The Commons

For two centuries the commons were described in the past tense, as a backward system that enclosure replaced and that private property improved on. The story had a name: the tragedy of the commons. A shared pasture, so the story went, gets eaten to dirt, because each herder gains by adding a cow and the cost falls on everyone. The herder who restrains himself loses. So the commons is doomed, and only a fence or a state can save it. That story was used to justify enclosure across England and much of the world.

Elinor Ostrom spent a career checking the story against the record and found that it describes one case, an open pasture with no rules and no users who knew each other. It does not describe a commons. A commons is a shared resource held under rules made by the people who use it. Ostrom documented hundreds of those, some of them running for centuries, and in 1990 she set out why they work. She received the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 for it.

The eight design principles

Ostrom's finding, generalized, is a short list. Each one answers a way a shared resource can break.

1. Clearly defined boundaries. The resource is bounded and so is the group entitled to use it. Törbel, a Swiss alpine village, has regulated grazing on its communal pastures since the thirteenth century, and its records name who may pasture how many animals.

2. Rules fit the local conditions. The rules for taking and for maintaining match the place and the season. The irrigated huertas of Valencia and Murcia in Spain set water turns by the crop and the time of year, not by a rule imported from elsewhere.

3. Collective choice. Most of the people affected can take part in changing the rules. The huerta farmers governed their own canals and wrote their own turns.

4. Monitoring. The people who watch the resource are accountable to the users, or are the users themselves. The Maine lobster fishery is monitored by the fishers, who also set and enforce the zones and the size rules.

5. Graduated sanctions. A first offence draws a warning, then a heavier penalty in steps. Ostrom found that punishing a first slip as hard as the last turns an erring member into an outsider with nothing left to lose.

6. Cheap, fast conflict resolution. Disputes are settled close to the dispute. In the huertas a water court resolved them on the spot, at low cost, before they became feuds.

7. Recognized right to organize. The outside authority does not overturn the rules the users make. Where a state or a landlord ignores or voids those rules, the institution collapses.

8. Nested enterprises. Where a commons is part of a larger system, it is governed in layers, from the plot up to the council, with each layer limited in what it may decide.

Where commons fail

The principles are tendencies, not guarantees. The same record shows the failure conditions.

An open-access resource is not a commons. If anyone may enter and there is no boundary, no rule can be enforced, and the tragedy story is true of that fact and nothing more. Rules imposed on users rather than made by them get evaded. Monitoring that is captured by the people who profit from breaking the rules watches nothing. Sanctions with no gradation are brittle. A court or agency that voids the users' own rules destroys the institution it claims to regulate. And Ostrom's later work adds the structural stresses: rapid change, very large numbers, and sharp inequality among users all make self-organization harder, because when some users can absorb a wrecked resource and others cannot, cooperation frays.

A land-holding commons in a US county today

You do not need a village in the Alps. A working land commons is buildable in an American county, and the shape is known. It is a community land trust or an agricultural commons.

• The entity holds title; the farmer holds a long ground lease, typically ninety-nine years, sellable to the next steward but stripped of speculative gain. The land is taken out of the market once.
• Membership has a defined boundary. Who may join, who may use the ground, and who may not, written down. An undefined membership is an open-access resource and will fail.
• The members make the rules, in a body small enough that they can meet, at the scale where everyone affected is in the room.
• Monitoring sits with the members, and the lease carries graduated sanctions: a warning, then a written work plan, then a lease review.
• Conflict resolution is a step before lawyers. A named person and a short process, cheap enough to use on a small dispute.
• Legal recognition is the scaffolding. A state trust, a conservation easement, and a lease a court will enforce. This is principle seven wearing modern clothes.
• Layers exist, the individual plot, the commons board, and the county, each with limited authority. West Virginia's counties already supply the outer layer.

The barrier to this is rarely the land base. The land-access analysis in this course found the same disease every enclosure story describes, land treated as an investment rather than a living system. A commons is the cure that does not wait for the law to change.