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Commons
Shared resources / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the term "commons" in political economics. For the Wikimedia project, see Wikimedia Commons. For other uses, see Commons (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with common land or commmons.
The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons can also be understood as natural resources that groups of people (communities, user groups) manage for individual and collective benefit.[1] Characteristically, this involves a variety of informal norms and values (social practice) employed for a governance mechanism.[2] Commons can also be defined as a social practice[3] of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.[4]
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