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different from Malthusian perspectives. Second, contemporary commons are imag-
ined at a variety of different scales, with confl icting and often ambiguous criteria
for membership, rule-making, and other fundamental aspects usefully explicated in
the institutional literature on common property regimes: participation in a regional
governance coalition is, after all, quite different from saving seeds in violation of
patents. Alternative political visions cannot and should not always be forced into
the Procrustean bed of rational choice models; St. Martin (2007) is right to resist
thinking of commons in only the latter terms. Still, it is both useful and important
to ask of any proposed commons the sorts of questions emphasised by Ostrom and
her colleagues: Who is excluded? Who makes the rules? What difference does it
make to imagine a given commons at one scale versus another? For instance, some
proposed global commons (e.g., those casting tropical rainforests as the lungs of
the planet), depend upon the bold assertion of some claims and the marginalization
of others, and are quite compatible with the further institutionalization of anti-
democratic forms of globalisation (Neumann, 2005), while others (e.g., Sitze's), are
far more radical and inclusive in their politics, making all of humanity the relevant
commoners and demanding commons as a bulwark against precisely the excesses
of neoliberal globalization. Third, underlying different and more and less examined
criteria for membership, appropriate scales, and so on are different politics: pro-
posed commons that share a vision of collective public rights and a skepticism
regarding unchecked markets can still differ sharply in terms of whether they are
radical or liberal; internationalist, nationalist, or resolutely local; fundamentally
critical of capitalist social relations or merely their of 'excesses'; and so on. In sum,
within these proposals for new commons are major differences in proposed property
arrangements and policy solutions, including whether the state owns resources
directly or not, whether it administers environmental protections directly or not
(versus indirectly, as through a semi-autonomous emissions market), whether the
state is seen as a viable trustee or guardian of public goods or not, and perhaps
most fundamentally, whether the state is seen as equivalent to the public.
A fourth key point illustrated in the examples above is that activists and intel-
lectuals representing many different positions seem to concur that the state is not
an effective or trusted guardian of public goods and interests. Many recent calls for
commons can be seen as defensive reactions to the aggressive economic liberalism
of the past quarter century or so. Such defensive reactions are not at all new (see
Polanyi, 1944). But where earlier reactions to the failures of self-regulating markets
turned primarily to the state and to expansions of state property, control and regu-
lation (as in the Progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
the Keynesianism, fascism and state-centred communism of the interwar period that
motivated Polanyi, or the modern environmental movement of the 1960s and
1970s), contemporary critics are skeptical of the state and turn instead to communi-
ties and to commons, understood in the myriad senses above, as remedies to both
market and state failures. With respect to the state, the authors above range from
mistrustful but willing to use state power in limited ways so long as it is overseen
by NGOs and markets, to unremittingly hostile, seeing states as oppositional to any
sort of genuine commons.
One explanation for this turn is that current calls for commons are in part reac-
tions to the many failures of centralised state control throughout the history of
capitalist modernity (see Scott, 1998). In the realm of environmental management,
those failures include the overriding of legitimate local claims and knowledges,
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