Inspiring an effective Plant Treaty with the ‘theory of the commons’

The results of the legal and stakeholder analyses of the Treaty point to the need for a stronger ‘common’ management of seeds under the Treaty. Chapter 6 explores this avenue by diving into Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom’s Theory of the Commons. First, a history of the theory of the commons is provided (from Ostrom to the many diverse developments by more recent authors such as Ugo Mattei or Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval), pointing to the link between sustainbale development objectives and the philosophy of the theory which promotes a collective management of common resources. Then, it identifies new invariable principles for collective seed management inspired from the theory of the commons and applied to the Treaty, which are recognized as crucial to shape an effective ‘Global Seed Commons’. Finally, it applies these invariable principles to the Treaty constraints identified in Chapters 4 and 5, in order to redesign the Treaty’s Multilateral System of access and benefit-sharing into an effective Global Seed Commons.