Reclaiming the Windy Commons: Landownership, Wind Rights, and the Assetization of Renewable Resources

The ‘second phase’ of the energy transition involves large-scale rollout renewables, raising wider questions about arrangements for management and ownership such resources how costs benefits should be distributed. Ideas practices as ‘community energy’ ‘prosumption’ capture potential more decentralised systems control inherent in renewable technologies. However, until now, key biophysical (e.g., wind, wave, solar, geothermal) underpinning have received surprisingly little attention, given wealth creation issues justice that underpin their use. This paper explores this issue using idea ‘wind rights’, which highlights numerous social actors who rights or claims to use benefit from wind resources. Key among these are landowners silently enclosing ‘windy commons’ extract rents’ monopoly property rights. has profound (but undertheorised) distributive structural ramifications transition. Despite this, with some recent notable exceptions, much research science humanities portrays taken-for-granted, apolitical, sometimes marginal (ised) stakeholders. Combining a Marxist, class-based approach landownership rent Ostromian institutional analysis, reviews expands (predominantly legal) literature on deepens understanding concept highlighting many instances de facto privatised/enclosed via ‘proxy rights’ landowners. We also indicate alternative configurations, including nationally commonly managed analysis leads consideration long-term socially orientated arrangements, community nationalisation resource. These could play role securing just widely supported