title: Commons as deliberative systems: designing institutions for the common good
title: The commons as deliberative systems: designing institutions for the common good
titleType: AlternativeTitle
Creators: name: Rozenburg, Max
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2024
Subjects: deliberative democracy
commons
common good
Scottish crofters
International Telecommunications Union
Wikipedia
decision-making
economic inequalities

description: This project explores and defends a basic proposition: those who participate in democratic processes should be incentivised to uncover and maintain common goods, rather than to aggregate or integrate their private interests. This basic proposition is more controversial than it seems. The hegemonic institutions of the liberal democratic state and market capitalism both assume that common goods are a by-product of aggregated, integrated or negotiated interests, and incentivise their (incorporated) subjects to act accordingly: maximise your private utility, and vote for those who represent your private interests. Two (re-)emerging models of democratic governance offer an alternative vision: one that reprioritises the common good. First, the model of deliberative democracy, which requires shared decisions to be justifiable to all those subjected to them, not because they serve narrow self-interest, but because they appeal to some conception of a common good. And second, the model of the commons, which shows that certain common goods can only be sustained when individual appropriators are systematically disincentivised from maximising their utility. This project brings these two models of democratic governance into conversation with each other, by recasting the commons as deliberative systems. More specifically, this project is an exercise in grounded normative theory, and evaluates how deliberative legitimacy is generated in three contemporary commons: the Scottish crofters (who own land in common); Wikipedia (which produces and maintains an open access encyclopaedia); and the International Telecommunications Union (which manages both the radio spectrum and outer space under the Common Heritage of Humankind principle). These cases – and the original qualitative data generated through in-depth interviews, documentary analysis and ethnographic work – are analysed through the lens of deliberative systems theory, to explore which institutional arrangements and systemic incentives are more conducive to producing and maintaining common goods and, ultimately, to generating deliberative legitimacy. This thesis advances three specific contributions. First, it contributes to deliberative systems theory’s empirical turn, by identifying, analysing and evaluating three real-life deliberative systems. More specifically, this thesis shows that deliberative systems do, in fact, exist in the real world, and identifies twelve patterns across cases, which can be employed in both the study and design of deliberative systems. Second, this project contributes to deliberative democratic theory more broadly, by exploring how the political economy impacts processes of deliberation. This project shows that common ownership requires deliberation, and suggests that deliberation might require common ownership. Last, this thesis contributes to commons theory, by exploring how legitimacy is generated in the commons. This thesis adds a distinctly normative dimension to the study of the commons, by showing how the commons put the ideals of systemic deliberation into practice.