State- and market-centric approaches to land redistribution have not worked in South Africa. Instead, South Africa has an agrarian structure marked by concentrated ownership in a shock-prone globalised food system. This chapter argues climate extremes and famines require a new approach to land redistribution and food systems thinking. Critical lessons can be learned about food provisioning from pre-capitalist South Africa’s commons mode of production, which exemplified the first attempts at food sovereignty. This is a decolonial imperative. Moreover, South Africa’s globalised industrial food system is premised on the destruction of nature and has engendered several ecological rifts, including famines and continued starvation faced by many. Campaigning for a food sovereignty commons system, through democratic systemic reform and as part of the deep and just transition, represents an alternative approach to re-agrarianise South Africa on a national and local scale in a heating world. In this regard, large-scale commercial farmers and the state face the challenge of thinking and behaving like commoners to ensure land, climate and more generally ecological justice.

The final chapter turns its attention to considering how fantastic forms facilitate productive exchanges between creators and audiences. It contends that fantasies are made both in communities and for communities – sometimes as gifts, sometimes as challenges, but always with the idea of adding something new to a shared commons that can in its turn be taken up, valued and built upon. The chapter begins by discussing the importance of craft and exchange in Fantasy culture, considering how Fantasy diverges from conflictual models of influence articulated by critics like Harold Bloom and exploring how fantasies such as Jo Walton’s Among Others and Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story express a deep faith in the power of readers and reading. It then explores fan-cultural exchanges, touching on Critical Role, Archive of Our Own, A Very Potter Musical and the practice of modding video games. Finally, the chapter turns to questions of inclusion, discussing works by Patricia A. McKillip and Ursula K. Le Guin, the representation of race in genre fiction, and the changing ways that contemporary communities play Dungeons & Dragons.

Treading the same ground as Ostroms original work, we examine the relevance of caring, empathy, and relationality for governance of the commons. There are numerous instances of commons where group boundaries, rules for resource use, and sanctions are possible, and more diffused modes of coordination and management are needed. It is in these situations that relationality holds the most promise. We examine early evidence, from experiments in the field to smaller real-world situations, where connectedness and empathy serve to bind individuals to collective action. Moreover, we realize that relational and rational mechanisms are not mutually exclusive and suggest that, even in situations where Ostroms design principle take effect, relationality works behind the scenes to strengthen collective action.

How do we motivate the busy urbanite to care about melting glaciers half a world away? In a classroom in Pennsylvania, a teacher and his class begin interacting, online, with other students and teachers in Asia and Africa. Hearing from a teacher in Nepal about problems with glacial melt in their community, the issue of melting glaciers suddenly become immensely important to them. This phenomenon, of a change in individual orientation to connectedness, is what is referred to as relationality. Through empathy and perspective-taking, people are moved to other-regarding action in ways not considered by the literature on collective action and the commons. The book is a necessary addendum to Ostroms tome, Governing the Commons, and presents a new, relational, model of collective action and begins to imagine its implications for real-world institutions.

Three theoretical traditions dominate our understanding of decision-making. The rational actor model assumes individuals are self-interested and maximize their utility subject to budget and time constraints. When outcomes depend on the decisions of others, as in the problem of common pool resources, trust and norms can avoid support sustainability. Social psychological models examine the role of values, especially altruism and self-interest, beliefs, norms, identity, emotions, empathy and trust in decision-making. The heuristics and biases literature shows that decisions are often based on mental shortcuts that deviate from the rational actor model. Our tendency towards biased uptake of new information and communicating mostly with those similar to us can lead to polarization. The three theories can be viewed as complementary: each yields important insights into decision-making.

The content of this book is rather controversial. It paints a rather bleak picture, that the current EU legal economic system being developed for the data-driven economy is both outdated and – to some extent – a policy at war with itself. It promotes dominant platforms to detriment of others. Moreover, the fundamentals for creating rules are also missing. A liberal economic system needs to be based on aspects of a rights system, otherwise, we risk losing innovation, the establishment of new markets, and the creation of wealth, while we will see increasing market failures. Without a legal system for rights to data, we will lose out of a just system for the distribution of wealth. Indeed, it is time that the data-driven economy and the internet economy are granted their ‘property’ rights, reflecting the new paradigm of the data-driven industrial revolution. Moreover, such a regime fits well with the European economic constitution now being established.

Data is vital to the internet-based economy and will become even more important in the old economy as the Internet of Things (IoT) gains ground. The competitiveness of firms will increasingly depend on timely access to relevant data and the ability to use that data to develop new, innovative applications and products. In consumer-oriented businesses, the relevant data is often personal information; although this data is becoming increasingly collectable, only a few firms have access to larger amounts of it.1

This chapter brings together the main threads of the book, reflecting on the role of English marine protected areas and the extent to which they are sites for commoning or uncommoning and the extent to which they support the conservation of common-pool resources. It also offers broader critical observations on the way English marine protected areas law and regulation construct the relationship between nature and society.

This chapter introduces the multiple roles of marine protected areas using the language of the commons. After introducing how international biodiversity law uses commons' language, it attempts to discuss two main characterisations of marine protected areas: marine protected areas as regulatory tools for common-pool resources and marine protected area as institutional sites for supporting or hindering commoning practices. The discussion draws on three principal strands of social science literature: political ecology to show how rational and scientific interventions are always political, geographical literature to discuss the meaning of territory and uncover the more-than-human elements in the analysis of conservation intervention and most crucially, the literature on commons, which spans from the more traditional Ostromian analysis of common-pool resources to the more recent and politicised literature on commoning. Investigating the relationships between marine protected areas and commons is an essential preliminary step to enable a critical discussion of how English law and regulation conceptualises marine protected areas and contributes to the formation of marine protected areas as spaces of opening and/or closing.

This part considers how markets and other institutions decoupled society and environment and how to recouple them. Transitions along the way include the Western belief in progress by controlling nature, the reorganization from feudal to market systems, as discussed by Polanyi, and the idea that land can be divided and owned. The challenges and opportunities of collective use, of common-pool resources, were discussed and debated by Gordon, Hardin, and Ostrom. Economics needs to integrate ecology, as Daly emphasized. The implications can be dire, as Sen showed for famines. Catton and Dunlap made a like plea for sociology and the environment, and Bullard showed the environmental justice implications of unfairly sited urban waste and pollution. Lele explored the disconnect between the ideal of sustainable development and its application, arguing for knowing first the complex links between social and natural systems. Norgaard frames development as an evolutionary problem, arguing that knowledge, values, technology, organizations, and the environment coevolve. Diverse experimentation can provide the raw material for selecting more-sustainable paths.

The climate emergency is strengthening the understanding that humans, non-humans and the planet are intrinsically interconnected. International law has both participated in the creation of the paradigm that has led to these entangled socio-ecological problems and has proven to be inadequate for their remediation. This article argues that, through the multiple enclosure of natures, knowledges and times, international law imposes a vision of the world that is incompatible with the conception and functioning of the interconnected web of life. In light of this, we suggest that the political notion of commoning could offer useful intellectual opportunities for engagement with and a radical rethinking of international law as an element of ecological systems. By not treating natures, times and knowledges as objects of law, commoning opens an intellectual and confrontational space to rethink the premises, processes and aims of international law.