Picture a pasture open to all.” For at least a generation, the very idea of the commons has been marginalized and dismissed as a misguided way to manage resources: the so-called tragedy of the commons. In a short but influential essay published in Science in 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin gave the story a fresh formulation and a memorable tagline.
“The tragedy of the commons develops in this way,” wrote Hardin, proposing to his readers that they envision an open pasture:
It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible in the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy. As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?”
The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
The tragedy of the commons is one of those basic conceits that is drilled into the minds of every undergraduate. The idea is considered a basic principle of economics—a cautionary lesson about the impossibility of collective action. Once the class has been escorted through a ritual shudder, the professor whisks them along to the main attraction, the virtues of private property and free markets. Here, finally, economists reveal, we may surmount the dismal tragedy of a commons. The catechism is hammered home: individual freedom to own and trade private property in open markets is the only way to produce enduring personal satisfaction and social prosperity.
Hardin explains the logic this way: we can overcome the tragedy of the commons through a system of “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.” For him, the best approach is “the institution of private property coupled with legal inheritance.” He concedes that this is not a perfectly just alternative, but he asserts that Darwinian natural selection is ultimately the best available option, saying, “those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more.” We put up with this imperfect legal order, he adds, “because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.”
Such musings by a libertarian-minded scientist have been catnip to conservative ideologues and economists (who are so often one and the same). They see Hardin’s essay as a gospel parable that affirms some core principles of neoliberal economic ideology. It affirms the importance of “free markets” and justifies the property rights of the wealthy. It bolsters a commitment to individual rights and private property as the cornerstone of economic thought and policy. People will supposedly have the motivation to take responsibility for resources if they are guaranteed private ownership and access to free markets. Tragic outcomes—“total ruin”—can thereby be avoided. The failure of the commons, in this telling, is conflated with government itself, if only to suggest that one of the few recognized vehicles for advancing collective interests, government, will also succumb to the “tragedy” paradigm. (That is the gist of public choice theory, which applies standard economic logic to problems in democratic government.)
Over the past several decades, the tragedy of the commons has taken root as an economic truism. The Hardin essay is taught not just in economics courses but in political science, sociology, and other fields. It is no wonder that so many people consider the commons with such glib condescension. The commons = chaos, ruin, and failure.
There is just one significant flaw in the tragedy parable. It does not accurately describe a commons. Hardin’s fictional scenario sets forth a system that has no boundaries around the pasture, no rules for managing it, no punishments for overuse, and no distinct community of users. But that is not a commons. It is an open-access regime or a free-for-all. A commons has boundaries, rules, social norms, and sanctions against free riders. A commons requires that there be a community willing to act as a conscientious steward of a resource. Hardin was confusing a commons with “no-man’s-land,” and in the process, he smeared the commons as a failed paradigm for managing resources.
To be fair, Hardin was following a long line of polemicists who projected their unexamined commitments to market individualism onto the world. As we will see later, the theories of philosopher John Locke have been widely used to justify treating the New World as terra nullius—open, unowned land—even though it was populated by millions of Native Americans who managed their natural resources as beloved commons with unwritten but highly sophisticated rules.
Hardin’s essay was inspired by his reading of an 1832 talk by William Forster Lloyd, an English lecturer who, like Hardin, was worried about overpopulation in a period of intense enclosures of land. Lloyd’s talk is notable because it rehearses the same line of argument and makes the same fanciful error—that people are incapable of negotiating a solution to the “tragedy.” Instead of a shared pasture, Lloyd’s metaphor was a joint pool of money that could be accessed by every contributor. Lloyd asserted that each individual would quickly deplete more than his share of the pool while a private purse of money would be frugally managed.
I mention Lloyd’s essay to illustrate how ridiculous yet persistent the misconceptions about the “tragedy” dynamic truly are. Commons scholar Lewis Hyde dryly notes,
Just as Hardin proposes a herdsman whose reason is unable to encompass the common good, so Lloyd supposes persons who have no way to speak with each other or make joint decisions. Both writers inject laissez-faire individualism into an old agrarian village and then gravely announce that the commons is dead. From the point of view of such a village, Lloyd’s assumptions are as crazy as asking us to suppose ‘a man to have a purse to which his left and right hand may freely resort, each unaware of the other.’
