"Commons and common good(s): why this theme? To take stock of the situation and respond to an urgent need.
The facts
It's clear that our Western societies are currently facing multiple crises: economic, social, religious, ecological, political and health-related. These crises are causing suffering to whole populations and threatening the extinction of many species, if not the planet itself. But they have at least had the merit of allowing the gradual collapse of the anthropological paradigm dating from the modern era. This paradigm is based on the individual, conceived as an invulnerable, autonomous self-made man, for whom personal fulfilment and self-fulfilment, combined with the satisfaction of individual needs, constitute the ultimate purpose of his existence.
This paradigm has made possible the development of an economic, social and political organisation structured around production, the exploitation of resources and the principle of private property, including resources that we might define as "common goods" (such as water or raw materials - gas, coal, oil, minerals, forests - as well as technological inventions or the cultural heritage developed over time). This economic organisation has favoured the construction of a sovereign state, whose legitimacy has long been based on a 'contract' drawn up with its citizens, guaranteeing security and protection for their particular interests in exchange for the alienation of some of their property and certain freedoms. But since the advent of industrial society, as the market has gradually replaced the State as the legitimate authority capable of ensuring social peace, we now find ourselves faced with an ultra-liberal societal organisation that favours the reduction of all reality to an object of exchange, including common resources and man himself.
It is this anthropological and economic paradigm that the current crises are shaking.
We are gradually rediscovering that the individual, conceived as an invulnerable and autonomous self-made man, does not exist, and that all living beings are linked to each other and to their environment, being all affected by a common vulnerability. This has led to a resurgence of interest in the common good(s).
Laura Rizzerio, Professor of Philosophy
The urgency
There is an urgent need to devise and implement a new model of society capable of providing better resource management and more appropriate responses to the crises we face. This is where the reference to the "common good" and the "commons", which have resurfaced in research and practice in recent decades, becomes interesting. In 2009, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Elinor Ostrom for her research into the "theory of the commons".1 This theory identifies the "commons" as the tangible and intangible resources of a community, the management of which is the result of the negotiation of rules between individuals. These individuals see themselves in relation to each other and have the collective at heart, communicating not with a view to individual interests, but with a view to the sound management of these same assets, while also guaranteeing their sustainability.
This theory makes it possible to envisage a new model of governance that places community decisions at the centre of economic games, by suggesting ways of accessing common goods and property (which does not disappear for all that) other than those imposed by the market. This model also revives the notion of the commons as it was proposed in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, for example), and which was associated with an anthropological vision in which Man is thought of as a 'political' being who finds his raison d'être in his ability to open up to others, through language and communication, for example.
As the link between the 'theory of the commons' and the 'common good' is still little studied, UNamur's Notre-Dame de la Paix Chair wanted to focus on the relationship between the commons and the common good(s), by inviting specialists in various fields (economics, philosophy, theology, human sciences, law, science and technology, spatial planning) to speak. The Chair welcomed a number of internationally renowned professors and specialists, including the economist and theologian Gaël Giraud, the economist Benjamin Coriat, the legal experts Fabienne Orsi, Serge Gutwirth, Séverine Dussoiler and Alain Strowel, the philosophers Arnaud Macé and Cécile Renouard, the historian René Robaye, and the urban planning engineer and architect Bernard Declève. Their contributions provided a better understanding of what taking the common good into account can produce, in practical terms too, in terms of the conception of the good, the just, property and the management of resources while respecting the freedom of each individual.
The large audience, made up of academics, researchers, students and prominent members of society, appreciated the depth of the presentations and the reflections put forward by the various speakers, as well as the opportunity for discussion after each lecture. The Notre-Dame de la Paix Chair and the eponymous research centre (cUNdp) are thus part of a process of service to society, with a view to contributing to the construction of a 'sustainable' model of societal organisation that respects people and the environment.
The cUNdp, in collaboration with other researchers at UNamur and other Belgian and foreign universities, is planning to set up a think tank to pursue the debate and come up with concrete proposals, drawing on the input and experience of those in society who have already given life to experiments in the Commons.