Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
A strong tradition of scholarship around commons has developed out of the cri-
tiques above, one that has long since moved from criticism of the tragedy of the
commons thesis towards a positive project of researching how commons work,
articulating the key relevant concepts and relationships, and exploring potential new
applications of these lessons. The political scientist economist Elinor Ostrom has
been perhaps the most central fi gure in crafting a general conceptual framework in
this area (e.g., Ostrom, 1990; 2005; Ostrom et al., 1994; Ostrom and Hess, 2007;
see also McCay and Acheson, 1987; Ostrom et al., 1999; Dietz et al. 2003), but
such efforts are built upon a foundation of many intensive empirical cases studies
in heterogeneous locations around the globe. Geographers, including most centrally
those in the traditions of cultural and political ecology, have been among the most
important contributors to that corpus (reviews and bibliographies of this large body
of literature can be found in Robbins, 2004 and Neumann, 2005). Most recently,
forms of public-participation GIS have proved invaluable in documenting past and
present patterns of resource use and associated territorial claims integral to histori-
cal and contemporary commons.
Commons scholars are now careful to distinguish between
resource character-
istics
and
property and governance relationships
in discussions of commons. The
former are referred to as
common pool resources
, the latter as
common property
regimes
, and there are no necessary relationships between them: common pool
resources can still become state or private property in some cases, while common
property regimes can be designed to govern resources that do not have all the
characteristics of common pool resources. The defi ning characteristics of common
pool resources are that is it diffi cult to exclude users, and that exploitation by one
user reduces the resource's availability to other users (Ostrom et al., 1999). Thus,
a fi shery is typically a common pool resource, whereas a mine is not: it is far
easier to exclude potential users from the latter than the former. And while lan-
guage can be thought of as a common asset of a sort, its use by one person does
not reduce a fi nite material supply available to other users; in fact, each additional
user adds to the resource, a dynamic also found in other 'inverse commons' such
as culture or open source software. Therefore, language is not a common pool
resource by this defi nition. With respect to biophysical systems and assets, some
of the key characteristics examined by common property scholars are size, mobility
(e.g., wildlife versus medicinal plants), carrying capacity, storage capacity (e.g., in
an aquifer), rates of renewal, resilience, and the amount and quality of information
about all of the above that are available or obtainable (see McCay and Acheson,
1987; Ostrom, 1990; Ostrom et al., 1994; Ostrom et al., 1999; Dietz et al., 2003).
Each clearly affects what governance relationships users will deem feasible and
desirable, reminding us that the social regulation of human-environment relation-
ships must grapple seriously with a heterogeneous material world. Similar con-
straints and complexities are to be found on the institutional side: commons
scholars have found that in order for common property regimes to be successful,
members of the user group must be able to exclude others if necessary, commu-
nicate amongst themselves, develop and modify rules as needed, monitor the condi-
tion and use of the resource and enforce sanctions against users who violate the
rules. Trust within the group is critical, not least because it lowers the costs of
monitoring and enforcement, as is a relatively high degree of equality within the
group, which increases legitimacy and reduces the incentives for violating rules
and norms.
