Commons and the tourism sector facing a pandemic

The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic took the tourism sector by surprise. Discussion about resilience started immediately, and has instinctively been bottom-up. A point that has emerged among Italian professionals and scholars is the local dimension of potential solutions. Separate issues, like sustainability to be granted on a territorial level to attract foreign visitors in the future, awareness that reaction against the pandemic either starts from local stakeholders or does not start at all, and the need of sanitization to be carried out massively throughout a destination, all may be referred to the concept of common goods, i.e. goods beyond individual properties – entities that have owners but are not owned personally. In a word, Commons. Strictly speaking, Commons belong to a prefeudal organization of societies, where pastures are shared and run smoothly by local communities. Commons like these are still alive here and there across the Alps and in Switzerland. Commons, however, are also at the origin of urban parks in the British Isles, and the field in which Elinor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994. What’s interesting, the digital protocol and language that billions of people have relied on to keep communicating during the lockdown after the Covid-19 outbreak are Commons, too. No one individually owns the World-Wide Web or initiatives like Wikipedia, nor – the keyword, again – Creative Commons.