The Stewardship of the Temporal Commons

The contemporary move toward privatization has led to the assigning of property rights to many intangible public resources. One shared intangible resource swept up in this marketization is, we argue, the temporal commons – the shared conceptualization of time and temporal values created by a culture-carrying collectivity. As a result, the stewardship, or management, of the temporal commons is judged exclusively by the market-sanctioned metric of efficiency. We suggest that metrics based on the stakeholder approach to organizational effectiveness are more appropriate than the sole reliance on market efficiency criteria for judging the stewardship of a temporal commons, and offer several examples of stewardship evaluated by such metrics from the perspectives of a variety of stakeholders. We close with a call for more cognizant agency and wider participation in temporal commons stewardship.