For people to effectively share an environment, they usually also must effectively share knowledge about that environment. While seemingly obvious and intuitive, this insight is often overlooked in literature about governing resources as commons. Focusing on the knowledge commons associated with an environmental commons helps to illuminate a host of complex governance dilemmas. This chapter examines the interrelationship between environmental and knowledge commons, weaving together different strands of commons research and practice. Examples discussed include shared pastures, forests, road systems, computer servers, social media platforms, living rooms, and antimicrobial effectiveness/resistance.

The ecological paradigm in stormwater management mimics natural hydrology by diverting stormwater into well-designed green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) practices that also enhance biodiversity and community resilience. The challenge for municipalities is to devise institutions to encourage the adoption of GSI. Detroit, Michigan, imposed a drainage charge on all city property owners based on the extent of impervious areas. Property owners can reduce the drainage charge by using GSI. This analysis situates an economic model within the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework. The team evaluated fourteen properties where the owner installed GSI. Properties with positive net present values for their GSI tended to be less complicated and offered more cobenefits. Information gathered from broader conversations suggests that many property owners did not know how to reduce their drainage charges with GSI practices. Therefore, the drainage charge’s price signal may not work as intended. The GKC institutional analysis showed that noneconomic factors, such as prosocial values or corporate policy, also influence GSI adoption. Sharing information may encourage others to adopt GSI practices. Nongovernmental organizations can act as information brokers to share knowledge that might otherwise be proprietary or hard to find. Highly visible projects may educate property owners about GSI practices.

Given data’s characteristics as a nonrivalrous, inexhaustible resource, some interpretation is necessary to apply Ostrom’s design principles to the challenge of data governance – starting with the question of boundaries. Building upon the Governing Knowledge Commons framework, this chapter argues that boundaries around data resources can be drawn through the intentional development and application of values statements. Since the potential value of data often increases in relation to the number of its users and potential uses, values statements set normative expectations around the kinds of processes and outcomes that are considered desirable – what do we think is good, and how do we agree to do this work? These statements functionas a kind of boundary object that can give shape to a community’s identity and, in turn, aid in the development of new institutional strategies to protect that identity. After considering this function in the context of examples – ranging from abstract signifiers such as “open data” and “smart cities,” to bundled declarations such as the CARE principles, to specific examples of environmental data commons – this chapter concludes by offering practical guidance for the development of values statements through democratic writing processes and collective choice-making.

This chapter uses the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to illustrate and advance the idea of the expert knowledge commons. The IPCC was established in 1988 as an intergovernmental body of the United Nations, charged with advancing scientific knowledge about climate change in order to inform public policy decision-making. As an institution and instrument of authority grounded in scientific expertise, the IPCC has come to play a critical role in advancing political, cultural, and economic awareness of the character of climate change. The IPCC has been the subject of a great deal of research, none of which has focused directly on the manner in which its authoritative status rests both formally and informally on multiple layers of shared knowledge, information, and data. This chapter uses the IPCC’s governance of that shared knowledge to motivate and illustrate a model of expert knowledge commons.

Smart cities require trusted governance and engaged citizens, especially governance of intelligence and intelligence-enabled control. In some very important respects, smart cities should remain dumb, and that will take governance. This introduction provides an overview of the book’s aims, structure, and contributions of individual chapters.

This chapter outlines a forward-looking, intelligent approach to thinking through and evaluating supposedly smart systems. First, it clarifies that it is not the city that is smart. Rather, smartness is better understood and evaluated in terms of affordances supposedly smart tools provide actual people. Who gains what kinds of intelligence? For what purposes? Subject to what governance? Second, it identifies and addresses key challenges to intelligent governance in smart city projects. Cities must move beyond a transactional mindset, appreciate how smart systems become an integral part of the built environment, and develop appropriate governance. Third, it proposes an approach to smart city governance grounded in local, contextual norms and scaffolded by key questions to ask throughout smart city planning, procurement, implementation, and management processes. This approach is importantly not oriented around Elinor Ostrom’s famous design principles, but rather a shared set of evaluative questions to guide decision-making.

