The concept of ‘recommoning’ has its roots in the dialectics of enclosure and the commons. Positioning recommoning as future-facing practice allows a definition of the term to be encompassing rather than specific in ways that may delimit is use and applicability across circumstances.

At the heart of the notion of recommoning is reckoning with the legacy of enclosure. Laws related to the enclosure of common land stretch back centuries in Europe and Asia. High profile examples begin to proliferate through the sixteenth century in England and continue to be legislated into the present. The Acts of Enclosure were a turning point in the history of Britain – and all the territories subject to the British Empire. Prior legislation, particularly the Charter of the Forest recognised and elaborated rights and responsibilities towards commonly held resources. As enclosure laws advanced, a range of regimes of thought were developed to indemnify the practice. Perhaps the best known example of such concepts is the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’. First formulated in modern terms in 1833 by William Forster Lloyd, and repackaged for the contemporary period by Garrett Hardin, the tragedy of the commons posits that commonly-held resources will inevitably be depleted and destroyed by overuse as a result of competing incentives. Individuals will use their access to a common resource to their maximum capacity according to Lloyd’s and Hardin’s logic; thus individual advantage will eventually overwhelm the collective advantage provided by being good stewards of the commons. The tragedy of the commons became ‘common knowledge’ – pun not necessarily intended, but accepted – in economic thinking since Hardin, but eventually the concept was tested within real-world contexts. The study of ‘common pool resources’ by economists, particularly the Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom and her frequent collaborator Adela Schlager, demonstrated that circumstances did not always conform inevitably to the tragedy of the commons logic. Often common pool resources were able to be preserved and maintained by the granting of specific sets of rights and responsibilities. Key to Ostrom and Schlager’s research was the role of information. Information about the resource, its scarcity and about others’ use of that resource were pivotal in preventing tragedies of the commons.

Ostrom and Schlager’s research has been queried in recent years, in particular by writers like Bernard Stiegler whose work suggests that there is an optimum size for common pool users to act in altruistic ways and if numbers exceed that optimum range, tragedy of the commons can become inevitable. The question is an empirical one, but one that is not easy to research given the numerous compounding factors. Nevertheless, it is useful to think about how maintenance of the commons can be fostered as a widely accessible set of practices.

It is here that the notion of recommoning becomes significant. Through a recommoning process a community can index and examine the status of enclosure in relation to the resources it accesses and requires. The process of enclosure is an alienation process, but one which can be redressed. By examining the efficacy of de-enclosing spaces and resources, communities can create new forms of community and social cohesion through the conscious recommoning of resources and then maintaining that ‘commoned’ status. Theorising the process of de-enclosure, and positioning a resource or territory as a “commons-to-be” will be a diverse process. It will entail ways of thinking about access and the composition of the commons in more inclusive ways than have previously been applied. Theorists, particularly Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have discussed the concept of the ‘undercommons’ – populations excluded, often along racial/gender/sexual axes – from being part of the notional ‘commons’ of a territory or community. Looking ahead, each recommoning process must redress the specific political circumstances and exclusions that have underwritten their preceding notions of the ‘commons’ as well as those of enclosure. Thus a recommoning process can begin to be a process of remediation, and democratisation: both of political space as well as geographical space.