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"If Planet Earth is to survive in the coming decades as we know it, we must find new ways to protect our planet from the unsustainable growth imperatives of neoliberal economics and politics. This will require a new architecture of "green governance"―laws, public policies, and social practices that can honor human rights and commons-based management of natural resources large and small"

All the talk about rights-based fishing and IFQs is a red herring that throws all of us off the track of what is important. IFQs do not work because they are rights, or because they are property rights…. IFQs work because they involve an assigned catch, as opposed to having catch be determined competitively. (Vermont Law Review, Spring 2004, p. 659) It is apparently irresistible for people, even trained scientists, to misunderstand ITQs as a triumph of the market and privatization. ITQs play into the grand narrative that private property rights promote good stewardship of a resource. Remember the so-called "tragedy of the commons" story? That parable holds that if you give people private property rights in the commons - if only your privatize the collective resource! - people won't over-exploit it. "Tragedy" can be averted. The mythology insists that the commons can be responsibly managed only if it is duly privatized.

"By losing the free and open Internet, and free and open devices to interact with it - and even such ordinary things as physical books and music media - we reduce the full scope of both markets and civilization. But that's hard to see when the walled gardens are so rich with short-term benefits."

David Bollier outlines some possible online governing strategies for the commons.

The commons, said Wolcher, citing Linebaugh, is not simply a conflict over property rights. It is about "people expressing a form of life to support their autonomy and subsistence needs." The commons is a verb - "commoning." It's about "taking one's life into one's own hands, and not waiting for crumbs to drop from the King's table."