The quality of sustainability and the nature of open source software

The aim is to categorise Open Source Software as a commons based production process and resource. The definition of the commons is always accompanied by the doubt about its sustainability, the so-called "tragedy of the commons." Therefore it is worth to have a closer look on Open Source and why a "tragedy" does not appear

Risk Assessment and Decision-Making for Genetically Modified Foods

The author examines concerns about genetically modified foods and how those concerns have developed into policy responses markedly different in Europe than in the United States

The economics of copyright law: a stocktake of the literature

This article is a survey of publications by economists writing on copyright law. It begins with a general overview of how economists analyse these questions; the distinction is made between the economics of copying and the economic aspects of copyright law as analysed in law and economics. It then continues with sections on research on the effects of copying and downloading and the effects of unauthorised use (‘piracy’) and ends with an overall evaluation of the economics of copyright in the light of recent technological changes. Economists have always been, and still are, somewhat sceptical about copyright and question what alternatives there are to it. On balance, most accept the role of copyright law in the creative industries while urging caution about its becoming too strong. And although European authors’ rights are different in legal terms from the Anglo-American copyright, the economic analysis of these laws is essentially the same

Reconfiguring Household Management in Times of Discontinuity as an Open System: The Case of Agro-food Chains

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This article is based upon a heterodox approach to economics that rejects the oversimplification made by closed economic models and the mainstream concept of ‘externality.’ This approach re-imagines economics as a holistic evaluation of resources versus human needs, which requires judgement based on understanding of the complexity generated by the dynamic relations between different systems. One re-imagining of the economic model is as a holistic and systemic evaluation of agri-food systems’ sustainability that was performed through the multi-dimensional Governance Assessment Matrix Exercise (GAME). This is based on the five capitals model of sustainability, and the translation of qualitative evaluations into quantitative scores. This is based on the triangulation of big data from a variety of sources. To represent quantitative interactions, this article proposes a provisional translation of GAME’s qualitative evaluation into a quantitative form through the identification of measurement units that can reflect the different capital dimensions. For instance, a post-normal, ecological accounting method, Emergy is proposed to evaluate the natural capital. The revised GAME re-imagines economics not as the ‘dismal science,’ but as one that has potential leverage for positive, adaptive and sustainable ecosystemic analyses and global ‘household’ management. This article proposes an explicit recognition of economics nested within the social spheres of human and social capital which are in turn nested within the ecological capital upon which all life rests and is truly the bottom line. In this article, the authors make reference to an on-line retailer of local food and drink to illustrate the methods for evaluation of the five capitals model

Ecofeminism, Commons, and Climate Justice

Much recent work in ecological economics, degrowth, climate justice, and political ecology focuses on ‘commons’ as an emergent paradigm for sustainable governance institutions to address or rectify ecological crisis. This paper summarizes definitions and typologies of commons, give some examples of commons which help to further climate justice, and discusses these ideas from an ecofeminist perspective.his research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, FRN IDRC and SSHRC File Agreement No. 2017-008

Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource

The goal of this paper is to summarize the lessons learned from a large body of international, interdisciplinary research on common-pool resources (CPRs) in the past 25 years and consider its usefulness in the analysis of scholarly information as a resource. We will suggest ways in which the study of the governance and management of common-pool resources can be applied to the analysis of information and \u27the intellectual public domain.\u27 The complexity of the issues is enormous for many reasons: the vast number of players, multiple conflicting interests, rapid changes of technology, the general lack of understanding of digital technologies, local versus global arenas, and a chronic lack of precision about the information resource at hand. We suggest, in the tradition of Hayek, that the combination of time and place analysis with general scientific knowledge is necessary for sufficient understanding of policy and action. In addition, the careful development of an unambiguous language and agreed-upon definitions is imperative. As one of the framing papers for the Conference on the Public Domain, we focus on the language, the methodology, and outcomes of research on common-pool resources in order to better understand how various types of property regimes affect the provision, production, distribution, appropriation, and consumption of scholarly information. Our analysis will suggest that collective action and new institutional design play as large a part in the shaping of scholarly information as do legal restrictions and market forces