 All right, I think it's time we get underway. Welcome to the Space Sustainability Research Program Reports from our Space Sustainability Fellows. This is the Secure World Foundation. My name is Chris Johnson. I'm the Space Advisor here at the Secure World Foundation. We are going to be going over our research fellowship reports. Firstly, as some housekeeping notes, I'll first thank everyone for coming back to our rescheduled webinar. We originally intended to do this last week, but technical issues with Zoom and changing a meeting, setting from a meeting to a webinar caused untold mayhem in the logistics of it. So we apologize for that, and I apologize for that. Nevertheless, we're going to get underway with our two research fellows. First, I want to talk a little bit about what the program is and why we do this program. So I've written there aimed at investigating fundamental questions and clarifying fundamental concepts in space sustainability, including spaces and global commons, and that issue of applying polycentric governance concepts to space. The reason that we have these research fellowships and we have focused research is because over the life and course of Secure World's work in our various fora, international fora, national fora, academia, scientific community, commercial actors, in the discussions that we have on promoting and fostering space sustainability, we quite often continually run into, I would say, issues that have to do with assumptions about outer space and governance of outer space, where we kind of see this is where the debate and the discussion ends, where some actors just voice their assumptions or come to conclusions that are not uniformly shared. And we felt that, you know, in actually, in order to push the conversation forward, we do need to have focused research and really shine a light on some of these areas which we do have these underlying assumptions and I would say misconceptions. So one of those that we'll get into is on global commons and is that quote unquote is space, space itself in global commons and another one on, well, where should governance happen in the space domain? We felt that these were key issues and questions to look at and see if we can contribute to the discourse out there and make something which we hope is impartial, we hope is lasting and useful to contribute to those discussions. So this is why Secure World has set up this fellowship program last year with two of those issues and questions to be looked at and we're gonna continue with these research fellowship programs, the research that we do and to really continue to solve these persistent obstacles that we have in the discourse that we have as we try and foster and promote space sustainability. So here's the agenda for today. After I've given this introduction and some housekeeping notes, we're gonna have Claire present on polycentricity and space governance, 10 minutes for Q and A, then we'll have Mr. Daniel Patton answer that question, space as a commons is space of commons. We're gonna have some questions. The questions that you can submit are, please submit in the Q and A function and not the chat function. We have turned off, cause this is a webinar, we've turned off video for attendees but you can certainly still put your questions in there. In the Q and A, we are recording this and for the people who can attend now, we do hope to be posting it on a couple of different sites within the next couple of days, 24, 48, 72 hours. So those who are not in attendance can also take part in addition to the posting of the full reports and the executive summaries from our excellent scholarly research fellows. So with that, I'm going to now make an introduction to Ms. Claire Otto. She is a senior policy analyst at the University of Virginia's National Security Policy Center. And prior to joining UVA, she was a communication specialist at the DOE, Department of Energy. Claire earned a master in public policy in space and national security from George Washington University and a BA in comparative politics from the University of California, San Diego. You can see the research questions that we posed for applicants to the research fellowship on the right side of your screen, those bullet-pointed questions. I'm going to now hand over the remote control to Claire and she'll be able to talk about those questions and then talk about her research and her findings and her conclusions. So Claire, if you've turned your microphone on and turn your camera on. Yeah, can you hear me okay? Yes, we can hear you fine. So I'll give you the floor and you can go over those questions and you should also be able to run the slides. Is that true? I believe so, yeah. Good, all right. Yeah, great. Floor is yours. Great, thanks, Chris. Thank you so much for having me first off and thank you so much for the opportunity to do this research this past semester. I learned a lot and it was a really good time. So hope that this can sort of help contribute to any sort of space governance conversations. To get started, just I definitely need an agenda to keep me organized. So we're going to go over the guiding questions that we originally had at the beginning of last semester and what was posed by SWF and how maybe that changed a little bit over the course of the research. Then looking really quick at a polycentricity, kind of what it is, where it comes from. Some of that will be some of the literature that I looked at, some of the foundational polycentricity literature, some of the space governance look. In that, I also took a look at some analogous domains. So I'm going to take a look at a few of the ones that came up and had some good lessons learned and then move on just to my findings and some application at the end. So first off, the questions that I got from Secure World, there were sort of three main ones as Chris's slide had and as they are here. Generally the first was, how does the existing body of literature on polycentric governance connect to an informed space governance? Then looking at that, seeing if there were any gaps, what was missing from the discussion and then looking to how we can apply the concepts from other domains and concepts from the theory to both near-term work in space governance and long-term sustainability. So initially I had thought that the value add was going to be more of a review of the polycentric literature and the connections to space but there are already quite a few really good, really current resources there. The Ostrom Workshop, obviously, Stephen Marshall McGinnis did a really good review in 2019 of polycentricity from 1951 until 2019 and Tepper and Coon and Shingler from the Open Lunar Foundation both have very current connections to space governance. So that was great to find and good to have but I sort of shifted after that from thinking that this would be more of a literature of your in connection to looking more at the last question specifically kind of trying to take a look at how can this be added to how we think about applied governance, building a framework which in policy schools is a big thing that we love to do. So it was a good project. But before I could get to that, of course, first I needed to look at what polycentric governance was. It's a concept that I found myself sort of having trouble explaining at the beginning because it seemed to me kind of so, so inherent in so many things and so understandable. So polycentric governance in over the review of the literature that I found kind of the broadest definition, the one that includes the most things is a system in which multiple authorities oversee the same area with overlapping interests and differing scopes of responsibility. So we can see this in, I mean, metropolitan governance is where it was generally originally kind of applied in governance theory. There's a lot of environmental management, polycentric theory. If you think about like a power grid, there are lots of more local power grids but we care about it as a nation. So it's sort of so inherent and so simple that it can be a little difficult to describe. But yeah, so that's sort of the concepts. Obviously on the other hand, monocentric governance is when there's one overarching authority that oversees everything. Moving on, looking at the