Abstract

This paper attempts to provide a partial answer to the question as to how deliberation and democratic decision-making in complex human systems-highly diverse economically, socially and culturally-can become a common. For that purpose, we propose to understand deliberation and decision-making processes themselves as commoning. First, we show how these processes can be subject to the “tragedy of the anticommons,” referring to three core issues: individualization of civic responsibility, erosion of information and opinion-forming channels, and the narrowing scope of deliberation and decision-making. Secondly, we propose a solution to the first of these problems drawing on contributions from assembly theory. Finally, we address the other two issues based on classical tenets of the republican tradition and deliberative and participatory democracy.