Commons and Global Public Goods
To the traditional division between public and private goods, the commons add a new dimension: that of resources, material or not, that we can share and that are vulnerable to unregulated private appropriation. It is suggested that this category is key to addressing the ecological polycrisis but requires the establishment of a new type of hybrid international institutions bringing together private, public, and NGO actors, of which the Drugs for Neglected Disease initiative (DNDi) offers a promising example.
In the early 2000s the World Bank actively promoted a concept that was new at the time, that of global public goods (GPGs). Following in the steps of Paul Anthony Samuelson, these were goods and services whose consumption cannot be appropriated by a single individual or isolated group of consumers, but potentially concerns all the world's economic agents – their consumption is non-rivalrous on a planetary scale. This point is decisive: whether or not you decide to go sunbathing has no bearing on anyone else's ability to enjoy the sunshine. At the same time, access to this type of good can in no way be regulated (commercially or administratively) – you cannot station law enforcement officers every ten meters to demand a tax from everyone who sunbathes. The atmosphere, biodiversity, international security, financial stability, and so on…