Markets and knowledge commons: Is there a difference between private and community governance of markets?

This paper focuses on the informal occupation of public housing in Naples (Italy), analysing the fraudulent takeover of housing units. An in-depth look at this case study contributes to the international debate on the nexus between urban informality and the state, showing the fundamental, multifaceted role of public institutions in shaping the illegal city.

James M. Buchanan cited the American Founding as an important inspiration for his constitutional vision. His insistence on unanimous constitutional agreement highlights the fact that the Constitutional Convention did not obtain the consent of the black Americans. Accordingly, Buchanan’s work leads to an appreciation of the Founders as an archetype of the constitutional mentality that he advocated throughout his work, but also to an understanding that the Founding fell short of his ideal of genuinely consensual politics.

The innovation systems (IS) approach—developed by Richard Nelson, Christopher Freeman and Bengt-Ake Lundvall, amongst others—has become perhaps the dominant approach in the academic literature for the study of innovation. This paper argues that the work of Friedrich Hayek and Elinor Ostrom can be used to draw attention to some potential difficulties with the way in which the IS approach is often used to guide policy.

How does cultural diversity affect social organization? Do institutional differences between diverse and homogeneous communities have implications for economic development? This paper argues that heterogeneity not only impedes informal mechanisms of cooperation, but also increases demand for formal institutions. Greater reliance on formal law and public authority, in turn, facilitates economic development by enabling arm’s length transactions and encouraging entrepreneurship.

Property rights are important for economic exchange, but in much of the world they are not publicly guaranteed. Private market associations can fill this gap by providing an institutional structure to enforce agreements, but with this power comes the ability to extort from group members. Under what circumstances do private associations provide a stable environment for economic activity?

Read Here Steering, Knowledge and the Challenge of Governance Evaluation: The Case of National Health Service Governance and Reform in …

Building upon recent work on epistemic varieties of liberalism, avant-garde political agency and the theory and practice of activism, I claim that a liberal defence of more open borders does not presuppose either indifference to the problem of the deep structural sources of poverty in poorer countries, or the absence of an account of those structures’ transformation.

Read Here Local Energy Communities and Distributed Generation: Contrasting Perspectives, and Inevitable Policy Trade-Offs, beyond the Apparent Global Consensus Author: …

Read Here Beasts of Prey or Rational Animals? Private Governance in Brazil’s Jogo do Bicho Author: Danilo Freire Published in …

We use evidence from Afghanistan to illustrate how political instability and the absence of meaningful political constraints enables the predatory state. Foreign aid and foreign military intervention amplify the wealth-destroying features of political institutions.

What is property, and why does our species happen to have it? In this paper I explore how Homo sapiens acquires and cognizes the custom of property and why this might be relevant to understanding how property works in the 21st century.

Political theorists have recently shifted their focus from the normative properties of institutions to their epistemic ones. One popular thesis in the current literature is that democracy has desirable epistemic properties, at least when compared to other methods of social choice.