This absurdity, unfortunately, is the basis for a large literature of “prisoner’s dilemma” experiments that purport to show how “rational individuals” behave when confronted with “social dilemmas,” such as how to allocate a limited resource. Should the “prisoner” cooperate with other potential claimants and share the limited rewards? Or should he or she defect by grabbing as much for himself or herself as possible?
Needless to say, the complications are endless. But the basic premise of such social science experiments rigs investigations at the outset. The very design of the “game” privileges certain behavioral assumptions, such as selfishness and rational calculation. It ignores the full context (test subjects have no shared social history or culture). It also presumes that individuals have sovereign agency, ignoring the formative power of relationships and groups, and everyone’s ecological dependencies. Test subjects are not allowed to communicate with each other or develop bonds of trust and shared knowledge. They are given only limited time and opportunity to learn to cooperate, in isolated lab settings. Aghast at the pretzel logic of economic researchers, Lewis Hyde puckishly suggested that the “tragedy” thesis be called, instead, “The Tragedy of Unmanaged, Laissez-Faire, Common-Pool Resources with Easy Access for Noncommunicating, Self-Interested Individuals.”
The dirty little secret of many prisoner’s dilemma experiments is that they subtly presuppose a market culture of “rational” individuals. Most give little consideration to the real-life ways in which people come to cooperate and share in managing resources. That is changing somewhat now that more game theory experiments are incorporating the ideas of behavioral economics, complexity theory and evolutionary sciences into their design. Yet a great deal of economic theory and policy continues to posit a rather crude model of human behavior. It avoids studying asymmetries of power and relational dynamics. Despite its obvious unreality, Homo economicus, the fictional abstract individual who actively maximizes his personal “utility function” through rational calculation, continues to hold sway as the idealized model of human agency in the cultural entity we call “the economy.” Two introductory economics textbooks widely used in the US, by Samuelson and Nordhaus (2004) and Stiglitz and Walsh (2006), consider cooperative behaviors to be so inconsequential that they do not even mention the commons. If economists show any inclination to discuss commons, you can be sure that the word “tragedy” will be lurking nearby.
Paradoxically enough, the heedless quest for selfish gain—rationally pursued, of course, yet indifferent toward the collective good—is a better description of the conventional market economy than a commons. The real tragedy precipitated by scheming individualists is not the tragedy of the commons, but the tragedy of the market.
Happily, contemporary scholarship has done much to rescue the commons from the memory hole to which it has been consigned by mainstream economics. American political scientist Elinor (“Lin”) Ostrom of Indiana University deserves special credit for her role in expanding the frame of analysis of economic activity. In the 1970s, the economics profession plunged into a kind of religious fundamentalism. It celebrated highly abstract, quantitative models of the economy based on rational individualism, private property rights, and free markets. A child of the Depression, Ostrom had always been interested in cooperative institutions working outside of markets. As a young political scientist in the 1960s, she began to question some of the core assumptions of economics, especially the idea that people are unable to cooperate in stable, sustainable ways. Sometimes working with political scientist Vincent Ostrom, her husband, she initiated a new kind of cross-disciplinary study of institutional systems that manage “common-pool resources,” or CPRs.
CPRs are collective resources over which no one has private property rights or exclusive control, such as fisheries, grazing lands, and groundwater. All of these resources are highly vulnerable to overexploitation because it is difficult to stop unauthorized people from using them. We might call it the “tragedy of open access.” (Hardin himself later acknowledged that he should have entitled his essay “The Tragedy of an Unmanaged Commons”—an oxymoron, but nevermind.)
What distinguished Ostrom’s scholarship from that of so many academic economists was her painstaking empirical fieldwork. She visited communal landholders in Ethiopia, rubber tappers in the Amazon, and fishers in the Philippines. She investigated how they negotiated cooperative schemes and how they blended their social systems with local ecosystems. As economist Nancy Folbre of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, explained, “She would go and actually talk to Indonesian fishermen or Maine lobstermen, and ask, ‘How did you come to establish this limit on the fish catch? How did you deal with the fact that people might try to get around it?’”
