The commons is the culture and nature 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 even when owned privately or publicly. Commons can also be understood as natural resources that groups of people (communities, user groups) manage for individual and collective benefit.[Classical theory based on Elinor Ostrom's book ]
Definition and modern use
The Digital Library of the Commons defines "commons" as "a general term for shared resources in which each stakeholder has an equal interest".
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."
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 use of "commons" for natural resources has its roots in European intellectual history, where it referred to shared agricultural fields, grazing lands and forests that were, over a period of several hundred years, enclosed, claimed as private property for private use. In European political texts, the common wealth was the totality of the material riches of the world, such as the air, the water, the soil and the seed, all nature's bounty regarded as the inheritance of humanity as a whole, to be shared together. In this context, one may go back further, to the Roman legal category res communis, applied to things common to all to be used and enjoyed by everyone, as opposed to res publica, applied to public property managed by the government.
Economic theories
Tragedy of the commons
A commons failure theory, now called tragedy of the commons, originated in the 18th century.
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.
The same concept has been called the "tragedy of the fishers", when over-fishing could cause stocks to plummet.
[Samuel Bowles, Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution, Princeton University Press, pp. 27–29 (2004) ] Forster's pamphlet was little known, and it wasn't until 1968, with the publication by the ecologist
Garrett Hardin of the article "The Tragedy of the Commons",
[Hardin, G. (1968). "The tragedy of the commons". Science, 162 (3859), 1243-1248.] that the term gained relevance. Hardin introduced this tragedy as a social dilemma, and aimed at exposing the inevitability of failure that he saw in the commons.
However, Hardin's (1968) argument has been widely criticized,
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.[The end of the commons as a watershed' The Age of Ecology, Joachim Radkau, John Wiley & Sons, 3 April 2014, p. 15 ff] 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.
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.
For example, Ostrom found that grazing commons in the
Swiss Alps have been run successfully for many hundreds of years by the farmers there.
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. This term was coined in an essay by legal scholar, Carol M. Rose, in 1986.[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]
Types
Environmental resource
European land use
Originally in medieval England the common was an integral part of the
Manorialism, 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.
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.[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., review (in German)] 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.
Global commons
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
by a contributor community in the form of encyclopedic knowledge that can be freely accessed by anyone without a central authority.
Tragedy of the commons in the Wiki-Commons is avoided by community control by individual authors within the Wikipedia community.["Avoiding Tragedy in the Wiki-Commons", by Andrew George, 12 Va. J.L. & Tech. 8 (2007)]
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
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."
Examples of digital commons are Wikipedia, free software and open-source hardware projects.
Following the narrative of post-growth, the digital commons can present a model of progress that guide commoners to build counter-power in the economic and political field.
Urban commons
Urban commons present the opportunity for the citizens to gain power upon the management of the urban resources and reframe city-life costs based on their use value and maintenance costs, rather than the market-driven value.
[Dellenbaugh-Losse, M. (2017). " What makes urban commons different from other commons?" Urban Policy. Retrieved December 28, 2017] in Athens as urban commons]]
Urban commons situates citizens as key players rather than public authorities, private markets and technologies.
[ Sharing Cities: activating the Urban Commons . (2017). Mountain View: Shareable. Retrieved December 28, 2017] David Harvey (2012) defines the distinction between public spaces and urban commons. He highlights that the former is not to be equated automatically with urban commons. Public spaces and goods in the city make a commons when part of the citizens take political action.
Syntagma Square in Athens,
Tahrir Square in Cairo, Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv, and the Plaza de Catalunya in Barcelona were public spaces that transformed to an urban commons as people protested there to support their political statements. Streets are public spaces that have often become an urban commons by social action and revolutionary protests.
[Harvey, D. (2013). " Rebel cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution". London: Verso] Urban commons are operating in the cities in a complementary way with the state and the market. Some examples are community gardening, urban farms on the rooftops and cultural spaces.
[C. Iaione. " The city as a commons" (personal communication, November 9, 2016) Blog] Participatory studies of commons and infrastructures under the conditions of the 2008 financial crisis have emerged.
[Dalakoglou, D. (2016). " Infrastructural Gap: Commons, State and Anthropology". City vol. 6 (2)]
Society and culture
Feminist perspectives
Silvia Federici articulates a feminist perspective of the commons in her essay "Feminism and the Politics of the Commons".
Since the language around the commons has been largely appropriated by the
World Bank as it sought to re-brand itself "the environmental guardian of the planet", she argues that it is important to adopt a commons discourse that actively resists this re-branding.
