Beyond Design Principles: Subjectivity, Emotion and the (Non-)Rational Commons

Abstract

"Common property debates have been dominated by approaches that seek to demonstrate that cooperation is rational. In other words, by working together under appropriate institutional frameworks, the commons becomes a viable resource management strategy. This paper seeks to open out the commons debate by arguing that more attention needs to be paid to the affective and non-rational reasons people cooperate. Drawing from feminist theory, gender and subjectivity and work on social relations, I focus on the importance of peoples emotional attachments to the sea and resources they manage. In a fisheries context, I explore how emotional attachments are bound up in subjectivity, kinship and community obligations, values over money and land use, such that people develop informal modes of cooperation. I suggest that these affective relations are important for people's willingness (or not) to cooperate in more organised contexts, particularly when resources become scarce. The paper demonstrates the importance of thinking about gender and other social relations as elements of subjectivity rather than roles or structures to understand how particular forms of cooperation emerge. At core, it attempts to develop a new understanding of cooperation that draws from the excellent foundation in institutional studies while incorporating new feminist research on emotion and subjectivity."