Ethics and the Commons: Building Ethical Awareness in Research Practice

Current literature on the commons offers a diversity of concepts and arguments related to the benefits and challenges of commons, common property and commoning for the governance and sustainability of social-ecological systems. Ethical values are involved in every intentional human action – both in research, governance and civil society. The question of this book is: what ethical values, challenges, and actions are associated with the commons and commoning? Do commons have a specific ethical and moral orientation? How can we engage with different and plural orientations? While the ethical values of commons may be implied from our research concepts, frameworks and methods, they are rarely made explicit or linked to ethical claims or theories in philosophy. This book aims to build awareness around the different ethical values, positions, and perspectives linked to commons, common property, and commoning research and practice. Building ethical awareness can help scholars strengthen their tools and skills for analyzing commons. Improving ethical awareness can give scholars a range of philosophical arguments to navigate and justify links between ethical values, actions, and outcomes. Current literature on the commons offers a diversity of concepts and arguments related to the benefits and challenges of commons, common property and commoning for the governance and sustainability of social-ecological systems. One challenge is that commons are not one thing. The term ‘commons’ is broadly used to represent different objects of shared interest, types of governance, social actions, and ideological positions. Given the diversity of commons and their tendency to have strong place-based dynamics, a plurality of ethical orientations and claims are observed and perhaps expected in the literature. Acknowledging and working with multiple ethical orientations, theories, and perspectives can enable richer analytical and reflective perspectives that can improve our engagement with the ethical complexities of researching and governing commons. This is an open access book.