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 precision of this distinction is not always maintained.
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.
Types of commons
Environmental resource
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.
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.
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. 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.
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
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). 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 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.
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.
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.
Tragedy of the commons in the Wiki-Commons is avoided by community control by individual authors within the Wikipedia community.
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 and information like the Toxic 100, a list of the top 100 polluters, 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."
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.
Syntagma Square in Athens as urban commons
Tahrir Square in Cairo as urban commons
Urban commons situates citizens as key players rather than public authorities, private markets and technologies.
David Harvey (2012) defines the distinction between public spaces and
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, 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..
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. More recently participatory studies of commons and infrastructures under the conditions of the financial crisis emerge.
Knowledge commons
In
2007, Elinor Ostrom along with her colleague Charlotte Hess, did
succeed in extending the commons debate to knowledge, approaching
knowledge as a complex ecosystem that operates as a common – a shared
resource that is subject to social dilemmas. The focus here was on the
ready availability of digital forms of knowledge and associated
possibilities to store, access and share it as a common. The connection
between knowledge and commons may be made through identifying typical
problems associated with natural resource commons, such as congestion,
over-harvesting, pollution and inequities, which also apply to knowledge.
Then, effective alternatives (community-based, non-private, non-state),
in line with those of natural commons (involving social rules,
appropriate property rights and management structures), solutions are
proposed. Thus, the commons metaphor is applied to social practice
around knowledge. It is in this context that the present work proceeds,
discussing the creation of depositories of knowledge through the
organized, voluntary contributions of scholars (the research community,
itself a social common), the problems that such knowledge commons might
face (such as free-riding or disappearing assets), and the protection of
knowledge commons from enclosure and commodification (in the form of
intellectual property legislation, patenting, licensing and
overpricing).
At this point, it is important to note the nature of knowledge and its
complex and multi-layered qualities of non-rivalry and
non-exclusive. Unlike natural commons – which are both rival and
exclusive (only one person can use any one item or portion at a time
and in so doing they use it up, it is consumed) and characterized by
scarcity (they can be replenished but there are limits to this, such
that consumption/destruction may overtake production/creation) –
knowledge commons are characterized by abundance (they are non-rival and
non-exclusive and thus, in principle, not scarce, so not impelling
competition and compelling governance). This abundance of knowledge
commons has been celebrated through alternative models of knowledge
production, such as Commons Based Peer Production (CBPP), and embodied
in the free software movement. The CBPP model showed the power of
networked, open collaboration and non-material incentives to produce
better quality products (mainly software).
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.
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. 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.
Other related concepts are the inverse commons, cornucopia of the commons, and triumph of the commons. 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".
Notable theorists
- Peter Barnes
- Yochai Benkler
- David Bollier
- Iain Boal
- George Caffentzis
- Barry Commoner
- Silvia Federici
- Henry George
- Garrett Hardin
- Michael Hardt
- David Harvey
- Lewis Hyde
- Lawrence Lessig
- Peter Linebaugh
- Karl Linn
- William Forster Lloyd
- William Morris
- Antonio Negri
- Elinor Ostrom
- Raj Patel
- John Platt (see Social trap)
- Joachim Radkau
- Kenneth Rexroth
- Gerrard Winstanley
- Michel Bauwens
- Vasilis Kostakis
Historical land commons movements
Contemporary commons movements
- Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa
- The Bhumi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee in India
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- The EZLN in Mexico
- Fanmi Lavalas in Haiti
- Geolibertarianism primarily in the US
- The Homeless Workers' Movement in Brazil
- The Land is Ours in the UK
- The Landless Workers' Movement in Brazil
- Movement for Justice en el Barrio in the United States of America
- Narmada Bachao Andolan in India
- Take Back the Land in the US
