Karl Polayni described how land and forests were the first of our shared resources to be enclosed and converted from commons to commodities to fuel the Industrial Revolution. (2) Ever since then, we have seen the further enclosure of water resources, biodiversity, data and knowledge (through Intellectual Property Rights) for continued capital accumulation.

Feminist economists have argued that if we aim to build economies that are more equal in distributing the value that they generate, we need to stimulate community-driven use of resources over market and state-controlled resource use. Elinor Ostrom introduced the concept of “commoning” to describe the necessary transition from individual ownership through property rights towards polycentric governance, which both depends on and strengthens communities through processes of trust-building and reciprocity. (3)(4)

As Silvia Federici notes, the commons have been crucially important within feminist economic analysis because women have historically depended on access to communal natural resources more than men and they have been most harmed by their privatization. (5) The struggle continues today all across the world, as women join hands to save degraded forests, block the construction of dams to prevent the privatization of water resources, and form self-managed money commons to provide cash to individuals or groups that do not have access to banks. (6) For Federici, these commoning movements shape a collective identity for women and constitute a “counter-power in the home and the community”. (7)