COMMONS AND COLLECTIVE ACTION IN ITALIAN INDUSTRIAL DISTRICTS

In recent years there has been a great upswing of interest in commons and collective and participatory management regimes for governing shared resources. This interest has been fueled by Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom’s seminal work that demonstrated, in the context of natural resources such as fisheries, watersheds, woodlands and the like, that common resources could be managed effectively without recourse to privatization or direct government control (Ostrom 1990). In certain circumstances and in specific local contexts collective management seems, on the contrary, advantageous in providing responsiveness to local needs and better conditions for the development of local economies. This contribution, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, assumes industrial districts as a fascinating and innovative field of application of Ostrom's notion of new commons and shows how Ostrom’s theory of self-organized and self-governed collective action contributes to explain the governance model of industrial districts. The preliminary findings suggest that an industrial district is strongly connected with the presence of industrial atmosphere, social cohesion and common business ethos that represent new commons in the sense of Ostrom and, therefore, lead us to say that the industrial district itself (which we adopted as the unit of analysis), as a whole can be considered as a new common. Furthermore, pointing out the key role played by nested district actors in applying, maintaining and enforcing the eight Ostrom principles of governing the commons in industrial districts, the contribution argues that Ostrom’s theory helps us to understand the dynamics of governing commons within industrial districts, especially focusing on Italian districts.