Extracting the commons

ABSTRACT

This article investigates how resources that are perceived as common are turned into property through different interventions of extractivism, and how this provokes counter-activism from groups and actors who see their rights and living conditions threatened by the practices of extraction. The article looks at how extraction is enacted through three distinct practices: prospecting, enclosure and unbundling, studied through three different cases. The cases involve resources that are material and immaterial, renewable as well as non-renewable, ‘natural’ as well as man-made. Prospecting is exemplified by patenting of genetic resources and traditional knowledge, enclosure is exemplified by debates over copyright expansionism and information commons, and unbundling through conflicts over mining and gas extraction. The article draws on fieldwork involving interviews and participant observation with protesters at contested mining sites in Australia and with digital rights activists from across the world who protest against how the expansion of copyright limits public access to culture and information. The article departs from an understanding of ‘commons’ not as an open access resource, but as a resource shared by a group of people, often subjected to particular social norms that regulate how it can be used. Enclosure and extraction are both social processes, dependent on recognising some and downplaying or misrecognising other social relations when it comes to resources and processes of property creation. These processes are always, regardless of the particular resources at stake, cultural in the sense that the uses of the commons are regulated through cultural norms and contracts, but also that they carry profound cultural and social meanings for those who use them. Finally, the commonalities and heterogeneities of these protest movements are analysed as ‘working in common’, where the resistance to extraction in itself represents a process of commoning.

KEYWORDS:

• Extraction
• commons
• property creation
• digital piracy
• natural resources
• bioprospecting

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Johanna Dahlin is postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Culture Studies (Tema Q), Linköping University, Sweden, where she is working with the project ‘Commons and Commodities: Knowledge, Natural Resources and the Construction of Property’. Her principal research interests are heritage, resource use and social mobilisation. E-mail: [email protected]

Martin Fredriksson is assistant professor and Marie Curie Fellow at the Department of Culture Studies (Tema Q), Linköping University. He has been visiting scholar at MIT and Western Sydney University. He is currently conducting a project about ‘Commons and Commodities: Knowledge, Natural Resources and the Construction of Property’ funded by the Swedish Research Council. He has previously worked with the history of copyright in Sweden and with piracy as a social movement. E-mail: [email protected]

ORCID

Johanna Dahlin http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2040-913X

Martin Fredriksson http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3309-3840

Notes

1. In the Western tradition, four major types of property are distinguished: open access, which can be seen as a form of non-property, common property, state property and private property. These are associated with a number of assumptions, which in Western traditions of economic theory have favoured private property as the most desirable and efficient.

2. The metaphor is not new, it can be traced back to the nineteenth century and Henry Maine, and it is used in other influential works on property (Hann 1998).

3. The name of the local Aboriginal people in this area was earlier written Kamilaroi. Since the sounds of that language do not exactly match the sounds of English, there are several alternative spellings with Gomeroi or Gamilaraay being the most common today.

4. The Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey was the site of battles during the First World War where in 1915 Australian troops sustained huge losses. Gallipoli has since gained almost mythical proportions in the Australian national imagination, and is a frequent site of pilgrimage for Australians.

5. The Liverpool Plains Alliance is made up of Gomeroi/Gamilaraay Traditional Custodians, Caroona Coal Action Group, Liverpool Plains Youth, Breeza Action Group, SOS Liverpool Plains, The Wilderness Society, Lock the Gate Alliance, Land, Water, Future, 350.org Australia, Front Line Action on Coal (FLAC) and Our Land, Our Water, Our Future.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council and the Marie Skldowska Curie Actions [grant number E0633901, Cofund Project INCA 600398].