polycentricity literature just to get a brief foundation. It first was kind of articulated as a concept by Polly Annie in 1951. He wasn't a political scientist. He instead articulated this more looking at the concept of science and scientific research called it the self coordination of independent research initiatives. And it was then applied to governance. Most I think notably early on by Ostrom, Taiba and Warren in 1961, they took a look for quite a while at metropolitan governance and specifically used the idea of polycentricity. So the idea of local municipalities all under a city that's under a county that's under a state, it's under a country. It's very polycentric framework. Eleanor Ostrom continued this look at metropolitan governance but also applied it pretty often to metropolitan or to environmental management as well. And then more recently, we have seen expanded upon and applied to a lot of internet governance which is Shackleford and Tepper. Both have done really interesting work expanding this to cyber governance and recently space governance. Like I had mentioned the work of the Open Linger Foundation and of Tepper again. So some really great resources. They're definitely, yeah, all of these are linked in the report worth a look for sure. So some other research just kind of adding onto the idea of governance and maybe a framework to start thinking about space governance through a polycentric lens. Obviously looking at the large body of space governance research that there is, there's some really good books by Clay Maltz, Martin France and John Fox. There are quite a few resources there. Also looking at norms back to sort of foundational norm literature, Finnemore and Skikink and more recently Robin Dickey of the Aerospace Corporation. Both all have really great norms research and also looking at the idea of public goods and the commons and management of both of those. This is really where the idea for kind of a framework to consider how the different levels of governance and how they can be employed came about. Sort of a obviously a sort of simplified way to think of it, but a useful tool I found. So that being said, after that I looked at sort of characterizing space. It as it stands is quite a polycentric governance system. I think that that I don't find to be debatable. It's their national bodies, international bodies and subnational bodies that all have overlapping interests and some level of governance or control oversight over different parts of space. But as it stands, again, this is relatively simplistic but helpful to visualize. But sorry, moving on from that. I also took just a brief look at analogous domains. There are so many that have different lessons to be learned and obviously the lessons, the analogies break down a little but looking at things like maritime, specifically commercial whaling and lobster fisheries. There are some serious, some useful historical parallels about different levels of management, lobster fisheries. There's the tension between self-governance and regulation coming from state bodies and seeing how those kind of work together to form a useful, flexible and responsive governance system, commercial whaling. There are some historical parallels with how governance systems had to walk back environmental degradation after technological change that I found pretty applicable. Environmental management, as I had mentioned, the Austrian workshop especially has done a lot of work looking at how different environmental management systems can be both responsive and also still not entirely self-governed. And more recently, internet governance is more self-directed and informal, which is interesting considering space, definitely began formally but now has the proliferation of space companies and the impact that commercial companies have. There are some parallels that can be pulled there. It's also still evolving with the government kind of catching up to technological pace, which can be similar to internet governance. There's also, I looked, there's bridging artificial intelligence governance work. A lot of it is sort of strictly advocating self-governance, which I find interesting, but there are some concerns, especially for space and I think sustainability environment with strictly self-governance. Why in large, just a quick question, why are these domains analogous or how are they analogous? Yeah, definitely. Thank you for the question. So it varies, definitely none are a one-to-one analogy. Everywhere is different. The physics is different in space, of course, but with maritime, I think that's probably the one that has been most often parallel to space. You have the competing economic security, civil interests. There's, especially with the commercial whaling around the Antarctic, it's got a lot of the sort of scientific civil interests that are similar to space, while also what changed a lot was the commercial capability in the area. With lobster fisheries, what I found interesting was the, I don't want to say tension, but sort of the pull between the sort of commercial self-governed entities, the people with boats who were interested in just, you know, in their industry, but also in the larger maintenance of the environment. Oh no. Can you still hear me? I think our power has gone out here. No, I can still hear you. Yeah, you're fine. Okay, great. Then I think our wifi's still on, so we're good. But the larger, the pull between the commercial action and the necessity of the environment and the maintenance of the environment to stay, to continue the commercial activity, that balance seems sort of reminiscent of space for sure. With environmental management, I think it was more the, what I found is interesting parallel anyway, was more the idea of the, sorry, the different, again, the sustainability, the necessity of sustaining the environment for, you know, to be able to continue to use the water from rivers and so on. Internet governance, I think, on the face of it seems potentially, you know, a little bit more different. That's not quite so much a physical domain, but there are a lot more parallels, I think, in the fluidity of it, you know? And also that, I think, a lot more of the kind of idea of technology outpacing governance definitely happens in the internet. And the same thing, artificial intelligence, it's a lot more, sorry, we're trying to figure out why the power has gone out. Artificial intelligence is a lot newer. It's a lot more recent. So almost with space, almost not almost space, definitely is, has a longer history, space governance. But I find the idea of the, the advocation for self-governance in artificial intelligence, I think you do see parallels with the advocation for strictly, you know, companies should govern themselves. The free market will take care of it. I think both of those ideas have become prevalent in the conversations for good or not, but. Thank you. Yeah, of course. No, thank you for the question. All right, let me, moving on. So with, with all of these understandings was a good kind of breadth of research, but I was looking to pull them all together. And I love a framework as I think most people in public policy do. And I wanted a way to really understand, you know, with all of these different levels, how can we best use them? You know, you wanna make sure that there's, as some of the literature had said, you know, you want some overlap because some overlap is healthy, you do want, you want some level of resilience there, but at the same time, you don't want too much overlap, you don't want too much repetition when you could be building a more kind of flexible responsive, flexible responsive governance system. So looking at this, I first, excuse me, I first went, I first started to consider what I believed are, what I believe are two of the most important kind of criteria to consider. Obviously, very simplified, there are a million different criteria, but these two, I think really capture two of the most important things of any kind of space incident, which would be the barrier to entry. I don't know that it matters too much if no one has access to the technology yet. If there's a high barrier to entry, then there are, okay, power's back. If there's a high barrier to entry, then there are fewer