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

[Michel Bauwens]

started reading ostrom's, governing the commons, finally ...



On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 7:45 AM, Ryan <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
>  Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader:
>
>
>  how a community can own a resource<http://www.peterlevine.ws/mt/archives/2010/07/how-a-community.html>
> via Peter Levine <http://www.peterlevine.ws/mt/> by peterlevine on 7/12/10
>
> Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons<http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of_the_commons.html>"
> 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.
>
>
>
>  Things you can do from here:
>
>    - Subscribe to Peter Levine<http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.peterlevine.ws%2Fmt%2Findex.rdf?source=email>using
>    *Google Reader*
>    - Get started using Google Reader<http://www.google.com/reader/?source=email>to easily keep up with
>    *all your favorite sites*
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> p2presearch mailing list
> p2presearch at listcultures.org
> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>
>


-- 
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org

Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20100713/c4d7e437/attachment-0001.html>