Smart cities require much more than smart tech. Cities need trusted governance and engaged citizens. Integrating surveillance, AI, automation, and smart tech within basic infrastructure, as well as public and private services and spaces, raises a complex set of ethical, economic, political, social, and technological questions that requires systematic study and careful deliberation. Throughout this book, authors have asked contextual research questions and explored compelling but often distinct answers guided by the shared structure of the GKC framework. The Conclusion discusses some of the key themes across chapters in this volume, considering lessons learned and implications for future research.

Smart city technology has its value and its place; it isn’t automatically or universally harmful. Urban challenges andopportunities addressed via smart technology demand systematic study, examining general patterns and local variations as smart city practices unfold around the world. Smart cities are complex blends of community governance institutions, social dilemmas that cities face, and dynamic relationships among information and data, technology, and human lives. Some of those blends are more typical and common. Some are more nuanced in specific contexts. This volume uses the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework to sort out relevant and important distinctions. The framework grounds a series of case studies examining smart technology deployment and use in different cities. This chapter briefly explains what that framework is, why and how it is a critical and useful tool for studying smart city practices, and what the key elements of the framework are. The GKC framework is useful both here and can be used in additional smart city case studies in the future.

This chapter explores various aspects of community land trusts (CLTs), focusing on how this governance model effectively functions as an ownership structure for common pool resources. Indeed, understanding the incentives facing the owners of any communal ownership structure is vital to successfully creating and managing a CLT. These resource commons aspects are conceptually explained and explored below through a descriptive account of current practices within the CLT sector.

Chapter 15 concludes by describe two radically different future visions of the intelligent society. On one hand, instrumentarian intelligence assumes that algorithms tracking human behavior can predict human behavior more accurately than ever before. In western countries, this intelligence manifests itself in a new surveillance capitalism with companies like Google and Facebook constantly searching for behavioral surplus in both online and offline settings. In the political domain, instrumentarian intelligence seeks a reputation state built on a neobehavioristic governing model. The most prominent example is the nationwide social credit system in China that makes it possible to grade citizens on different behavioral indicators. In stark contrast, civic intelligence highlights a use of technology still controlled by the community and citizens in contrast to the dehumanizing aspects of instrumentarian intelligence. While machine intelligence also craves for informational diversity in its hunt for behavioral surplus, civic intelligence seeks a broader diversity that includes not only information, but also multicultural, cognitive, biological, and participatory diversity. The “fuel” of CI is people who are different from each other, with different interests and unique perspectives. Civic intelligence also builds on a strong knowledge commons and an open shared collective memory. It does not hide information to produce the best predictions, but it promotes complete transparency and individual empowerment. In contrast to instrumentarian intelligence, CI still lets human-to-human intelligence, and not the algorithms, be at the core of the human collective problem solving.

Chapter 12 describe different types of intelligent evaluation. At all group levels, most CI practices are reliant on some degree of explicit evaluation of the collective work. Digital technology also makes it possible to design metacommunicative feedback loops in most group work and organizational work. While some systems build on shared coordination, others let coordinators regulate the collective work. In the political system, intelligent evaluations are at the core of any well-functioning democratic system, from the nomothetai in ancient Athenians to the Citizen assembly in Ireland today. These new institutions strengthen citizen metadiscourses about important societal issues. A strong knowledge commons is also an important basic condition for this type of critical discourse. In general, digitized evaluations are becoming more common in society, exemplified by online reputation systems that rate a person´s trustworthiness, not only on business sites, but also in social media. However, there is increasing concern about the negative consequences of having the current focus on evaluating persons in the emerging reputation society.

Common sense is fundamental to humanity in two different but related ways. First, it is a basic capability essential to human flourishing. It helps us effectively engage with each other and our complex world. Second, it is social knowledge, often situational and contextual. Though easily taken for granted, common sense functions as critical social infrastructure that shapes and enables various social systems, including markets. This chapter examines this special type of social infrastructure, exploring common sense in general and focusing on the subset of common sense that also constitutes social norms.

Knowledge about property rights is a commons that facilitates market exchange and economic coordination. The governance of that shared knowledge resource—the various formal and informal rules that maintain ledgers of property rights—ranges from community norms to formal state registries. In this chapter we make three contributions. First, we use the lens of knowledge commons theory to argue that knowledge about property rights is a shared resource. Second, we explore how that knowledge commons is governed—particularly relating to “rules in use”—might shift due to technological advances in distributed ledgers. Third, we argue that as blockchain augments and complements existing governance structures, it creates a more robust political economy.