actors, it's less of a collective action problem. And then the other side is the risk to operations. If there's a low risk to operations, then it's a little bit easier to allow less oversight, to allow more self-governance because the consequences are less high. So that is kind of how this framework began was just thinking about the criteria. And of course, it's just, I think foundational still, looking to sort of set the idea of how to start to set different systems and different levels. And finally, I wanted to test this framework and I looked at three different case studies in the paper, looking at space traffic management, looking at kind of the Artemis lunar landing sites and how eventually those will be used kind of more, ideally more economic, for more economic purposes. And those two were interesting because, and sort of what I expect to find was that with space traffic management, it's kind of a mix of different levels, a mid and low level if you can. And with the lunar landing sites, it would start higher. Obviously there's a very high barrier to entry, but as that barrier to entry lowers, governance could be pushed lower to the commercial entities that are interested or to the different associations or different kind of more local governance. The case study that I found the most interesting, however, was the ASAT ban, which was enacted at a high level and I believe should be enacted at a high level, looking at the idea of anti-satellite tests and the harm that they could cause to the environment, along with the barrier to entry of direct descent ASATs is also relatively high. It just, it fell onto the highest level of governance of that, the framework. And it was interesting because I think most of the literature on polycentricity, it does lean a lot towards self-government, advocating for self-governance or as much self-governance as possible. But I think the ASAT test ban really does show that that is good where possible. Being able to have a more flexible, responsive governance system does require having a lot of kind of lower level governance, but the ASAT ban or things like ASAT tests and direct descent ASATs are still definitely proof that high levels of governance, international bodies and national bodies are very necessary. So thank you for bearing with me through just a little bit of chaos, but if there are any questions, I'd be happy to take them and thank you again. All right, thank you for that overview. And I think that's like a very good advertisement for folks to download and read the full report. You know, I'm looking at some of these questions of, so if you wanna do security related matters, that's, and we look at it from a polycentric lens, we may be getting a different answer as to where to take security issues as opposed to other norms that we need to be setting. So is there some type of like rubric for where we should be guiding our polycentric efforts depending on like the subject matter at hand, the challenge at hand, the space sustainability challenge? That I think, if I had more time, I think I'd like to develop a criteria and look for more of a way to have a more in-depth rubric because it is, I think generally speaking, security issues because of the risk to operations, whether that be the risk to the environment or the risk to like country operations. Generally speaking, that would push it up higher, there's higher risk, but there are things like there was a project actually here at UVA where a student for a Capstone project was looking at different kinds of space situational awareness and data sharing and how those things could be, how the commercial applications could kind of effectively be used. It was a really interesting question and that's I think something that I've seen and anyway, the DOD kind of grapples with regardless, the government kind of grapples with regardless is how to effectively leverage commercial capabilities and things that have some sensitive components. There's definitely a problem of classification that would actually push things up to a higher level as well. So yeah, I don't have too many more criteria at the moment, but I'd love to think about them and do some more research about it for sure. Excellent, thank you for that. So there's a number of questions. Some of them are pretty detailed. I'm gonna look at Sean's first. Are there any existing examples of formal or informal bodies which help either coordinate or adjudicate disputes and feel free to answer that and go in any direction you want though? Yeah, love that. Thank you for the question. I think that there are at a higher level some of the more formal bodies, larger bodies like at the UN that I think are expected to help adjudicate disputes but what I think is missing and what might be useful to be able to push is lower levels. So I guess I don't know of any like commercial associations that might help disputes in between commercial actors but if there are levels, one of the benefits to a polycentric system or an effectively managed polycentric system is that there's multiple levels for conflict resolution, which it's multiple bodies for dialogue. I don't know of any off the top of my head but that is definitely one of the benefits. Excellent, thank you. All right, so the next question, let's see, I'm gonna read the second part of the question. Is it, or is maritime internet environment a pretty good model to use as governance is developed? And the first part of her question was, do you think it'd be useful to consider less parallel domains for ideas on governance since space can be so different? So yeah, kind of complex that one. Yeah, no, it's a great question. And I think that there's the usefulness, I think the utility of looking at analogous domains are that there are specific parallels to be drawn with lessons learned. It's just sort of an easier tool to kind of understand how situations might arise but I definitely think that there are, I mean, I think there are lessons to be learned from pretty much any environment but especially I think for kind of more, kind of one-off, like I'm trying to think of a case and I can't really, but things that are very specific to space, there may be less parallel domains that they have one specific parallel that would be very useful. I think that, again, I really can't think of any off the top of my head, but I know that that would be a really good thing to study. Again, something I'd love to do, so thank you. So all right, a related question was from Cynthia Harris. She writes, on comparing to environmental management, any lessons learned, why the good or bad promised her otherwise, from environmental review processes involving multiple agencies, jurisdictional levels, non-governmental stakeholders. So any lessons learned from other areas? Yeah, yeah, again, this is kind of big things that I'm not great at thinking off the top of my head about. But there were a few, not so much the environmental review. Unfortunately, I can't think of any of those, but I'm sure there are some. But I saw more in sort of environmental incentives, things like if there were, one example was there were laws, there was federal legislation passed. Those, as federal legislation tends to be relatively broad about having more incentives for building more environmentally friendly homes. Those got filtered down into the state level, which were again, relatively broad, but then at the sort of the city municipality level, there were directives about different kinds of credits to have, different kinds of things for solar panels, things for more environmentally friendly appliances. And so having, and then getting down to the, getting down to the, I'm sorry, I can't think of the word for the provider, like electricity provider, they had very specific, we have the $100 rebate for this kind of solar panel or things like that that were very specific incentives. I think that was a useful parallel, a useful lesson to be able to show that the utility of the system, being able to have the broad goals at the highest level and then be able to filter them down so that they're useful specifically for the small locality. I hope I answered the question. All right, so last question, and honestly, this is a question we get pretty continually. Anytime we talk about polycentric