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

[Alex Rollin]

Any ideas on how to build a set of pages to discuss the distinct
points in this article on the wiki?

On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 2:45 AM, Ryan <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader:
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> how a community can own a resource
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> via Peter Levine by peterlevine on 7/12/10
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> 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
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> 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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