Verso una Carta Internazionale dei Beni Comuni. Ricerca interdisciplinare sull'accesso a cibo, acqua e sapere quali interconnessi limiti alla produzione di mercato nell'interesse della riproduzione ecologica
Towards an International Charter of the Commons. An interdisciplinary research on access to food, water and knowledge as interconnected limits to market production in the interest of ecological reproduction)
Partecipanti al progetto
- Mattei Ugo (Coordinatore)
Descrizione del progetto
- Abstract:
Today, a critical rethinking of the role of global public goods with an emphasis on sustainability is urgent, while the notion of “Commons” is now seen as crucial for the exercise of fundamental rights and the free development of the individual. The notion has already made its way into the new constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia in protecting access to water and food and more generally the natural environment. The Commons must be provided with scrupulous legal protection to ensure that their present use by everybody is consistent with the need for their preservation to the benefit of future generations. In Italy a reform proposal of the 1942 Civil Code was made in 2008 by the “Rodotà Commission”, in which “the commons” (“beni comuni”) are seen as goods and services expressing different bundles of utility functional to the protection both of individual rights and vital public interests: while they do not strictly fall in the class of public goods, since they may belong both to public subjects and private individuals, their deeper utility is to be enjoyed by the whole of the community. In this perspective, the shared knowledge about the production and preparation of food when guaranteeing sustainability in the ecological cycle of life is understood as an intangible “common”.
Having outlined what can be generally defined as “commons”, our research will:
- identify the various utilities produced by food both as a cultural good and as a material good generated by agricultural techniques, in a context of animal welfare safeguard;
- explore innovative legal protection of these commons;
- define a rational and fair international regime of food, water, energy and knowledge, non-severable entities understood as global commons to be protected by law from financial speculation and nonecological use;
- provide the guidelines for an International Charter of the Commons as a tool to limit the boundaries of the market and avoid excessive commoditization.