governance or international law, so if you haven't faced it before, may as well face it now. Sure. Why should anyone care about attempts at polycentric governance when there's most likely going to be bad actors who have, and rogue states align with them, have historically bowed out any effective international governance which went against their interests when they could? In other words, if it's going to be the wild west anyway, why should space actors invest resources into setting up governance as opposed to self-defense? So the common question we always get in international law, there's always gonna be law breakers why I have laws at all. You may as well take it, and I'll also say that this is something that because that we face it so often in talking about international space sustainability, it is ripe for actual further research as a space sustainability fellow. But let's see how you handle that the common question, there's always gonna be bad actors. Sure, I love the nihilism there for sure. But it is, I think potentially more important to care about polycentric polycentricity and differing levels of governance when you're concerned about bad actors and when you're concerned that the international level may fail because then looking at the different levels of governance, you can see kind of where, where if international bodies fail, lower levels of governance might succeed. I sort of think about, my mind always goes to commercial, okay, maybe internationally, actors don't wanna comply with norm set or with test fans, but if there's pressure, enough pressure from an association or from important commercial actors, then maybe it doesn't matter that they don't wanna comply as much, it doesn't matter as much that they don't wanna comply with the international norm because companies on the ground are saying, we're gonna lose a lot of money if you screw this up for us. So I think in that case, polycentric government and different levels may be a good kind of fail-safe, almost. All right, pretty good. I mean, I usually say we write down the law and we create laws even knowing that there's gonna be criminals so that when criminals commit bad actions, we can point, we can all, and we've all agreed this is what the law is. And it's better to have something written down than to have something which is a loose understanding of how people are supposed to behave. All right, so with that, you're off the hook. Your sentence is finished, you've done your work. But I think that your scholarship in this field is something which is going to be useful and referenced in the future. And we hope to see your scholarship in this area continue. And I hope that you've created some fresh ideas for the folks who are tuning in or are gonna be looking at your full report. With that, thank you so much. We're now gonna move on to our next sustainability fellow. I will reshare the screen and make an introduction of Daniel Patton. So Daniel, if you can turn your camera on, welcome. Daniel is an environmental specialist in Huntsville. Originally from Virginia, Daniel worked for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality before starting in his current position. Daniel has a bachelor's in environmental sciences from the University of Virginia and a master's in natural resources from Virginia Tech. So I'm going to give the remote control over to you so you can advance your slides. And with that, Daniel, thank you for your full report which we're going to put a link in the chat. Thank you for the executive summary and the floor is yours. Thanks, Chris. I'm gonna start just by thanking Secure World and Chris especially for facilitating this research. The questions for the fellowship document is here on the right side of the screen. There's a lot of complex questions here and we're not gonna be able to get into a lot of depth in all of these, but we're gonna try to give sort of a high level overview of space as a commons. So we'll talk about what a commons is. And we'll talk about why we're asking these questions. We'll also describe and sort of qualify the space domain and then we'll look at our analogous domains. Some of the same stuff that Claire was talking about, Antarctica, the atmosphere, the oceans. And then we'll do sort of an analysis of the existing space policy and we'll discuss some potential management strategies. Let's see, there we go. So what is a commons? The term commons stems from the tragedy of the commons. This is often attributed to William Foster Lloyd, sort of a metaphor for describing how resources can be depleted by overuse. Basically a commons, a town commons was a shared green space in a town used for the grazing of livestock, not owned by any individual, but shared by the participants. And at a certain point, the number of livestock grazing on that land depletes the resource fast and the grass grows back. And you have this tragedy where there are more livestock on the land than the land can support. And the way this happens is there are individuals who have an incentive to add additional animals because they experience the benefit of that in terms of increased wool production or milk production or sale of those animals. But the costs of the extra animal in terms of resource depletion is shared by all participants equally. So this describes a situation where the benefit is individual, but the cost is shared. So that's what the tragedy of the commons was originally illustrating it. Lloyd used it to sort of describe overpopulation and the risks of that. The idea was sort of expanded by Garrett Hardin to illustrate climate degradation. And he applied it to sort of global commons. The idea that the oceans or the atmosphere is sort of a town commons shared by the whole world. So when we talk about a commons, the economic criteria for a commons are two things. It's a rivalry and non-excludability. We'll get into that in a second. But I do wanna make the distinction here between a commons and common pool resource. A commons is the domain, the space, and the common pool resource is the actual resource within it. So in our classic commons example, the commons is the commons, of course, and the grass or whatever is growing there is the resource. That's the thing that's depleted or excluded. That distinction is important when we talk about this. That line is sort of blurred when we talk about space because in a lot of situations in space, the domain is the resource. There's nothing in Earth orbit that's being consumed by satellites. It's the position. The position is the resource. So that line is sort of blurred, but that's an important distinction that we wanna make sure we're aware of. So the importance of commons determination, proper management of any domain, but especially outer space is critical for the continued use of that domain. And there are risks in the space domain. There's risks of Kessler syndrome. This is the situation where satellites colliding create debris that collides with more satellites that creates more debris. And you get this sort of cascading collision effects such that there's so much debris in orbit it becomes very difficult to launch anything outside of Earth's atmosphere. That's Kessler syndrome. That's one risk. Another risk is resource monopolies. Something that a lot of space actors are talking about now is in situ resource utilization, whether it's on the moon or Mars or even asteroids. The early actors, the early arrivers to the moon or to Mars, they're limited resources there and they could monopolize those resources if they're the first ones there and they're not abundant resources. So that's another risk. So there's risks for this space domain and proper management protects us from those risks. A consistent space utilization policy also protects from spoilage and exploitation of resources and deciding if space is a commons or deciding it's not a commons determines how stakeholders operate within the domain. One of the challenges with space is that states and leaders have expressed contradicting views on whether space is a commons or not. So this consensus is important for how we operate within domain but we don't really have consensus on whether space is a commons. If you work or research in the space economics or space law or space policy world