[Federici, S. (2012). " Feminism and the Politics of the Commons" In The Wealth of the Commons. Retrieved April 25, 2020] Secondly, articulations of the commons, although historically present and multiple have struggled to come together as a unified front. For the latter to happen she argues that a "commoning" or "commons" movement that is effectively able to resist capitalist forms of organizing labour and our livelihoods must look to women to take the lead in organizing the collectivization of our daily lives and the means of production.
Women have traditionally been at the forefront of struggles for commoning "as primary subjects of reproductive work". This proximity and dependence on communal natural resources has made women the most vulnerable by their privatization, and made them their most staunch defendants. Examples include: subsistence agriculture, credit associations such as tontine (money commons) and collectivizing reproductive labor.
Commoning as a process
Scholars such as
David Harvey have adopted the term
commoning, which as a verb serves to emphasize an understanding of the commons as a process and a practice rather than as "a particular kind of thing"
or static entity. Some authors
distinguish between the resources shared (the
common-pool resources), the
community who governs it, and
commoning, that is, the process of coming together to manage such resources. Commoning thus adds another dimension to the commons, acknowledging the social practices entailed in the process of establishing and governing a commons.
These practices entail, for the community of commoners, the creation of a new way of living and acting together,
[Euler, J. & Gauditz, L. (23 February 2017). "Commoning: a different way of living and acting together". Degrowth.info] thus involving a collective psychological shift: it also entails a process of subjectivization, where the commoners produce themselves as common subjects.
Contemporary commons movements
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Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa
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The Bhumi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee in India
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Electronic Frontier Foundation
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The EZLN in Mexico
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Fanmi Lavalas in Haiti
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Geolibertarianism primarily in the United States
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The Homeless Workers' Movement in Brazil
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The Land is Ours in the UK
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The Landless Workers' Movement in Brazil
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Movement for Justice en el Barrio in the United States of America
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Narmada Bachao Andolan in India
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Take Back the Land in the US
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Cosmopolitan localism or cosmolocalism
Notable theorists
Examples
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.
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.
A collaborative effort on the part of Mongolians proved much more efficient in preserving grazing land.
Lobster fishery of Maine, United States
The 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).
The case of Maine lobster fisheries reflects how a group was able to restrain access to a resource from outsiders, while regulating the communal use in an effective manner. This has allowed the local communities to reap the benefits of the rewards of their restrain for decades.
[Berkes, F. et al. 1989. The Benefits of the Commons. Nature, vol. 340: 91–93.] Essentially, the local lobster fishers collaborate without much government intervention to sustain their common-pool resource.
Irrigation systems of New Mexico, United States
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.
The Congreso de las Acequias has since 1990s, is a statewide federation that represents several hundred acequia systems in New Mexico.
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, some locals, especially in the middle hills, have noticed a visible increase in the number of trees, although other places have not seen tangible results, especially where opportunity costs to land are high. Community forestry may also contribute 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.
Many Nepalese forest user groups generate income from the community forests, although the amount can vary widely among groups and is often invested in the community rather than flowing directly to individual households. Such income is generated from external sources involving the sales of timber from thinned pine plantations such as in the community forest user groups of Sindhu Palchok and Rachma, and internally in Nepal's mid-hills' broad leaf forests from membership fees, penalties and fines on rule-breakers, in addition to the sales of forest products. Some of the most significant benefits are that locals are able to use the products they gather directly in their own homes for subsistence use.
Beaver hunting in James Bay, Quebec, Canada
Hunting wildlife territories in James Bay, Quebec; located in the northeastern part of Canada, provide an example of resources being effectively shared by a community. There is an extensive heritage of local customaries that are used to effectively regulate beaver hunting in the region.
Allotment gardens in Stockholm
In the Stockholm region, green spaces are predominantly owned and managed in either private or municipal forms, allotment gardens being the most common form. The system provide cultural ecosystem services to lot holders, as well as the offer of vegetables, fruits, and ornamental flowers. The majority of allotment land in Stockholm is owned by the local municipality, and leaseholds are set for extended periods of time (up to 25 years). The local allotment association makes the decisions about who gets land rights. Only residents of multifamily homes inside the municipality were permitted to sign contracts, signifying a commitment to the original goals of allotments, which were to enhance the health of city dwellers in outdoor settings. Land is organised and managed cooperatively; outside enterprises are not involved in any way.
See also
External links
