Ethics and the Commons: Building Ethical Awareness in Research and Practice

This open access book engages with the topic of how ethical values are involved in every intentional human action – both in research, governance and civil society. The question of this book is: what ethical values, challenges, and actions are associated with the commons and commoning? Do commons have a specific ethical and moral orientation? How can we engage with different and plural orientations? While the ethical values of commons may be implied, they are rarely made explicit or linked to ethical claims or theories in philosophy. This book aims to build awareness around the different ethical values, positions, and perspectives linked to commons, common property, and commoning research and practice. Building ethical awareness can help scholars strengthen their tools and skills for analyzing commons. Similarly, improved ethical awareness can give scholars a range of philosophical arguments to navigate and justify links between commons and their ethical values, actions, and outcomes orientations.

Dr. Stefan Partelow is a Professor of Environmental Governance at the University of Bonn in Bonn, Germany. He leads the Governance and Transformation group at the Center for Life Ethics, and is the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant project called SharedSeas (2025-2029), which examines how to scale effective governance in our oceans. Dr. Partelow is a Lead Editor at the journal People and Nature, and the co-host and co-founder of the In Common Podcast, the official podcast of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC). His research areas include ocean governance, small-scale fisheries and aquaculture, social-ecological systems analysis, commons, commoning, and institutional change. He completed his Doctoral and Postdoctoral research at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) and Jacobs University (now Constructor University) in Bremen, Germany. Dr. Partelow further studied Environmental Studies and Sustainability Science at Lund University, Sweden, and the University of California, Santa Barbara.