Commons

The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately.

Definition and modern use

The definition from the Digital Library of the Commons is; "the commons is a general term for shared resources in which each stakeholder has an equal interest".[1]

The term "commons" derives from the traditional English legal term for common land, which are also known as "commons", and was popularised in the modern sense as a shared resource term by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in an influential 1968 article called The Tragedy of the Commons. As Frank van Laerhoven and Elinor Ostrom have stated; "Prior to the publication of Hardin’s article on the tragedy of the commons (1968), titles containing the words ‘the commons,’ ‘common pool resources,’ or ‘common property’ were very rare in the academic literature".[2]

Some texts make a distinction in usage between common ownership of the commons and collective ownership among a group of colleagues, such as in a producers' cooperative. The precision of this distinction is not always maintained.

Types of commons

Environmental

The examples below illustrate types of environmental commons.

European land use

Originally in medieval England the common was an integral part of the manor, and was thus legally part of the estate in land owned by the lord of the manor, but over which certain classes of manorial tenants and others held certain rights. By extension, the term "commons" has come to be applied to other resources which a community has rights or access to. The older texts use the word "common" to denote any such right, but more modern usage is to refer to particular rights of common, and to reserve the name "common" for the land over which the rights are exercised. A person who has a right in, or over, common land jointly with another or others is called a commoner.[3]

In middle Europe, commons (relatively small-scale agriculture in, especially, southern Germany, Austria, and the alpine countries) were kept, in some parts, till the present.[4] Some studies have compared the German and English dealings with the commons between late medieval times and the agrarian reforms of the 18th and 19th centuries. The UK was quite radical in doing away with and enclosing former commons, while southwestern Germany (and the alpine countries as e.g. Switzerland) had the most advanced commons structures, and were more inclined to keep them. The Lower Rhine region took an intermediate position.[5] However, the UK and the former dominions have till today a large amount of Crown land which often is used for community or conservation purposes.

Mongolian grasslands

Based on a research project by the Environmental and Cultural Conservation in Inner Asia (ECCIA) from 1992 to 1995, satellite images were used to compare the amount of land degradation due to livestock grazing in the regions of Mongolia, Russia, and China.[6] In Mongolia, where shepherds were permitted to move collectively between seasonal grazing pastures, degradation remained relatively low at approximately 9%. Comparatively, Russia and China, which mandated state-owned pastures involving immobile settlements and in some cases privatization by household, had much higher degradation, at around 75% and 33% respectively.[7] A collaborative effort on the part of Mongolians proved much more efficient in preserving grazing land.

Lobster fishery of Maine

Widespread success of the Maine lobster industry is often attributed to the willingness of Maine’s lobstermen to uphold and support lobster conservation rules. These rules include harbor territories not recognized by the state, informal trap limits, and laws imposed by the state of Maine (which are largely influenced by lobbying from lobster industry itself).[8] Essentially, the lobstermen collaborate without much government intervention to sustain their common-pool resource.

Community forests in Nepal

In the late 1980s, Nepal chose to decentralize government control over forests. Community forest programs work by giving local areas a financial stake in nearby woodlands, and thereby increasing the incentive to protect them from overuse. Local institutions regulate harvesting and selling of timber and land, and must use any profit towards community development and preservation of the forests. In twenty years, locals have noticed a visible increase in the number of trees. Community forestry also contributes to community development in rural areas – for instance school construction, irrigation and drinking water channel construction, and road construction. Community forestry has proven conducive to democratic practices at grass roots level.[9]

Irrigation systems of New Mexico

Acequia is a method of collective responsibility and management for irrigation systems in desert areas. In New Mexico, a community-run organization known as Acequia Associations supervises water in terms of diversion, distribution, utilization, and recycling, in order to reinforce agricultural traditions and preserve water as a common resource for future generations.[10]

Cultural and intellectual commons

Today, the commons are also understood within a cultural sphere. These commons include literature, music, arts, design, film, video, television, radio, information, software and sites of heritage. Wikipedia is an example of the production and maintenance of common goods by a contributor community in the form of encyclopedic knowledge that can be freely accessed by anyone without a central authority.[11]

Tragedy of the commons in the Wiki-Commons is avoided by community control by individual authors within the Wikipedia community.[12]

The information commons may help protect users of commons. Companies that pollute the environment release information about what they are doing. The Corporate Toxics Information Project[13] and information like the Toxic 100, a list of the top 100 polluters,[14] helps people know what these corporations are doing to the environment.

Digital commons

Mayo Fuster Morell proposed a definition of digital commons as "information and knowledge resources that are collectively created and owned or shared between or among a community and that tend to be non-exclusive, that is, be (generally freely) available to third parties. Thus, they are oriented to favor use and reuse, rather than to exchange as a commodity. Additionally, the community of people building them can intervene in the governing of their interaction processes and of their shared resources".[15][16]

Examples of digital commons are Wikipedia, a type of Free Software and Open-source hardware projects.

Economic theories

Tragedy of the commons

A commons failure theory, now called tragedy of the commons, originated in the 18th century.[4] In 1833 William Forster Lloyd introduced the concept by a hypothetical example of herders overusing a shared parcel of land on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze, to the detriment of all users of the common land.[17] The same concept has been called the "tragedy of the fishers", when over-fishing could cause stocks to plummet.[18]

It has been said the dissolution of the traditional land commons played a watershed role in landscape development and cooperative land use patterns and property rights.[19] However, as in the British Isles, such changes took place over several centuries as a result of land enclosure.

