Connecting the Commons to Voluntary Action and Nonprofit Research

Scholars have recently recognized shared interests between commons scholars and nonprofit and voluntary action scholars (Brudney and Meijs, 2009; Bushouse, Never, and Christensen, 2016). While both lines of scholarship consider similar topics related to the concept of ‘beyond markets and state’ (E. Ostrom, 2009)- collective action, resource scarcity, governance of nested systems- there has been very little intentional overlap between the two. This paper articulates that both sets of scholars would be better served by integrating the strengths in their intellectual traditions and lays out key elements from nonprofit and voluntary action scholars in particular that could potentially augment the findings in commons scholarship. The intended result is to continue to open the dialogue across two multidisciplinary fields of scholarly endeavor.