Schweik Elected President of Commons Organization

Image

Professor Charlie Schweik of the School of Public Policy and the department of environmental conservation has been elected the next president of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC).

Schweik will serve as the organization’s president-elect until 2023, then will assume his two-year term as president.

IASC is the leading professional organization devoted to “the commons,” which it defines as “a broad set of resources, natural and cultural, that are shared by many people,” from forests and groundwater to the “knowledge commons,” such as digital resources that are collectively owned and managed via the internet. The organization brings together scholars, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners from a range of disciplines “for the purpose of improving governance and management, advancing understanding, and creating sustainable solutions for commons, common-pool resources, or any other form of shared resource.”

Schweik has been a member of IASC since 1998 and has served as a member of its governing council since 2015. For the past three years, Schweik, with support from UMass Amherst students, has been a lead organizer of its international World Commons Week, a series of webinars, workshops, and other events with participants from across the globe. He’s co-led IASC’s Elinor Ostrom Award, which recognizes scholars and practitioners for work related to the commons, and leads the organization’s Knowledge Commons group, including organizing its 2021 Knowledge Commons Virtual Conference, to take place in June.

“The central theme of my scholarly work is understanding how humans can work together to manage shared resources,” said Schweik. While his early work focused on natural resource commons, such as forests, his more recent work has focused on digital commons, such as open source software, the subject of his book “Internet Success: A Study of Open Source Software Commons.”

“Generally, online, self-governing communities are increasingly being applied to address problems, big and small,” Schweik said. “What’s so important is that these systems allow collaborations across sector — public, private, and nonprofit — as well as across levels of government, and these collaborations can be very small or become quite large in scale.

“While commons and commoning practices have been applied around the world for centuries, many of these practices were taken over in the last 200 years by the dominance of markets and individual property rights, and the quest to commercialize the earth’s resources,” he continued. “But significant problems like climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic have shined a light on the criticality of stewardship of shared resources and our need to share innovations and intellectual property at break-neck speeds, rather than holding on to ideas in a proprietary fashion. We may be at a cusp of a renewal in commons and commoning practices as an alternative to address these and many other problems.”