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neoliberalism for environmental governance and quality in particular (see Goldman,
1998; McCarthy and Prudham, 2004; Heynen et al., 2007).
As might be expected, activists and social movements around the world have
interpreted and framed these developments in theoretically and politically disparate
ways, with reference to a wide array of empirical situations. A single narrative thus
does none of them justice. Still, a remarkable convergence is visible around the
position that: (i) recent enclosures are the product of recent forms of corporate-led
globalisation; (ii) states facilitate this globalization and also appropriate resources
on their own behalfs, meaning that they are more likely to be enemies of public
goods and commons than their defenders; (iii) the reclaiming or establishment of
commons governed with a high degree of local autonomy is the most promising
strategy to combat these trends; and (iv) inasmuch as many groups around the world
may share this analysis and broad and underdetermined political project, they are
natural allies in the 'anti-globalisation' movement. This basic analysis was articu-
lated quite clearly in a 1998 collection by
The Ecologist
, for example, while in recent
years it has become quite mainstream, appearing in summary form in mass-market
environmental magazines such as
Sierra
(Rowe, 2005). Different elements of this
discourse are prominent in different instances, of course, but the common threads
are striking, as the following examples demonstrate.
Canadian journalist Naomi Klein, one of the most prominent voices advocating
different sorts of commons at global scales, seems to articulate precisely the position
above: 'Reclaiming the Commons' is the title of her 2001 article-cum-manifesto in
the
New Left Review
, while her 2002 book,
Fences and Windows: Dispatches from
the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate
, chronicles the struggles of countless
others around the globe calling for a, 'radical reclaiming of the commons' in the
contexts of particular struggles against privatization and other forms of enclosure.
Her examples include struggles over water privatization in South Africa and Bolivia,
over Napster and public sector jobs in the United States, and over community forests
and fi sheries in Canada. Klein explicitly views these proliferating calls for commons
as reactions to neoliberal privatisations of formerly public domains, and uses 'the
commons' to mean public goods, civic space and collective enterprises, as well as
the common pool resources and property regimes discussed in the previous section.
In a similar vein, Sitze (2004) constructs a brilliant and impassioned argument for
life-saving drugs, particularly antiretroviral drugs effective against HIV, to be the
common property of humanity. He criticises equally the corporations that profi t
from exclusive ownership of the drugs and the states that respect and enforce their
patents, and he establishes a clear line of argument from the specifi cs of those
struggles to a broader radical challenge to the global reproduction of capitalism and
the spatial, political and environmental separations upon which it depends. Finally,
Sumner (2004) argues that an array of 20th-century liberal democratic social and
environmental protections can be theorised as a 'civil commons', one threatened by
neoliberal globalization, and that the globalization of the civil commons will pave
the way towards sustainability.
Some members of the environmental movement in the United States have become
enthusiastic proselytizers of the four-part analysis above as well (e.g., Rowe, 2005).
For instance, David Bollier's
Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common
Wealth
has as its goal, '[D]eveloping a discourse of the commons,' as a fi rst
step towards, 'invent[ing] the commons we need for the 21st century.' The topic
documents myriad enclosures in domains that had been 'commons', including
