Global Environmental Commons and the Need for Ethics

An important, although very controversial, development has to taken place in the past decade about how to manage the global environmental commons. According to this approach, the “tragedy of the global commons” should be avoided through the extensive use of market-based instruments, and the privatisation of the commons. This paper examines some aspects of this phenomenon and argues that an economic approach to the commons should be subordinated to a genuinely ethical one. In this approach the concept of the commons does not signify simply an area where the coordination mechanism of the market is somehow imperfect, but have an intrinsically normative content, too.