Common ownership

Common ownership is collective ownership of resources or productive assets rather than exclusive private ownership. It assigns rights and responsibilities to a group instead of a single private owner.

Common-pool resource: A resource from which excluding users is difficult and whose use by one person reduces what remains for others. These resources make collective rules necessary because exclusion is difficult and use can deplete them.
Private property: A system in which individuals or private entities hold recognized rights to exclude others from assets. It concentrates ownership rights in private holders rather than assigning them collectively.
Commons: Resources or spaces governed for shared use by a community. Common ownership draws on institutions historically used to govern shared land and resources.
Worker cooperative: A business owned and democratically governed by its workers. Workers collectively own productive assets and participate in decisions about their use.
Tragedy of the commons: A model in which individuals acting in self-interest overuse a shared resource, degrading it for everyone. It highlights risks of unmanaged access, not an inevitable outcome of governed common ownership.
Common property regime: A system in which a defined group governs access to and use of a shared resource. It specifies how a community can exercise common ownership through rules and membership.
State ownership: Ownership of assets by a government or public authority. Public authority, rather than a community of users, holds the ownership rights.
Open-field system: A premodern European farming arrangement with shared fields divided into strips and subject to communal rules. It offers a historical example of shared use governed through community rules.
Community land trust: A nonprofit organization that holds land for community benefit, often separating land ownership from building ownership. It applies collective stewardship to land while allowing homes or businesses to be privately held.
Socialism: A family of political and economic ideas favoring social or collective control of productive resources. Common ownership is one proposed institutional basis for socialist economic arrangements.

Linked from 19 pages