Extracting the commons

Abstract

This article investigates how resources that are perceived as common are turned into property through different interventions of extractivism, and how this provokes counter-activism from groups and actors who see their rights and living conditions threatened by the practices of extraction. The article looks at how extraction is enacted through three distinct practices: prospecting, enclosure and unbundling, studied through three different cases. The cases involve resources that are material and immaterial, renewable as well as non-renewable, "natural" as well as manmade. Prospecting is exemplified by patenting of genetic resources and traditional knowledge, enclosure is exemplified by debates over copyright expansionism and information commons, and unbundling through conflicts over mining and gas extraction. The article draws on fieldwork involving interviews and participant observation with protesters at contested mining sites in Australia and with digital rights activists from across the world who protest against how the expansion of copyright limits public access to culture and information. The article departs from an understanding of "commons" not as an open-access resource, but as a resource shared by a group of people, often subjected to particular social norms that regulate how it can be used. Enclosure and extraction are both social processes, dependent on recognising some and downplaying or misrecognising other social relations when it comes to resources and processes of property creation. These processes are always, regardless of the particular resources at stake, cultural in the sense that the uses of the commons are regulated through cultural norms and contracts, but also that they carry profound cultural and social meanings for those who use them. Finally, the commonalities and heterogeneities of these protest movements are analysed as 'working in common', where the resistance to extraction in itself represents a process of commoning.

Open Source Seeds and the Revitalization of Local Knowledge

“…The open source seed movement has the declared goal of creating and promoting a 'seed commons' where seeds are protected as a common good that can be shared within a community under specific conditions that prevent them from being withdrawn from the commons and privatized (https://www.opensourceseeds.org/en/about-us accessed on 27 October 2021). As such, it is one example within a broad variety of commons movements that collectively share a resource under agreed upon rules and protocols that guarantee that it is sustainably managed [20,67]. Commons in seed sharing systems are generally, as Sievers-Glotzbach et al [17] (p. 418) put it, a form of 'hybrid commons', that span from 'traditional seed systems (such as seed exchange networks and seed banks) to recent anti enclosure movements [ .…”

Hur stor är en gruva?

“…Genom att kraftigt begränsa vilket område som ska beaktas blir bedömningen en annan, vilket länsstyrelsens kompletterande yttrande från 2015 visar. Att separera steg för steg och land från land kännetecknar utvinningsprocesser generellt, och separation kan ses som en förutsättning för att utvinning alls ska vara möjlig (Dahlin & Fredriksson, 2017).…”

Dilemmas of protection: decolonising the regulation of genetic resources as cultural heritage

“…There are often cultural and religious values to these resources which are embedded in a holistic worldview that sees genetic resources as intrinsically intertwined with the social fabric of the community and makes no distinction between the natural and the cultural dimensions of the plant (Posey 2002;Oguamanam 2006). Those dimensions are neglected and violated when they are taken out of their context and commercialised as products for Western consumers (Shiva 1998;Robinson, Drozdzewski, and Kiddell 2014;Dahlin and Fredriksson 2017;Fredriksson 2017).…”