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Michael Goldman, ed., Privatizing Nature: Political Struggles for the Global Commons. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.
Privatizing Nature: Political Struggles for the Global Commons is perhaps not the best title for this anthology of essays about ecological politics and common property resources. Fortunately, that's probably the weakest feature of this book.
Privatizing Nature is about the politics of local commons institutions facing global forces of development, and how commoners wage struggles over property rights and social justice in the use of natural resources. This terrain is also pragmatic, intellectual, and ethical, the book tenaciously argues, for the operation of any ecoinstitutional regime has at its core a commonly held theory - the sensus communis, "common sense," of how people with a shared stake in the world should act and behave.
The commons is itself an icon of struggle, too. Goldman's opening chapter provides the opening salvo on motivations of experts working on common property resource issues in international development. He shows how development professionals discover and analyze commons regimes, not for the sake of the commons regime, but to figure out how better to incorporate...