you probably have an opinion on whether space is a commons and I doubt that everybody on this call has the exact same opinion. There's a lot of contradicting views and I wanted to explore why we have those contradicting views. So as I mentioned before, the criteria for commons determination is rivalry and excludability. So when we say something's rivalrous we mean that a resource is finite that it's use or occupation by one person reduces its availability for another person. And excludable, we say commons are non-excludable. If something's excludable means that you can control access or use of that resource. So like a fish stock, that's something that's rivalrous because if I take more fish there's less available for the people and it's not really excludable because you can't just put a wall or net around all the fish in the sea, right? Something like radio stations would be like a non-rivalrous, non-excludable. If I listen to the radio my neighbor doesn't have less availability to that radio station and it's not really excludable and that you can't limit it. I mean, there's ways to limit radio stations I guess if you can encode or encrypt a radio frequency but just a regular radio station we consider that non-excludable. So the traditional understanding of this commons criteria is sort of, these are binary attributes, right? There's excludable and there's non-excludable. There's rivalrous and there's non-rivalrous and something has to fit in one of those four areas. It has to fit in one of those four categories. That's the traditional understanding. Modern researchers sort of understand now that these are not necessarily binary attributes. There's a continuum. There's two things that are both rivalrous. One is probably more rivalrous than the other and the same thing goes for excludability. So one of the first steps in understanding a common determination is to understand rivalry and excludability not as binary attributes but as this continuum and using that we can sort of chart or graph the status of various domains. So we've sort of done that here, radio stations and roads. They're both sort of public goods but radio stations are probably less excludable than a roadway is or you say that fish stocks or the oceans are non-excludable and Antarctica is also maybe non-excludable but it's definitely a more excludable because it's territory and we do that all the time. You see where I'm going with this. These things don't fit in these neat categories. We have sort of a range here which explains why there's so much confusion and so much disagreement about whether something is a commons or not, especially when it comes to space. The fact that there's a range here, different people draw that line for what's low and high excludability or what's low or high rivalry. They draw that line at different places which means that their categories for where things fall are probably different. So that sort of explains why there's a little bit of confusion about this and you see here the rivalry excludability continuum for various terrestrial domains but I want to do the same thing for space domains. One of the things I realized when I'm doing this research is that we talk about space as this uniform domain. Space is one thing. It's really not one thing, it's a collection of things and the various parts of space are used very differently. Something like Earth orbit is very different from celestial bodies in terms of how it's used and its availability, its access and especially in terms of those criteria we were talking about for the commons. You know, the atmosphere or the Earth orbit rather is far less excludable than something like a particular part of the moon. So seeing these differences by dividing space into these subcategories, we see that they differ in terms of their rivalry and excludability not just from terrestrial domains but from each other as well. And as such, we need to consider them separately. Consider whether they're commons each individually not as one uniform domain but as a subdomain. So that's what I did here. I put the space domains in the same rivalry excludability continuum and in doing this we can see pretty clearly that, you know some domains seem to fit in the common pool resource or the commons section pretty well like low earth orbit, geostationary orbit. Other things like the moon might be considered private goods if you're looking at just rivalry and excludability obviously they're not owned and we've agreed that you can't make territorial claims on the moon but it's technically more excludable than low earth orbit. So we put them in different places here and now we see why it's so difficult to regulate and talk about space as a commons. Now it's important to note that just because something is not definitionally a commons economically speaking it doesn't mean it can't be regulated as a commons. We look at Antarctica. Antarctica is excludable to some extent, right? You could defend that territory it could be claimed and defended and we'll get into the Antarctic treaty in a moment but just because something does not fit neatly in that common pool resource category doesn't mean it can't be managed as a commons and that seems to be what has been expressed by various stakeholders. The desire to manage resources based domains as commons whether or not they fall in that category. So I wanna talk about analogous domains. This is a helpful framework for how we talk about space domains and help shaping policy. One, Antarctica, we just talked about that. Notably the Antarctic treaty doesn't require nations to renounce their previously asserted rights or claims although it does require them to act as those as though those claims don't exist it requires certain technology and information sharing and but it does require that states can't make additional claims or expand claims. Antarctica is sort of this strange thing that we call a commons and manages a commons but like I said doesn't sort of fit neatly in that category like some other domains do. The oceans, it's another classic commons we've talked about this is probably the longest history of commons management as the ocean and there's a long list of agreements including the LLC that was mentioned previously I think in one of the questions but that's not exhaustive at all. Of course, there's things like fisheries agreements fish stocks agreement, the international convention on the regulation of whaling things like this. There's a whole list of oceans management agreements on the international level and of course on the national and local level as well. One of the interesting things about the ocean domain is that there are different resource use categories. There's biological resources like fish and whales and seaweed. There's territorial resources, there's coastal waters and then of course there's like the energy and mining resources, oil, deep sea bed minerals and metals, those types of things. And interestingly, those are managed separately. They're not all managed under one agreement. They're managed with separate agreements. We have fisheries agreements and we have the law of the sea. We have the international sea bed regime that we'll talk about in a moment which is something important to keep in mind when we talk about space domains, the ability or the opportunity to manage different categories of resource use separately. I wanted to mention especially the international sea bed authority which was formed parallel to the convention on the law of the sea. The ISA works with private and state sponsored mining organizations to distribute both technology resources and mining sites to assure equitable access to deep sea bed mineral resources. This is a really interesting way to approach this domain and there's possibilities of applying a similar strategy to in situ resource utilization on celestial bodies like the moon or Mars. The atmosphere is the third category that I talked about in the paper. Obviously atmospheric regulation is primarily focused on pollution but similar to the ocean domain, there's not just a single agreement. There are multiple agreements targeted at specific pollutants. There's a couple listed here that create the Kyoto protocol, Paris agreement, Montreal protocol. Montreal protocol specifically