ABSTRACT
The commons is increasingly proposed as an economic and legal solution to global and regional problems. Commons are often thought of as collectively managed, shared resources. From the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions into our common atmosphere to the management of watersheds that straddle territorial boundaries, resources that extend beyond the jurisdictions of nation-states and outside the entrenched frameworks of the international order, the commons offers a new (and ancient) way of managing things we share. Certainly the Nobel Prize Committee understood this when they awarded the 2009 prize in economics to Elinor Ostrom for her lifelong work on the commons. Coming after the global economic collapse of 2008, the committee seemed to suggest that the intricate regulatory system of our global financial markets was not unlike the complex regulatory system of our climate: too fundamental to be left deregulated or mismanaged for the benefit of an elite few.1