From such firsthand research, Ostrom tried to figure out what makes for a successful commons. How does a community overcome its collective-action problem? The recurring challenge facing a group of principals in an interdependent situation, she wrote, is figuring out how to “organize and govern themselves to obtain continuing joint benefits when all face temptations to free ride, shirk, or otherwise act opportunistically. Parallel questions have to do with the combinations of variables that will (1) increase the initial likelihood of self-organization, (2) enhance the capabilities of individuals to continue self-organized efforts over time, or (3) exceed the capacity of self-organization to solve CPR, common-pool resource, problems without external assistance of some form.”
Ostrom’s answer was Governing the Commons, a landmark 1990 book that set forth some of the basic “design principles” of effective, durable commons. The focus of the “Bloomington School” of commons scholars has been the study of how communities develop social norms—and sometimes formal legal rules—that enable them to use finite resources sustainably over the long term. Standard economics, after all, declares that we are selfish individuals whose wants are unlimited. The idea that we can depend on people’s altruism and cooperation, economists object, is naive and unrealistic. The idea that commons can set and enforce limits on usage seems improbable because it rejects the idea of humans having unbounded appetites.
Ostrom nonetheless showed how, in hundreds of instances, commoners do in fact meet their needs and interests in collective, cooperative ways. The villagers of Törbel, Switzerland, have managed their high alpine forests, meadows, and irrigation waters since 1224. Spaniards have shared irrigation waters through huerta social institutions for centuries while, in the 1960s, diverse water authorities in Los Angeles learned how to coordinate their management of scarce groundwater supplies. Many commons have flourished for hundreds of years, even in periods of drought or crisis. Their success can be traced to a community’s ability to develop its own flexible, evolving rules for stewardship, oversight of access and usage, and effective punishments for rule breakers.
Ostrom found that commons must have clearly defined boundaries so that commoners can know who has permission to use a resource. Outsiders who do not contribute to the commons generally have no rights to access or use the common-pool resource, at least for depletable natural wealth. She discovered that rules for appropriating a resource must take account of local conditions and must include limits on what can be taken and how. For example, wild berries can only be harvested during a given period of time, or wood from the forest can only be taken from the ground and must be used by households only, not sold in markets.
Commoners must be able to create or influence the rules that govern a commons, Ostrom noted. “If external governmental officials presume that only they have the authority to set the rules,” she discovered, “then it will be very difficult for local appropriators to sustain a rule-governed CPR over the long run.” Commoners must be willing to monitor how their resources are used (or abused) and must devise a system of sanctions to punish anyone who violates the rules, preferably through a gradation of increasingly serious sanctions. When disputes arise, commoners must have easy access to conflict-resolution mechanisms.
Finally, Ostrom declared that commons that are part of a larger system of governance must be “organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.” She called this “polycentric governance,” meaning that the authority to appropriate a resource, monitor and enforce its use, resolve conflicts, and perform other governance activities must be shared across different levels—from local to regional to national to international.
It must be emphasized that Ostrom did not regard her eight design principles as a strict blueprint for successful commons but rather as general guidelines. It is also important to note that she focused primarily on small-scale natural resource commons. She did, in the latter stages of her career, explore the problems of large-scale regional or global commons and digital commons (which can scale to large sizes with great ease). But these were secondary concerns during most of her working life.
Here is another way of looking at factors that affect how a commons should be structured and managed:
Ostrom’s impressive body of work earned her the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 (along with Oliver Williamson). I like to think that the Nobel Prize committee was spooked by the 2008 financial crisis and wished to shine a light on the profusion of alternatives to markets—nonmarket forms of provisioning and resource management that are nonetheless productive, stable, and sustainable.
Besides providing a powerful analytical platform for studying commons more rigorously, Ostrom’s most lasting accomplishment may be her role in building a global network of commons scholars. Hundreds of academics from around the world have produced a vast social sciences literature, mostly about natural resource commons in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Much of the seminal academic thinking about the commons was incubated, debated, or refined at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University (now the Ostrom Workshop), which Ostrom co-founded with her husband in 1973. Elinor Ostrom also founded the Digital Library of the Commons, the International Journal of the Commons, and the International Association for the Study of the Commons, an academic network of hundreds of scholars and practitioners.
