Managing the global commons: common good or common sink?

Abstract

The global commons, comprising the areas and resources beyond the sovereignty of any state, build upon the heritage of Grotius’s idea of mare liberum – an idea that aimed to preserve the freedom of access for the benefit of all. However, the old mare liberum idea digressed into ‘first come, first served’ advantages for industrialised countries. Especially at the initiative of developing countries, it has now been replaced by a new law of international cooperation and protection of natural wealth and resources beyond the limits of national jurisdiction. The global commons have thus served as the laboratory for testing new legal principles and the rights and corollary duties emanating from them. Occasionally path-breaking innovations in regulation have been practised, most notably the imposition of a ban on whaling, penalties for the production and use of ozone-depleting substances and the freezing of claims to sovereignty over Antarctica.

Keywords:

• Global commons
• international law
• natural resources
• sustainable development

Notes

1. Cf. Hardin, “Tragedy of the Commons”; and Gore, The Inconvenient Truth.

2. See Buck, The Global Commons.

3. Schachter, Sharing the World’s Resources.

4. In the terminology of property law, ‘commons’ represent those resource domains in which ‘common pool resources’ are found – in the sense that access to them, or the exploitation thereof, cannot be efficiently limited to a ‘pool’ of users.

5. See Wijkman, “Managing the Global Commons,” 512.

6. See Grotius, Mare Liberum; and Feenstra and Vervliet, Hugo Grotius Mare Liberum.

7. See Schrijver and Prislan, From Mare Liberum to the Global Commons, 170–176.

8. Grotius, Mare Liberum, 23.

9. Grotius, Mare Liberum, 23–24. As Grotius explains there, not even the fields were delimited by boundary lines, nor was there commercial intercourse.

10. Grotius, Mare Liberum, 27 (emphasis added).

11. Grotius, Mare Liberum, 28. However, Grotius’s position with regard to fisheries appears to be somewhat inconsistent, as at a later point he claims that ‘in a way it can be maintained that fish are exhaustible’. Mare Liberum, 43.

12. Grotius, Mare Liberum, 36–37.

13. Emphasis in the original text. For a collection of documents on the committee’s work, see Rosenne, Committee of Experts for the Progressive Codification. See also Schrijver, Development without Destruction, 23–25.

14. ICJ, Danube Dam case, separate opinion, Weeramantry, 110.

15. ICJ, Danube Dam case, separate opinion, Weeramantry 115.

16. See also Wolfrum, Die Internationalisierung; and Molenaar and Oude Elferink, The International Regime.

17. See Vicuña, The Changing International Law; and Schrijver, Sovereignty over Natural Resources.

18. See International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, Request for an advisory opinion submitted by the Sub-Regional Fisheries Commission (SRFC), Advisory Opinion of 2 April 2015, Case No. 21, available at https://www.itlos.org/fileadmin/itlos/documents/cases/case_no.21/advisory_opinion/C21_AdvOp_02.04.pdf.

19. See ICJ, Whaling case, 2014.

20. Official Records, UN Conference on the Law of the Sea, first plenary meeting, UN doc. A/CONF.13/SR. 1 (1958), 3.

21. Pardo, The Common Heritage.

22. Dam-de Jong, Internatonal Law and Governance.

23. Redgwell, Intergenerational Trust.

24. Kohen, Possession contestée.

25. Schrijver, The Changing Nature.

26. Churchill and Lowe, The Law of the Sea.

27. Weiss, In Fairness to Future Generations.

28. Schrijver, Sovereignty over Natural Resources.

29. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, and Schrijver, Natural Resource Management.

30. Yoshida, The International Legal Régime for the Protection of the Stratospheric Ozone Layer.

31. For an analysis of these principles, see Schrijver, The Evolution of Sustainable Development.