targets CFCs and it's been broadly successful. The ozone layer researchers estimate it could return to pre-1980 levels by 2050. I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that that level of success might not have been achieved if this was lumped in with other pollutants like greenhouse gases. There's an advantage to managing sections of a domain individually, whether it's resources, pollutants or subsections of those domains. So I wanna talk about some of the existing existing space policy. Of course the main one is the outer space treaty. Here's a couple sections of the treaty mentioned here and these are just a couple that I pulled out that seem to reinforce this common status. The exploration for the shall be for the province of all mankind, right? The outer space will be free for exploration by use of all states, not subject to national appropriation similar to Antarctica like we talked about astronauts on voice of mankind. These types of boards, they seem to reinforce this perspective of space as a commons. Although it doesn't ever really come out and say space is a commons in those exact words. There's a whole collection of other agreements. The rescue agreement liability convention and registration convention are probably the three main ones. Rescue agreement protects space flight crews by committing to rescue and warning of hazards. Wide building conventions, nations are liable for damages caused by their spacecrafts. Registration convention is designed to track positions and purposes of space objects. Important to note is that while we have these agreements they're not necessarily universally successful. The cosmos 954 accident in 1977 saw the failure of four tons of your reconnaissance satellite. The nuclear reactor core was destroyed in this failure and scattered nuclear debris across Northern Canada. The Canadian government spent I think over $6 million cleaning up this debris and under liability convention then the Soviet Union would have been responsible for reimbursing that cost. I think less than half of that amount was ever reimbursed. So while we have these agreements they're not universally successful in managing the domain even when they are targeted at something like liability specifically. Two other agreements or declarations that I wanted to mention the moon agreement. Moon agreement is one that's been sort of less successful than some of these other agreements with only 11 signatories. The moon agreement sort of applies a structure for operating on the moon but has had less adoption. One reason for that might be the last sentence of this quote here. All space vehicles, equipment, facilities, stations and installations on the moon shall be open to other states parties. Many saw that as sort of a step too far especially considering how valuable and closely held some of the space technology is and allowing access to other states parties was seen by some as sort of an overreach. Bogota Declaration, this is I think seven equatorial countries got together and declared that these segments of geostationary orbit above the territory were part of that country's national sovereignty. Of course, this was rejected by most non-equatorial countries, if it wasn't then they wouldn't really be able to operate in that domain. And that also sort of reinforces that common's perspective. If we saw geostationary orbit as a private good then there would be national sovereignty. You could claim national sovereignty but it seems that actors do not want to agree to that. So we've talked about some of the existing space management mechanisms, some of these treaties and policies. We can now analyze them. Eleanor Ostrom, who Claire mentioned in her presentation in her book governing the common she identifies eight sign principles for effective commons management. She looked at commons all around the world and pulled out these eight design principles to the things that are required for successful management of a domain. Stuff like clearly defined boundaries, monitoring of the situation, graduated sanctions, conflict resolution mechanisms, nested enterprises, that sort of gets that polycentricity thing that Claire was talking about there. So using Ostrom's institutional analysis we can apply this to the space domains and evaluate these subdomains of space. We can evaluate earth orbit, celestial bodies and interplanetary space. We can evaluate them based on this institutional analysis to see how they perform or how they're likely to perform in a more crowded space economy. So that's what I've done here and this is explained in more depth in the actual paper but some of the takeaways from this are that earth orbit is a pretty fragile performance in terms of this institutional analysis. Celestial bodies and interplanetary space are even worse. They're likely to fail based on these criteria that Ostrom has presented. The main gaps are sanctions, conflict resolution mechanisms and nested units. There's the main gaps and celestial bodies are probably at the highest risk here of resource failure. That's because while interplanetary space and celestial bodies are both likely to fail the demand and potential use of celestial bodies and the limited access to them means they're much more likely to fail. They're gonna experience more traffic, more activity than something like interplanetary space which is far vaster and less competitive in that sense. So potential management strategies first thing a potential strategy would be to address the common pool resources separately as is done with the oceans and the atmosphere. There are separate policies for space domains the liability convention, registration convention but they work on the space domain as a whole. They don't work on specific sections whether it's celestial bodies or earth orbit or interplanetary space. The next is to institute graduated sanctions, conflict resolution mechanisms and nested units. If the goal is for a more robust performance then these have been identified as the gaps in that performance and opportunities for additional policy management. The third is examine existing terrestrial policy and use that to shape similar outer space management, outer space resource management. We talked about this deep sea bed mineral management and how that might be applied to a resource utilization outer space using these terrestrial policies that are working at least to some extent on earth they can be used to shape space policy. Now that's not to say that we can copy these things over obviously space is a unique domain. There are unique challenges in terms of access, in terms of resource types, in terms of the use of space for economic and research purposes. Space is not exactly like the moon or spaces rather is not exactly like the oceans or the atmosphere, it's unique. And therefore any sort of terrestrial policy has to be shaped and changed to fit the space domain. And the last thing is we can explore novel governance concepts. There's a lot of great research here. I mentioned some of it in the paper. I'm not gonna get into a lot of it here. But novel governance is there's an opportunity there to look at new governance concepts as a way to implement those into space management. So in conclusion, we see that space, it's not uniform, right? We have these sub-domains that are not all identical. And while some are definitionally of commons by economic criteria, others are not. And if they are not, they still may be managed as a commons if stakeholders express a desire and agree to treat them as a commons. They can be managed as a commons whether they meet those exact criteria or not. Current management strategies, they don't appear to be robust enough to withstand the expected changes in the use of outer space and the space economy. That's what that institutional analysis from Ostrom shows us. But terrestrial domains, they can be a helpful guide but for shaping commons management. Although not without changes and evolution of those strategies to make them fit into the unique attributes of the space domain. So with that, I'll hand it back to Chris and we'll open it to some questions, I think. All right, thank you so much. I'm gonna first go back to one of your slides, this one about space domain continuum because I wanna have a concrete