We develop a theoretical framework for the analysis of the production, reproduction, and transformation of intellectual and legal infrastructures that enable market interactions using the Governing Knowledge Commons research program. A distinctive contribution of this volume is the conceptualization of market-supporting knowledge structures as shared goods (established through co-operation) and contribution goods (established through competition). There are four building blocks around which the edited volume revolves. First, the chapters show that markets are cultural, they depend on various kinds of knowledge some of which are governed as commons. Second, the market-supporting knowledge commons are, unlike physical commons, produced and reproduced by contributions and sharing. Third, these knowledge commons serve as economic inputs in private production processes. Finally, the volume highlights the social and cultural effects of entrepreneurship. Through innovation and slight evasions of existing rules entrepreneurs do not merely change market goods, but also social conventions and cultural meanings. Building on the Governing Knowledge Commons framework, the book highlights the entanglement of markets with society and the broader culture of which markets are a part.

Common pooling of knowledge goods requires effective governance institutions to avoid over depletion or under provision. Following recent literature, this chapter treats the institutions of knowledge goods governance as dually coproduced in provision and common pool in consumption. I combine a notion of individual sovereignty from political economy with a scalar analysis of the knowledge content of goods exchanged within a community. Insofar as the economic value of goods depends on knowledge content, and less on physical expression, exchange acts are speech acts. Therefore, communities where individuals have high exchange rights also feature a high form of speech rights. In these contexts, agents contribute to governance as an outcome of their ordinary economic activity. Therefore, entrepreneurship within rules and entrepreneurship to alter rules are not distinct actions. The paper relies on a combination of constitutive and regulative rules within a community, as defined by economic and social rather than geographic or political boundaries. Individuals use sovereign exchange and speech acts to interact within given rules, and in doing so they also contribute to the coproduction of governance, acting at once as both economic and institutional entrepreneurs.

The Scotch whisky industry is centuries-old and steeped in tradition. Indeed, “it has long been used as a symbol of Scottishness” (Baxter, 1985, p. 77). Recently, distillers in other countries have adopted the Scotch whisky process and have successfully imitated single malt Scotch whisky. This chapter will provide a case study of entrepreneurial history in the Scotch whisky market using the framework of Governing Knowledge Commons focusing specifically on the attempts of the entrepreneurs to legitimize their entry into the product category of Scotch. The category of Scotch, especially single-malt Scotch was developed and given credence by a small group of Scottish distillers at considerable cost. These distillers, thus, invested in an exclusionary knowledge commons between the producers and the consumers who value the spirit. On the one hand, Scottish producers understandably want to protect this investment and wish to maintain the quality of this shared resource. On the other hand, the exclusionary nature of this commons serves to restrict access to the shared resource and has limited the amount of innovation allowed. This trade-off between maintenance of and access to the shared resource will be the focus of this chapter.

The paper examines centuries old informal footwear cluster in India, and describes the instrument of informal trade credit, ingeniously designed and sustained by the market participants. A peculiar feature of this instrument is the shared knowledge of the creditworthiness of the traders. This knowledge is produced and consumed by the market participants as a useful resource in estimating discount on the credit. Using Ostrom’s IAD framework (its modified version) the paper attempts to understand the governance of knowledge commons in the market. In order to do so, it identifies the socio-cultural infrastructure which enables such governance. In helping identify the theoretical link between informal markets and knowledge commons through this case, the paper advances a promising step for future research not only in knowledge commons structures, but also in informal markets around the world.

This chapter studies the Queer Museum, an art exhibition held in Brazil, to discuss how identities can be interpreted as knowledge commons and the importance of polycentric institutional settings. The chapter uses the notion of institutional polycentricity to demonstrate that agents actively create solutions to face market-state constraints and better govern resources such as art and identity expressions. One of these solutions is crowdfunding, an alternative open funding mechanism that can act as both an enabling infrastructure and a resource that agents draw on to pursue their common goals. Finally, the chapter argues that certain types of knowledge commons (i.e., identities) develop especially in situations of public contestation and that, in such cases, they benefit from a diverse institutional setting. These identity struggles for representation ultimately fuel markets, social life in general and feedback into established organizations.