Ethics and the Commons
Description
Ethical values are involved in every intentional human action - both in research, governance and civil society. The question of this book is: what ethical values, challenges, and actions are associated with the commons and commoning? Do commons have a specific ethical and moral orientation? How can we engage with different and plural orientations? While the ethical values of commons may be implied from our research concepts, frameworks and methods, they are rarely made explicit or linked to ethical claims or theories in philosophy. This book aims to build awareness around the different ethical values, positions, and perspectives linked to commons, common property, and commoning research and practice. Building ethical awareness can help scholars strengthen their tools and skills for analyzing commons. Improving ethical awareness can give scholars a range of philosophical arguments to navigate and justify links between ethical values, actions, and outcomes. Current literature on the commons offers a diversity of concepts and arguments related to the benefits and challenges of commons, common property and commoning for the governance and sustainability of social-ecological systems. One challenge is that commons are not one thing. The term 'commons' is broadly used to represent different objects of shared interest, types of governance, social actions, and ideological positions. Given the diversity of commons and their tendency to have strong place-based dynamics, a plurality of ethical orientations and claims are observed and perhaps expected in the literature. Acknowledging and working with multiple ethical orientations, theories, and perspectives can enable richer analytical and reflective perspectives that can improve our engagement with the ethical complexities of researching and governing commons. This is an open access book.
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Person
Dr. Stefan Partelow is a Professor of Environmental Governance at the University of Bonn in Bonn, Germany. He leads the Governance and Transformation group at the Center for Life Ethics, and is the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant project called SharedSeas (2025-2029), which examines how to scale effective governance in our oceans. Dr. Partelow is a Lead Editor at the journal People and Nature, and the co-host and co-founder of the In Common Podcast, the official podcast of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC). His research areas include ocean governance, small-scale fisheries and aquaculture, social-ecological systems analysis, commons, commoning, and institutional change. He completed his Doctoral and Postdoctoral research at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) and Jacobs University (now Constructor University) in Bremen, Germany. Dr. Partelow further studied Environmental Studies and Sustainability Science at Lund University, Sweden, and the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Content
Ethics and the commons: an introduction to why building ethical Awareness matters.- Justice and the Commons: A Review.- Many Worlds, One Earth: towards a diverse ethics of the commons.- Ethical commoning: A framework for identifying and comparing values, practices, and capacities.- A Look at the Commons through the Lens of Buddhist Ethics.- Knowledge ethics for Marine Spatial Planning: balancing critical and constructive engagement with small-scale fisheries.- Trade-offs conducting action research on the commons: balancing the ethics of research and practice.- Navigating ethical spaces in common property research.- Ethical dimensions and practical guidance for transdisciplinary research on the commons.- Commons as boundary objects for ethical awareness: key questions and directions forward.