Governing the Commons in Transforming Economies: The Case of Ukraine

The situation generally defined as the “tragedy of the commons” acquires its specific features depending on the political and economic settings. Due to the domination of the public domain and the state ownership in the basis of the socialist economic systems, the definition of the “commons” in the so-called post-communist countries (the former Soviet Union and its satellites) can be employed to a much more extensive body of the resources. This creates additional challenges to the process of governing the commons in those countries, and it becomes increasingly complicated in their ongoing socio-economic transformation toward capitalism.

On the case of Ukraine, which is surviving through one of the worst scenarios of the failing transformation to capitalism, the disastrous deterioration of the economic infrastructure, and deregulation of the property rights, I investigate the epistemological value of the scholarly work on the governing the commons and the disaster capitalism, particularly writings by Naomi Klein and Eleanor Ostrom, as applied to the countries in transition.

I locate the situation in the post-socialist countries against the background of the global economic and legal (related to the property rights) affairs. I investigate the possibilities and the character of the reciprocal influences of the resources mismanagement in those countries and the vulnerabilities peculiar to the Western economies.