Abstract
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: IS;" lang="IS">Emphasizing the context of what has often been referred to as “scarce natural resources”, in particular forests, meadows, and fishing stocks, Elinor Ostrom’s important work <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Governing the commons</em> (1990) presents an institutional framework for discussing the development and use of collective action with respect to environmental problems. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In this article we discuss extensions of Ostrom’s approach to genes and genomes and explore its limits and usefulness. With the new genetics, we suggest, the biological gaze has not only been turned inward to the management and mining of the human body, also the very notion of the “biological” has been destabilized. This shift and destabilization, we argue, which is the result of human refashioning and appropriation of “life itself”, raises important questions about the relevance and applicability of Ostrom’s institutional framework in the context of what we call “genomic stuff”, genomic material, data, and information. </span></span>
Highlights
During the 1980s, several fields of scholarship – in particular, anthropology, ecology, economics, and political science – collectively established a new interdisciplinary domain focusing on the cultures, practices, and institutions associated with the governance of commons
The new interdisciplinary effort to address questions related to the governance of the commons was partly informed by the growing environmental problems of late modernity, including those posed by rapidly expanding human populations, ever more efficient technologies of extraction and exploitation, and the near collapse of entire ecosystems and animal populations, especially fish
Broadening the feminist perspective, we suggest that the labour carried out by both women and men contributing genomic stuff to biobanks, genomic projects, and personal genomics services largely goes unrecognized
Summary
During the 1980s, several fields of scholarship – in particular, anthropology, ecology, economics, and political science – collectively established a new interdisciplinary domain focusing on the cultures, practices, and institutions associated with the governance of commons (see, for instance, McCay and Acheson 1987). In some situations, the appropriators can be largely – on some level – equated with the appropriated Even when this is not the case, the providers of the resource, genomic material, data, and information, are active co-producers of the value from which they may later benefit, even if not in immediate ways but by means of higher level of health care, or better drugs, for the society as a whole. This scenario contains elements of the free riders problem, it cannot be reduced to it. These complex hybrids of the biomedical era pose complex questions for governance and property
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