Commons

For other uses, see Commons (disambiguation).

This article is about the term "commons" in political economics. Not to be confused with common land.

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".

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".

Types of commons

Environmental

The examples below illustrate types of environmental commons.

European land use

Main article: Common land

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 respectively small-scale agriculture in especially southern Germany, Austria and the alpine countries in general were kept, in some parts till the present. Some studies have compared the German and English dealings with the commons between the late medieval times and the agrarian reforms of the 18/19th century. The UK were quite radical with doing away and enclosing former commons, while southwestern Germany (and the alpine countries as e.g. Switzerland) had the most advanced commons structures and was much more willing to keep them. The Lower Rhine region took an intermediate position. However, the UK and the former dominons 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 that of Russia and China, which implemented state-owned pastures involving immobile settlements and in some cases privatization by household, was much higher 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

Implemented 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 therefore increasing the incentive to protect them from overuse. These 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 visible improvements in the number of trees. In addition to this, community forestry contributed to community development in rural areas such as school construction, irrigation channel & drinking water construction and road construction. Similarly their fund allocated into the poor focused activities as well. Furthermore, community forestry has become an example of an appropriate institution for democratic practices at grass root level, where we can see absolute inclusion into their executive committee.

Irrigation systems of New Mexico

Main article: Acequia

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

Main article: Digital commons (economics)

Mayo Fuster Morell proposed a definition of digital commons as "as an information and knowledge resources that are collectively created and owned or shared between or among a community and that tend to be non-exclusivedible, 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, a type of Free Software and Open-source hardware projects.

Economic theories

Tragedy of the commons

Main article: 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 back 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

Historical land commons movements

• The Diggers
• Kett's Rebellion

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

See also

• Common good
• Common ownership
• Creative Commons
• Copyleft
• Common land - Account of historical and present common land use, mainly British Isles.
• Global commons
• Game theory
• Homo reciprocans
• Network effect
• The Magic Cauldron - essay on the open source economic model
• Tragedy of the anticommons
• International Association for the Study of the Commons
• Patentleft
• Tyranny of small decisions

Further reading

• Bollier, David. "The Commons". Public Sphere Project. Schuler. Retrieved 26 October 2015.
• Bowers, Chet. (2006). Revitalizing the Commons: Cultural and Educational Sites of Resistance and Affirmation. Lexington Books.
• Bowers, Chet. (2012). The Way Forward: Educational Reforms that Focus on the Cultural Commons and the Linguistic Roots of the Ecological Crisis. Eco-Justice Press.
• Fourier, Charles. (1996). The Theory of the Four Movements (Cambridge University Press)
• Gregg, Pauline. (2001). Free-Born John: A Biography of John Lilburne (Phoenix Press)
• Harvey, Neil. (1998). The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy (Duke University Press)
• Hill, Christopher. (1984). The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (Penguin)
• Hill, Christopher. (2006). Winstanley ‘The Law of Freedom’ and other Writings (Cambridge University Press)
• Hyde, Lewis. (2010). Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Kennedy, Kennedy. (2008). Diggers, Levellers, and Agrarian Capitalism: Radical Political Thought in 17th Century England (Lexington Books)
• Kostakis, Vasilis and Bauwens, Michel. (2014). Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy. (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan). (wiki)
• Leaming, Hugo P. (1995). Hidden Americans: Maroons of Virginia and the Carolinas (Routledge)
• Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. (2000). The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press)
• Linebaugh, Peter. (2008). The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (University of California Press)
• Lummis, Douglas. (1997). Radical Democracy (Cornell University Press)
• Mitchel, John Hanson. (1998). Trespassing: An Inquiry into the Private Ownership of Land (Perseus Books)
• Neeson, J. M. (1996). Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700—1820 (Cambridge University Press)
• Negri, Antonio, and Michael Hardt. (2009). Commonwealth. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674060288
• Newfont, Kathyn. (2012). Blue Ridge Commons: Environmental Activism and Forest History in Western North Carolina (The University of Georgia Press)
• Patel, Raj. (2010). The Value of Nothing (Portobello Books)
• Price, Richard, ed. (1979). Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (The Johns Hopkins University Press)
• Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. (1994). What is Property? (Cambridge University Press)
• Rexroth, Kenneth. (1974). Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (Seabury Press)
• Rowe, Jonathan. (2013). Our Common Wealth: The Hidden Economy That Makes Everything Else Work (Berrett-Koehler)
• Shantz, Jeff. (2013). Commonist Tendencies: Mutual Aid Beyond Communism. (Punctum)
• Simon, Martin. (2014). Your Money or Your Life: time for both. Social Commons. (Freedom Favours)

External links

• Foundation for common land - A gathering of those across Great Britain and beyond with a stake in pastoral commons and their future
• International Journal of the Commons – an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed open-access journal dedicated to furthering the understanding of institutions for use and management of resources that are (or could be) enjoyed collectively.
• Infrastructuring the Commons – Aalto University Special Interest Group SIG in the Commons (peer-production, co-production, co-governance, co-creation) and Public(s)services. The SIG addresses the relevance of the Commons as a framework to expand the understanding of emerging considerations for the design, provision and maintenance of public services and urban space. Helsinki, Finland.
• On the Commons – dedicated to exploring ideas and action about the commons—which encompasses natural assets such as oceans and clean air as well as cultural endowments like the Internet, scientific research and the arts.
• The Peer to Peer Foundation and the Economics and the Commons Conference.

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