[p2p-research] how a community can own a resource

[Ryan]

  Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: how a community can own a
resource via Peter Levine by peterlevine on 7/12/10

Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons" is one of the most
frequently cited articles of the 20th century. Hardin argued that a
valuable resource must be owned. If it is left unowned, it will be
consumed and not replenished. There appeared to be two kinds of owners:
(1) private individuals or corporations, and (2) governments. There was
heated debate about the relative advantages and dangers of each, but
the consensus held that one or the other type of owner ought to own
everything that matters.

As a result, reformers (governments, international lenders, and
experts) turned forests, grazing lands, fisheries, and other resources
all over the world into property: either privatizing and marketizing
these assets, or else nationalizing them. In many cases, the results
were devastating. As Elinor Ostrom (2000) writes, "In many settings
where individuals have managed small- to medium-sized resources for
centuries, drawing on local knowledge and locally crafted institutions,
their disempowerment led to a worsening of environmental problems
rather than their betterment." This was no small matter: human famine
and the extinction of natural species were sometimes the price.

Part of the problem was conceptual, an assumption that if something is
property, it must be state or private property. As Ostrom and
colleagues have shown, a community can own an asset. That does not mean
that a government that represents the community owns it, as my town of
Belmont, MA (an incorporated municipality) owns Clay Pit Pond. Nor does
it mean that a nonprofit corporation manages the asset as the
community's trustee. The community can actually own the resource. It
needs rules, norms, traditions, or processes that limit the asset's use
and/or cause people to replenish it.

Those rules may include large doses of individual property rights. For
instance, you may own your fishing boat and nets and any fish that you
catch. But the community owns the fishery if only approved people can
fish there and if each can only take a certain number of fish. If those
rules are local government ordinances, we may say that the community
owns the fishery and uses the government as one of its instruments of
control. (It will almost certainly use other tools as well, including
private vigilance.) In many cases, the rules are effectively enforced
without official government endorsement. Violence and threats of
violence may never be necessary, either, if local ties are strong and
outsiders are rare.

An asset can belong to a community in a meaningful sense if it is true
collective property, or if it is divided among private owners who
collectively regulate its use, or if it belongs to just a few official
owners who depend upon and are accountable to the whole community. For
instance, many houses of worship all over the world belong to the state
or a private party who holds title to the land and the building. Yet
those religious institutions are genuinely owned by the community in
the sense that they could never move or survive without the community's
support.

Opening one's eyes to the possibility of community ownership that is
not state or private ownership provides new options for managing
resources, allows us to evaluate and appreciate traditional
arrangements, and calls attention to the impressive skills and values
that people employ all over the world to manage common assets.

See ...

Thomas Dietz, Nives Dolsak, Elinor Ostrom, and Paul C. Stern
(2002) "The Drama of the Commons," in Elinor Ostrom, ed., Drama of the
Commons, pp. 3-26.

Ostrom, Elinor (2000), "Crowding Out Citizenship," Scandinavian
Political Studies (23)1

Ostrom, Elinor (2004) "Covenants, Collective Action and Common Pool
Resources" in Karol Edward Soltan and Stephen Elkin, eds., The
Constitution of Good Societies.

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