Economist Peter Barnes has proposed a 'sky trust' to fix this tragedic problem in worldwide generic commons. He claims that the sky belongs to all the people, and companies do not have a right to over pollute. It is a type of cap and dividend program. Ultimately the goal would be to make polluting excessively more expensive than cleaning what is being put into the atmosphere.[20]

Successful commons

While the original work on the tragedy of the commons concept suggested that all commons were doomed to failure, they remain important in the modern world. Work by later economists has found many examples of successful commons, and Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel prize for analysing situations where they operate successfully.[21][22][22] For example, Ostrom found that grazing commons in the Swiss Alps have been run successfully for many hundreds of years by the farmers there.[23]

Allied to this is the "comedy of the commons" concept, where users of the commons are able to develop mechanisms to police their use to maintain, and possibly improve, the state of the commons.[24] This term was coined in an essay by legal scholar, Carol M. Rose, in 1986.[24][21][25]

Other related concepts are the inverse commons, cornucopia of the commons, and triumph of the commons.[26][27] It is argued that some types of commons, such as open-source software, work better in the cornucopia of the commons; proponents say that, in those cases, "the grass grows taller when it is grazed on".[28]

Notable theorists

Historical land commons movements

Contemporary commons movements

See also

Further reading

References

Notes

  1. ↑ Digital library of the commons – Indiana University, retrieved 02/01/16
  2. ↑ Traditions and Trends in the Study of the Commons Frank van Laerhoven & Elinor Ostrom International Journal of the Commons Vol 1, no 1 October 2007, pp. 3-28
  3. ↑ Anon. "Commoner". Farlex Inc. Retrieved 20 April 2012.
  4. 1 2 Radkau 2008, p. 90, ff in the German text
  5. ↑ Hartmut Zückert: Allmende und Allmendaufhebung. Vergleichende Studien zum Spätmittelalter bis zu den Agrarreformen des 18./19. Jahrhunderts (= Quellen und Forschungen zur Agrargeschichte; Bd. 47), Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius 2003, IX + 462 S., 4 Farb-Abb., ISBN 978-3-8282-0226-9 review (in German)
  6. ↑ Sneath, David. "State Policy and Pasture Degradation in Inner Asia". Science Magazine. Retrieved 11 May 2011.
  7. ↑ Ostrom, Elinor. "Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges". Science Magazine. Retrieved 11 May 2011.
  8. ↑ Acheson, James (2004). Capturing the Commons: Devising Institutions to Manage the Maine Lobster. University Press of New England. ISBN 9781584653936.
  9. ↑ Mehta, Trupti Parekh. "Community Forestry in India and Nepal". PERC Reports.
  10. ↑ Davidson-Harden, Adam. "Local Control and Management of Our Water Commons: Stories of Rising to the Challenge" (PDF). www.ourwatercommons.org. Retrieved 11 May 2011.
  11. ↑ Huberman, Bernardo A. and Romero, Daniel M. and Wu, Fang, Crowdsourcing, Attention and Productivity (September 12, 2008). doi:10.2139/ssrn.1266996
  12. ↑ Avoiding Tragedy in the Wiki-Commons, by Andrew George, 12 Va. J.L. & Tech. 8 (2007)
  13. ↑ "Corporate Toxics Information Project". Political Economy Research Institute. PERI-Umass.
  14. ↑ Ash, Michael. "Justice in the Air" (PDF). PERI. PERI- Umass.
  15. ↑ Fuster Morell, M. (2010, p. 5). Dissertation: Governance of online creation communities: Provision of infrastructure for the building of digital commons. http://www.onlinecreation.info/?page_id=338
  16. ↑ Berry, David (21 February 2005). "The commons". Free Software Magazine.
  17. ↑ Lloyd, William Forster (1833). Two Lectures on Population. JSTOR 1972412.
  18. ↑ Samuel Bowles: Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution, Princeton University Press, pp. 27–29 (2004) ISBN 0-691-09163-3
  19. ↑ The end of the commons as a watershed' The Age of Ecology, Joachim Radkau, John Wiley & Sons, 3 April 2014, p. 15 ff
  20. ↑ Barnes, Peter (2000). Pie in the Sky. Washington D.C: Corporation for Enterprise Development. p. 1. ISBN 1-883187-32-X.
  21. 1 2 Rifkin, Jeremy. "10 – Comedy of the Commons". The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative. Retrieved 2 February 2016.
  22. 1 2 Governing the Commons- The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action Elinor Ostrom Published: October 2015 ISBN 9781107569782
  23. ↑ NPR: Remembering Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Laureate Updated June 13, 201211:08 AM ET Published June 12, 20125:37 PM ET
  24. 1 2 Rose, Carol M. (1986). "The Comedy of the Commons: Commerce, Custom, and Inherently Public Property". Faculty Scholarship Series. Yale Law School: Paper 1828. Retrieved December 28, 2011.
  25. ↑ The Drama of the Commons By Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change, National Research Council, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, Board on Environmental Change and Society
  26. ↑ Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth By David Bollier
  27. ↑ Cox, Susan Jane Buck. (1985). "No tragedy on the Commons," Journal of Environmental Ethics 7 (Spring).
  28. ↑ The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an … By Eric Raymond
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