reducing levels of personal consumption and carbon emissions in the process.11 The growing infrastructure and community of the sharing economy includes many innovations and practices such as peer2peer services, crowd funding, crowdsourcing and co-production. Co-operative enterprises have also long pioneered the sharing economy by sharing the proceeds of business activity with employees, and allowing people to come together to do things that they can’t do alone. A growing body of evidence demonstrates that sharing has many social and environmental benefits, while also improving economic efficiency. Research suggests that most people are keen to share their time and resources with their local community, and that sharing makes us happy and increases our self-esteem.12 The principle of sharing also underpins the renewed focus on the ‘commons’ – the concept that certain resources of both society and nature, including natural resources, cultural traditions and knowledge, should be held ‘in common’ and shared by people and communities.13 The late economist Elinor Ostrum was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for her groundbreaking work on the management of land and other common-pool resources by local communities without intervention from the state or private sector.14 Social welfare as sharing Such examples outlined above illustrate the growing interest among ordinary citizens, entrepreneurs, economists and policymakers in the many different aspects of the sharing economy. However, one of the most important examples of sharing economies in the modern world often goes unrecognised: publicly provided welfare systems. Although various forms of social protection can be traced at least as far back as ancient Greece, modern policies of publicly funded welfare were first implemented by Chancellor Bismarck in Germany during the 1880s. Some of the most widely known modern welfare policies include those introduced in the United States during the Great Depression, as well as the National Health Service and other forms of social security implemented in the United Kingdom following the Second World War. In the 1970s, numerous European states, including Sweden, Germany and Austria, also expanded state welfare provision significantly. Today, sharing economies that make welfare services universally accessible are commonplace, especially in high- and middle-income countries. These national systems of sharing generally evolved alongside the recognition that everyone has certain inalienable human rights – including social and economic rights. These rights were first enshrined in international law in 1948 when nations subscribed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and they have been reinforced in a number of other international covenants since.15
Part 1: The sharing economy
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