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Some meta-critiques of the literature on common property have questioned these
assumptions and silences, noting for instance that formal property theory typically
has strong but implicit normative dimensions, in which powerful narratives and
thought experiments actually help to create and mold particular subjectivities and
orientations with respect to property and the environment (Rose, 1994; St. Martin,
2007). Similarly, discussions of actual or potential global commons that do not
speak to the origins of existing inequalities, exploitations, and oppressions elide
many of the central facts about contemporary patterns of resource use. Geographi-
cal scholarship related to environmental commons, most strongly in the tradition
of political ecology in recent years, has thus tended to focus less on the construction
of abstract models or rules of whatever sort, and more on context-specifi c investiga-
tions of the actual politics, power relations and forms of rationality and meaning
relevant to particular cases. Most notably, perhaps, political ecology has demon-
strated that in the modern era, instability in common property regimes has often
been rooted less in internal dynamics than in the forcible integration of entire societ-
ies into a global capitalist economy - a problem that may not be fi xable through
modifi cations of local rules. In a similar vein, political ecology has sharpened under-
standing of property rights as dynamic political arrangements inseparable from
production, and emphasised forms of differentiation and confl ict (e.g., along axes
of gender or class) within rights-holding 'communities' often treated as homogenous
and egalitarian in some of the literature on common property regimes (see Robbins,
2004; Neumann, 2005).
The Contemporary Politics of the Commons
A third distinct conversation around commons has proliferated over just the past
decade or so. It centres on the contention that the most recent global round of
capital accumulation - post-Keynesian, post-Cold War, labelled as 'globalization'
by some, 'neoliberalism' by others - has relied especially heavily upon the appro-
priation of assets and values by extra-economic means, i.e., the recent enclosure of
many commons in a new round of primitive accumulation. 'Commons' are under-
stood widely in this conversation, referring not only to the sorts of common-pool
natural resources and land-based use rights discussed in the preceding sections, but
also to a much broader set of public goods, trusts, spaces and interests, many of
which have been variously appropriated, privaticised, marketised or simply elimi-
nated during the neoliberal era. For instance, the widespread, often IMF-instigated
privatisation of state assets and industries, the globalisation of ruthlessly self-serving
western intellectual property regimes via the WTO, the patenting of gene sequences
and entire organisms, the World Bank's insistence on private land titling at the
expense of collective rights or redistributive land reform, the dramatic expansion
of the doctrine of 'regulatory takings', and increased corporate control over research
at public universities have all been invoked as examples of neoliberal enclosures of
commons. For activists and social movements, these enclosures have prompted
widespread resentment, resistance and calls for the creation or reconstitution of
commons with respect to a wide variety of resources and spaces (e.g., The Ecologist ,
1998; Klein, 2001; 2002; see McCarthy, 2005 for a review). For scholars of political
economy, meanwhile, they have prompted renewed attention to primitive accumu-
lation's role in capitalist accumulation (e.g., Harvey, 2003; De Angelis, 2004;
Glassman, 2006; Hart, 2006;) and sparked new interest in the signifi cance of
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