It is now easy to see that Ostrom’s great strength in studying economic activity was her distance from the economics profession. As an outsider to the guild, she could more readily see that free-market theories fail to explain many things of economic importance, such as our keen interest in working with others and assuring fairness within a group. As a woman in a male-dominated field (in the 1960s and 1970s, when sexism ran rampant in academia), Ostrom was also more attentive to the relational aspects of economic activity, the ways in which people interact and negotiate with each other to forge rules and social understandings. And so, while operating within the premises of neoclassical economics, Ostrom helped enlarge the scope of analysis to include many humanistic and social dynamics that the numbers-oriented mandarins of the field scorned.
Interestingly, her global prominence came mostly after she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2009. In the decades prior, the study of CPRs and “common property” was decidedly outside the perimeter of interest of serious economists. Indeed, some leading economists had no idea who Ostrom was when she was awarded the Nobel Prize. To outsiders and market-oriented economists, the commons was perhaps of little interest because it seems to focus on subsistence, which they interpret as bare survival. But subsistence is not necessarily just about survival; it is about providing for one’s household needs without reliance on markets. The commons, properly understood, is about the practice and ethic of sufficiency.
I had the good fortune to meet Lin Ostrom a few times before her death in June 2012. What I most remember is how remarkably gracious, open, and down-to-earth she was. This observation is not just a personal sidelight; I think it was what made her such a fertile thinker: she was open-minded and willing to engage with people and phenomena on their own terms, unencumbered by the deep prejudices of economic theory. Yet Ostrom nonetheless operated within the standard economic framework and its assumptions about “rational actors” and “rational design” in the construction of commons. She dealt only glancingly with macroeconomic dynamics and even less with politics and power. Ostrom also tended to approach commons in a functional, behaviorist way, and had less interest in the intersubjective, psychological, and cultural dynamics that animate commons. Still, the Bloomington School of commons scholarship deserves enormous credit for rescuing the commons from the tyranny of the tragedy myth.
What is fascinating is the parallel development, outside of academia, of an eclectic, transnational corps of activists and project leaders who have embraced the commons as an organizing principle for their initiatives for social change. These players, especially in Europe and the Global South, are making the commons a significant force in politics, economics, and culture today. They understand how the commons paradigm opens up new aspirational spaces for meeting needs at a time when it’s difficult for newcomers to enter conventional markets. The commons validates less hierarchical, noncapitalist relationships and values. Open source software programmers, urban farmers, permaculturists, open-access publishers, mutual aid networks, Indigenous textile makers, neighborhood energy commons, Slow Food activists: these groups share an affinity for the commons that is not necessarily intellectual or political; it’s personal, social, and ethical. For many, the commons is not a “management system” or “governance regime”; it’s a cultural identity, a personal livelihood, and a satisfying way of life. It’s a way to reinvent democratic practice. It’s a way to live a purposeful life.
We will meet more of these commoners in the chapters in Part II. For now, suffice it to say that most commoners are trying to carve out protected, nonmarket spaces in a world that is increasingly dominated by private property and capital-driven markets on a global scale. Over the past twenty-five years, interest in the commons has exploded into all sorts of different arenas. Once a specialized academic subject, the commons is a vibrant, grassroots social form that has penetrated into many different realms of life. It is also a flourishing transnational discourse that engages wildly different communities of practice. Each strives to steward their shared wealth with peer-directed care, participation, fairness, and active concern for holistic well-being. They protect their common assets as inalienable—not for sale—and limit their dependence on markets. They cultivate a relational mindset and minimize transactional individualism. They celebrate the rewards and challenges of working together.
For all these reasons, capitalist enterprises throughout history have not generally welcomed the presence of commons. The “competition” from collective provisioning threatens to reduce business revenues, brand loyalty, and market share. Successful commons are sometimes cast as “bad examples” because they offer cheaper, empowering alternatives to capitalist markets. Too, peer-organized systems for open source software, community land trusts, and seeding sharing—by demonstrating that “other ways of having” are possible—are sometimes seen as threats to free-market ideology and private property rights. Businesses often fear that commoners will come together as an organized political force and attack proprietary product designs and predatory business practices, and seek to curb marketplace abuses. So investors, corporations, and their political allies tend to have keen incentives to destroy or weaken commons.
Given the deep structural tension between businesses and commons, it’s impossible to understand the logic and behavior of commons without also understanding market enclosures. I turn now to that topic.
David Bollier at david /at/ bollier.org | New Society Publishers