answer on this. Let's say you hear it asserted that space is a commons or that space is not a commons. What is your response if you were at a symposia or some type of diplomatic conference and someone says, well, we all agree that space is not a commons. And you wanna give a nuanced informed factual response to that, what is your response to be concrete and clear here? Yeah, well, if we say space is not a commons, I think we can, while not maybe dismiss that view, we can see that evidence clearly says that certain parts of space are definitionally commons. They are non-excludable and they are rivalrous. They meet those categories. So yes, space is a commons whether you think it is or not, but other parts of space are not. To say all of space is a commons, that might be a step too far. That might be saying too much. It can be true, we can manage all of space as a commons if we agree on that, but that agreement doesn't appear to be present right now. And if it does become present, then there are additional policies that need to be changed and shaped in order to effectively manage them as such. What areas of space are not commons? Well, you might say, you can make the argument that the moon is not a commons. If you're looking at just this rivalry, excludability, continuum, or these categories, the moon, technically excludable, you could put something, some sort of, you could take a section of the moon and say, this is mine, you could put a fence around it and defend it as sovereign territory feasibly, although we've agreed not to do that, right? You could, economically speaking, it could be claimed as sovereign territory. It's not impossible to do that. So in that sense, the moon or Mars or an asteroid, you could say that it doesn't meet those criteria exactly. So that's sort of where I go with that. Something like interplanetary space, some people might say that's not a commons because it's not really rival rest. If I'm in one section of interplanetary space, there's plenty of other interplanetary space for someone else to occupy. People might make that argument, but there are certain parts that you really can't say, it's not rival rest or it's excludable, low earth orbit, geostationary orbit, that really fits in that category pretty well. And there's others, there can be some disagreement there. So that's how I'd answer that. All right, great, I'm gonna stop sharing, but I have a couple more questions on that. First is, the analysis that you've done, is this a legal analysis? Is this an economics or social sciences analysis? Is this a political analysis? Like what type of, how would you characterize this research and discussions about space as a commons? Yeah, I think that's a great point. And I get into this a little more in the actual paper, but when we talk about what's the commons, we have to say, well, what kind of commons are we talking about? Economic commons is what I mostly addressed in this presentation, but when we talk about illegal commons, that's sort of a different question. Or political commons, the criteria for those are slightly different. We focus mostly on economic commons in this paper because it's probably the easiest to define, but that's another reason why there's a lot of confusion over this question is because we're using different operational definitions of commons when we talk about it. All right, and I see a whole bunch of really interesting questions, but first I wanna ask, let's see here. So if the economic analysis is a space of the commons, then why do people's opinions on this matter? If it like is the, why are you, in other words, are we having a debate about the facts or a philosophical debate about how to govern these domains? I expect it's both. I imagine there are some who would say that no spaces are commons because there are motivations to not manage it as such. They're the earliest people, earliest groups to access a domain, whether it fits in that commons category or not, have an advantage in terms of the use of that resource. So there are certainly motivations to describe spaces as not a commons. So to one extent there is some conversation about the facts here, but there's also a lot about policy. Once we establish these facts, there's still this whole other discussion about how we manage it and what we want policy to look like. All right, thank you. I mean, and that idea about whether we're having an economics discussion or a social science discussion or a legal discussion, that's where I have a differing view about what the law says and what the law doesn't say and whether it comes to a conclusion or whether it's silent. And I should make it clear, I'm only speaking on behalf of my personal capacity, not an organization, you are not speaking on behalf of any organization. This is only your scholarship and your finding meant to be impartial. So let's see, I'm trying to look at those questions that we have and see, is there any order that they could be structured? But I was immediately interested in this question from a kill regarding nested units. Would that be the first one? Actually, no, I think I want to go to Sean's question. A lot of good questions today, Sean. What are your thoughts, if any, on space being declared a commons for a limited time, such as 50 years? I suspect part of the hesitance with the idea of a commons is how much things could change long-term. Any responses? Yeah, I mean, that's certainly a policy and it's probably better than nothing in terms of coming to an agreement. You know, one of the things we see in commons management in terrestrial domains is that they're not static. There are always changes to these policies. You look at the atmosphere for the ocean. The ocean has this long history of management and some of it's very recent, some of it it's not. And, you know, you can do things temporarily, but I expect either way, the way we manage space is going to change. That would sort of be my prediction. Does that answer that question? I believe so. All right. If not, Sean, submit another question or send us something offline. There's two questions about nested units. The first one is from Professor Rao. Regarding nested units, do you have a sense from the literature of what an appropriate or useful nesting would be for orbital space? Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing, there are sort of nested units and how we talk about these sub-domains, right? You know, we have space as one domain and then we can manage these earth orbit and, you know, interplanetary space and celestial bodies as, you know, we can have that sort of nested units, but there's also in terms of use, you know, you can talk about, you can have nested units for the application of space, you know, research or economic or defense. You know, there's lots of different ways to do it. I didn't focus a lot on the literature for how things are nested. That's a whole other discussion and there's a lot to dig into there. I didn't get into a lot of that, but there's certainly lots of different ways to do it. Okay, further question on nested units. It was from Marie Frank. How exactly did you come to the conclusion that the design principle of nested enterprises is not met in the earth orbits? Not sure I understand that question. So you can't see, how exactly did you come to the conclusion that the design principle of nested enterprises is not met? So I was looking at both what's in the actual, what's in the language of space agreements, but also in how they have been, how effective those have been. So, you know, I sort of looked at both of those. You know, this was sort of the way I scored this. It was, you know, sort of just me looking at this. You know, obviously we, you know, worked with some of the folks at Secure World as well, but you know, this is sort of my analysis. I would welcome any evidence to oppose or correct some of my judgments there on that. You know, I'm just looking at what the policy says and how it seems to operate. But it's possible that, you know, I categorize something as weak in it. It's stronger than I'm saying it is. So I certainly wouldn't say that my determination on any of those design principles is definitive. Okay. In the Q and A, have a look at the last question also by Marie Frank, kind of a longer detailed