Georgetown University,
Washington D.C.
October
5-6, 2018
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Garrett Hardin's The
Tragedy of the Commons. In one of the most cited articles of the 20th
Century, Hardin provided a stylized and memorable cautionary tale of how
self-interested actions can destroy common resources. However, even as Hardin's
work gained traction with a broad array of scholars in many fields of study, it
also garnered its fair share of criticism. Indeed, while Hardin popularized the
notion of the commons, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for her rigorous
research refuting the core tenets of Hardin's cautionary tale-- namely that
open access resources ultimately end in collective failure, or tragedy, and
that common resources should either be regulated by central authorities or
privatized. Ostrom’s work successfully demonstrated that common
natural resources—e.g. land, fisheries, forests, irrigation
systems—are collectively managed by groups of users all over the world using
“rich mixtures of public and private instrumentalities.”
The “commons” is now employed as a framework to understand and
rethink the management and governance of many kinds of shared resources. These
include natural resources such as those studied by Ostrom, digital resources
and the Internet, housing and other urban infrastructure, among others. At the
heart of the exploration of these “new” kinds of commons is the recognition
that Hardin’s Tragedy is a groundbreaking, though ultimately
incomplete, conceptualization of the challenges posed by shared resources and
the kind of governance solutions available to address those challenges. In
addition to concerns about overconsumption (Hardin’s primary focus), these new
human-created commons (e.g., scholarly communities, urban resources, and
open-source software) pose questions about robust participation in creating,
sustaining, and expanding the commons.
To celebrate this now multifaceted, multidisciplinary field of
study, scholars from many disciplines will gather to discuss solutions,
lessons, and challenges facing the commons and commons scholarship. This
gathering will recognize that commons are as diverse as the scholars who study
them--ranging from rainforests to the Internet to the city—and that field is
still developing in exciting ways. In a world as complex as ours, finding
such interconnections across disciplines is extremely
valuable.
The conference will be held on October 5-6th at
Georgetown University and will be the kickoff and flagship event of
“World Commons Week” activities around the world (www.worldcommonsweek.org), promoted and sponsored by
the International Association for the Study of the Commons.
We invite proposals for paper presentations, thematic panels or
sessions, workshops or interactive sessions, and poster presentations on
research topics related to the commons and examined through the lens of a
particular field or discipline. Please submit an abstract of
between 500-750 words that makes clear the relevance of the paper to the conference
topic and a brief bio by June 15, 2018. Submit all
materials to Chrystie Swiney, cfs23@georgetown.edu with
a copy to the organizers below. Also, please be aware that there is small $50
fee to attend the conference, even if you are presenting a paper.
- Prof. Sheila Foster, srf42@georgetown.edu (Georgetown University)
- Prof. Brigham Daniels, danielsb@law.byu.edu (Brigham Young University)
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