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A Social Commons Ethos in Public Policy-Making

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Abstract

In the business ethics literature, a commons paradigm orients theorizing toward how civil society can promote collaboration and collectively govern shared resources, and implicates the common good—the ethics of providing social conditions that enable individuals and collectives to thrive. In the context of representative democracies, the shared resources of a nation can be considered commons, yet these resources are governed in a top-down, bureaucratic manner wherein public participation is often limited to voting for political leaders. Such governance, however, can be motivated by values of solidarity and stewardship, and a bottom-up approach to participation, in ways that are consistent with a social commons ethos (Meyer and Hudon in J Bus Ethics 160:277–292, 2019). We employ an inductive methodology focused on successes and possibilities, using data from interviews with 93 policy-makers and national-level government leaders in 5 democratic countries, and observational and archival data. We reveal how governments can operationalize a social commons ethos in decision-making. This approach to governance involves stakeholder engagement that is Broad, Deep, and Continual (BDC). In this model, leaders engage a wide breadth of stakeholders, engage them deeply and meaningfully throughout the decision-making process, and sustain this engagement in a continual manner. Implications for governance of non-governmental bureaucracies are discussed, including the normative and strategic benefits of engaging stakeholders in this manner.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Inara Scott, David Stewart, Andrew Wicks, and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments.

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Author notes

  1. Jennifer Lees-Marshment and Aimee Dinnin Huff have contributed equally.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Auckland, Social Sciences Building, 10 Symonds Street, Auckland, 1010, New Zealand

    Jennifer Lees-Marshment

  2. College of Business, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, 97331, USA

    Aimee Dinnin Huff

  3. Terry College of Business, University of Georgia, Benson Hall, 630 S. Lumpkin St., Athens, GA, 30602, USA

    Neil Bendle

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  1. Jennifer Lees-Marshment
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  3. Neil Bendle
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Correspondence to Neil Bendle.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Specifically, interviews conducted for this study were approved by the University of Auckland Human Participants Ethics Committee Reference 2009/372 and 2012/8212.

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Lees-Marshment, J., Huff, A.D. & Bendle, N. A Social Commons Ethos in Public Policy-Making. J Bus Ethics 166, 761–778 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04577-3

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