Governing As Commons or As Global Public Goods : An Analysis of Normative Discourses

Commons and global public goods have become essential concepts in the current debate on governance. Many scholars still refer to their use in rational-choice theory, where these concepts relate to the classification of goods based on the objective criteria of (non-) excludability and (non-) rivalry. Rational-choice theorists argue that this classification can determine the best method of governing these goods. Thus, commons would require privatization of the common resources or public regulation of their use, while for (global) public goods public provision alone is deemed appropriate. However, the objective nature of this classification and consequent determination of the appropriate governance model is open to question, as these concepts often entail certain underlying normative considerations. At the same time, they have both increasingly been used in an explicitly normative sense, as central to two different discourses about alternatives to the existing governance paradigm. In this contribution, we study the normative discourses related to the commons and global public goods concepts and the models of governance they propagate. By examining their answers to three essential questions, namely the role of the state, the appropriate scale for governance, and the nature of power and authority, we sketch their widely divergent answers to the question how contemporary governance should be organised. In so doing, we hope to bring some clarity to these concepts the use of which has proliferated throughout academic disciplines. In addition, we hope to demonstrate how both concepts put forward two distinctly different answers to the question what contemporary governance of common resources and shared issues should look like