesive community with strong leadership. The main alternative has been regulation by a central government by limiting fishing effort and catch and monitoring stocks via its own science and research institutions. Such top-down management has been quite successful in achieving sustainability for many large fisheries, but it is difficult and expensive to implement for small fisheries.

This chapter looks at some ways in which capitalism impacts the natural world. While capitalism and markets can never be solely to blame in general for environmental harms, there are some specific objections to markets that call for special attention. It is important to distinguish between the role of markets in causing environmentally destructive human conduct and the role that markets could and, in a few cases, might already be playing in bringing about a constructive response. There’s no getting away from the fact that an effective global response to climate change is both urgently needed and distressingly hard to achieve. The goal here is to help avoid distracting conclusions about what’s to blame for this and to acquaint readers with a more robust approach to the problem as one of political economy.