No dia 21 de fevereiro, Max Rozenburg (Newcastle University) será o orador do Seminário do Grupo de Investigação RIGoP. O tema para esta sessão será Reconfiguring Democracy for the Common Good: The Commons as Deliberative Systems. A partir das 11h, na Sala 2 do ICS-ULisboa e online.
My work defends a basic proposition: the legitimacy of our social institutions depends on the extent to which they orient themselves to a common good, as opposed to individual private interests.
This basic proposition is more controversial than it seems. Dominant liberal institutions – the free market, the capitalist firm and the representative democratic state – assume that common goods are the by-product of aggregated or negotiated private interests, and incentivise their subjects to act accordingly: maximise your private utility, compete with others, and vote for those who best represent your private interests.
In my work, I explore alternative democratic arrangements that are oriented at common goods, and investigate the different ways in which these common goods are determined and maintained.
More specifically, I explore how deliberative legitimacy is systemically generated in three contemporary commons
1) the Scottish crofting communities, who own land in common;
2) the International Telecommunication Union, which manages the global commons of satellite orbits and the radio spectrum; and
3) Wikipedia, which maintains an open-access encyclopaedia – to explore which institutional configurations are most conducive to generating and sustaining a common good.