Hope for the commons - Miriam Coronel Ferrer
WAYS OF SPECIES | MIRIAM CORONEL FERRER | 11/06/2009 12:07 AM
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Many reasons make one elated by the this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, Indiana University political science professor Elinor Ostrom and her colleague Oliver E. Williamson. For one, Ostrom is the first female and only the second non-economist to receive the award.
More important than breaking the glass ceiling for women and political scientists, however, is how the 73-year old laureate has revived interest, faith and hope in “the commons.” The “commons” refers to shared natural resources like the forests, mountains, grazing lands, ground and irrigation waters, rivers, lakes and the seas, and all the bounty and benefits that come from these.
But the notion of the commons has expanded considerably alongside the growth of megacities and public institutions and information technology. Now more commonly considered part of the common-resource pool are the air and the atmosphere, and public goods like light houses, parks and the internet used by local, national and global communities. The “On the Commons” website (http://onthecommons.org/) defined the commons to also include “shared social creations such as libraries, public spaces, scientific research and creative works”. In all, the commons are all “the things that we inherit and create jointly, and that will (hopefully) last for generations to come.”
For Ostrom, human cooperation and the appropriate institutional arrangements can enable wise use of the commons. This point has long been advocated by believers in participatory democracy and the various shades of communitarianism. But for most parts, these believers merely preached the claim like gospel truth. Ostrom proved it can be done, and that it has been done. She did this by studying actual institutional rules, designs and practices, and the attendant human behavior that have protected or destroyed a shared resource.
She found that feasible common-property governance happened when end-users were actively involved in the process. In several cases, users were able to forego the incentives to destroy the resources, and developed among themselves rules and norms that made sustainability possible.
Ostrom overturned what the unfortunate, conventional wisdom encapsulated in the expression, “the tragedy of the commons.” Biologist Garrett Hardin popularized this notion in his influential essay written in 1968 with this title. Hardin blamed environmental degradation on overuse of common resources. The tragedy lay in the fact that while everybody partook of the resource, nobody really worried about or cared for the good, thus depleting or destroying it.
Although this tragedy is considered conventional wisdom, it was actually counter-intuitive to what we know about many indigenous communities’ environmentally sustainable and wealth-sharing practices. But then it is true that there are very few of these traditional communities left. Those that still exist are constantly threatened by “development aggression” and cumulative environmental degradation. The modern setting of the commons is not like the cohesive community of the past with simple needs and desires. It is about people with mobility, different pursuits and self-righteous needs in a highly commercialized world where profit rules.
In this modern setting, can people really band together and tame self-interest in order to protect a shared resource? From beings obsessed with private wealth-accumulation, can we really be transformed into a commons-based society capable of managing common assets that benefit everyone?
To find out, Ostrom saw that it was crucial to understand what conditions enabled users to develop and sustain institutions that come up with good resource policies and practices. For this task, she used diverse analytical tools like game theory and institutional analysis. She utilized methods like controlled laboratory experiments and field surveys. She made use of satellite imagery, various social and ecological measurements, and correlated these with computational predictions of human decision-making. Her various researches and theorizing are collected in her published books. Among these books, some co-authored, are GOVERNING THE COMMONS (1990), RULES, GAMES AND COMMON POOL RESOURCES (1994), UNDERSTANDING INSTITUTIONAL DIVERSITY (2005), and UNDERSTANDING KNOWLEDGE AS A COMMONS: THEORY AND PRACTICE (2006).
According to the publisher Princeton University Press, UNDERSTANDING INSTITUTIONAL DIVERSITY “provides empirical evidence about the diversity of rules, the calculation process used by participants in changing rules, and the design principles that characterize robust, self-organized resource governance institutions.”
In other works, Ostrom examined productive tenurial arrangements and irrigation management systems. But while making a strong pitch for devolved and localized collective management, she is also quick to admonish against simplifying or homogenizing policy and governance systems. For example, her earlier work on the police showed that a highly centralized police force is not efficient for the job of patrolling the streets, but economies of scale works for dispatching and crime laboratories.
Revisiting the tragedy of the commons and reversing it to become a source of hope and new possibilities can help us address our low agricultural productivity, the irreversible ecological damage we have caused, and the cataclysmic environmental changes that have come upon us.
Moreover, the network of citizens called “On the Commons” see the commons paradigm as “a new way of looking at the world, one that opens up the competitive, mechanistic, profit-centric mindset that has ruled Western civilization since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, with a more humanistic, environmentally aware and holistic worldview.”
You can read more about the commons in the website cited above. Expand your vocabulary and imagination with its glossary of new words and concepts like common asset (those parts of the commons that have a value in the market and which are appropriate to buy and sell like radio airwaves); copyleft or a license that allows free re-use and modification of creative work so long as any works derived from the original remain available on the same terms; and illth, the opposite of wealth. And be part of the commons movement.
E-mail: mcf178@yahoo.com
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