question that you might have to think about for a little bit. What is the difference between a commons and a CPR according to Ostrom? And yeah, go ahead and read it. Okay. Yeah. What's the difference between a commons and a comical resource according to Ostrom? In your paper, you write global commons are commons containing CPRs, Ostrom defined CPR as resource system. Emphasis is on system. This system provides resource units. How would you apply this to low earth orbit? Okay. This is a great question. And I like where this is going. A lot of my discussion between or distinction between CPRs, comical resources and commons is a simplification of this process. There's a lot of like Ostrom defines it as a system as a resource system. Others might define a comical resources, just the resource within the comments. I'm trying to sort of simplify it here. I'm not just mapping Ostrom's definition. That being said, there can be some confusion, which is why I made that distinction in the paper. But if we're using Ostrom's definition of a CPR, then we would need to look at low earth orbit slightly differently, I think. All right. And up at the top, this question by Matt, which stakeholders are you referring to that are in favor of a global commons approach? You might need to ask Claire, not one also. Yeah, Claire, you want to come back to this question for me? Well, so I would say they're definitely certain. Like when we look at the outer space treaty or the moon agreement or, there seems to be language and existing policy that supports the commonest designation. Although, as I said before, it doesn't come out and say it exactly. There are statements from various agencies that seem to support this. There is not a lot of, like very clear language that says this is a commons or this is not. You know, there's a few things. I think there was a statement for a declaration from President Trump a couple of years ago that said space is not a commons. Use that language exactly. It seemed to contradict some language from the Obama administration. And I think there are some various other states have made comments that seem to support or seem not to support. So it's not exactly clear. I hope that answers that question. All right, I'm going to take this last question from Caroline Wittenberg. If you take a look at that, how can a legal framework either internationally or nationally work in potential management strategies? That she then asks, how can a legal framework be incorporated in either space as a commons or not? So any responses to that? I don't know. This, the legal framework section, this probably falls beyond the scope of the research here. Chris, this probably falls more squarely in your territory in terms of your expertise. Certainly, we talk about policy centricity for this. There's international and national, there's things work in partnership, not necessarily we have to address it one or the other. How can a legal framework be incorporated in either space as a commons or not? I guess that comes down to how you shape policy. There's a lot of scholarship on that. I think something I just barely dip my toes into in this research is some of the institutional grammar and how we shape policy in that way. I think that can be a helpful tool as well. Okay. All right, I said last question, but then I saw this one from Alfonso, which is also very good. So I have to ask you, would self-regulation be compatible with the management of other celestial bodies as a commons? So self-regulation. I guess that depends on who you ask. Some people would say self-management is the way to go. And it seems that that's less successful based on history and self-management generally doesn't work when there are competing motivations. That's the whole reason why the tragedy of the commons exists because the benefit is experienced by the individual, but the cost is shared by all of the users. Self-regulation, users are incentivized to act in their own interest. That's the basis for the tragedy of the commons. So self-regulation, there's times it has worked and but for something as broad as space, I think generally that's seen as less successful. I don't know, Christy, anything to add there? Well, I mean, it made me think of this slide that you had about institutional performance. And so you're looking at these, on the right-hand side, institutional performance, either fragile or likely to fail. Although it's kind of tied to what you were just talking about, although as you look across those rows, conflict resolution mechanisms, graduated sanctions, you have a very dim view of whether there'll be sustainability and rule of law and governance of some of these common places like celestial bodies. So it kind of ties it to that. Is that tied to why you think self-regulation made, bodes ill? Yeah, I mean, that's part of it. I think we can also just look at the existing domain management, commons domains on earth as sort of, we can look at history and how self-regulation has worked in those. I can't see the future. And you say it's a bit of a dim view here. I think that's probably true. I'm probably taking, this is not beyond criticism, but I think history can indicate the likelihood of the success of self-regulation. All right, thank you so much, Daniel. We really put you through the ringer with these questions. I was a lightning round of very challenging stuff. I'm thankful for all the attendees who put in those questions. We didn't get to all of them, but listen, this is just the beginning of a conversation or the continuing conversation that's been going on for decades. We hope that, since you called in and all those folks who are attendees, you care about these concepts, you care about these issues. We encourage you and your institutions and your home organizations to continue on with these discussions. We hope that our report and the executive summary and the scholarship from Daniel and Claire have contributed to the discourse and brought to the fore some things which are often too all too often alluded to or there's assumptions about or conclusory opinions without much deeper thought. So we wanted to contribute to some of that deeper thought and we hope that and we're certain that these conversations are going to continue in the future. You have our reports to download, you have the slides to find this video recording is going to be placed on likely YouTube and maybe YouTube and also our website. So that's gonna be it for this year's fellowship. I want to mention two things. First, brief plug for our summit for space sustainability this summer in New York, June 13 and 14, you can learn more at SWFsummit.org where we're going to be having related discussions. And I hope that the work that we have done in the sustainability fellows will contribute and form some of the discussions that we're going to have there. And this research that we're doing at Secure World on these persistent underlying questions in space sustainability is going to continue. This was the first cohort of sustainability fellows, Daniel and Claire with the questions that we posed to them. In 2023, we are going to continue to work on these underlying questions. Likely it is going to focus on what is happening at the UN with the discussions on responsible behavior in space and therefore irresponsible behavior. The anti-satellite, anti-ASET work and bans and prohibitions and unilateral declarations being made, looking at how to foster that and how if we can do research which informs those debates and those discussions and deliberations. If there are persistent assumptions that happen in those debates about unilateral declarations or the worth of unilateral declarations, et cetera, et cetera. What can we as civil society, as one actor in civil society, contribute to those discussions and make them worthwhile? So stay tuned for what we're going to do, continue to do here at Secure World. Find those reports. I hope our scholarship has been useful and the footnotes to it also will lead you in other directions. And we look forward to further scholarship from Daniel and Claire and from many of the attendees that have joined us. So with that, I'm going to thank everyone for attending and end this meeting. Thank you so much everyone and I'll see you in the future.