Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
This body of theory has been used to help understand, advocate for, and in some
cases design governance regimes for larger-scale resources that fi t the description of
common pool resources, and might be governable through common property regimes.
Many have argued, for instance, that the atmosphere and the oceans would be best
understood and managed as global-scale common pool resources, and that biological
resources such as biodiversity or tropical rainforests ought to be reimagined as,
respectively, the 'common heritage of mankind', or the 'lungs of the planet'. Other
examples include Antarctica (Joyner, 1998), large fi sheries in international waters,
outerspace and minerals under the deep ocean fl oor (Buck, 1998). Many see such
efforts as vital because the absence of a global sovereign or globally shared norms
around private property mean that neither of Hardin's solutions are necessarily
available for common pool resources that cross international borders; rather, equal
users must be able to govern themselves if there is to be hope for global environ-
ments, now often referred to as 'global commons' (see Goldman, 1998; Eckersley,
2004). Yet the diffi culties involved in attempts to 'scale up' common property lessons
and approaches to larger biophysical and social systems are legion: even if nation
states are imagined as the individual 'users' of global commons, as they are in many
scenarios, it is not clear if the problems of incomplete information about environ-
mental resources, inequality and mistrust among participants in the commons, and
the diffi culties of excluding or sanctioning violators (to name just a few) can be
overcome. Without romanticising 'communities', it is far easier to imagine all of the
conditions for successful commons being met in relatively small communities with
a high degree of informal interaction among group members, governing a relatively
small-scale nearby resource, than in larger-scale societies dependent upon more
anonymous and bureaucratised structures attempting to govern truly global systems,
such as climate (Dietz et al., 2003). Moreover, the discursive or institutional creation
of 'global' commons necessarily entails an ironic willingness to overlook many local
claims to resources for the sake of making a more general claim on behalf on a spuri-
ously unifi ed 'humanity' (Neumann, 2005). At best, there are tensions involved in
conceiving of resources at such large scales as commons, inasmuch as many commons
historically have been designed precisely to enforce quite locally specifi c rights and
norms and exclude other claimants (cf. Thompson 1993: 184).
While common property scholars have heavily criticised Garret Hardin's thesis
and gone on to research and imagine quite different scenarios around the commons,
much work in this tradition still shares important assumptions with Hardin: it takes
as given that the world is populated by rational, utility-maximising individuals, but
then asks under what circumstances it is possible and advantageous for such indi-
viduals to construct and operate common property regimes. Much common prop-
erty theoretical work has thus taken the form of game theories and role playing
exercises (e.g., the prisoner's dilemma), and the refi nement of institutional structures
(see, e.g., Ostrom, 1990; 2005; Ostrom et al., 1994). Such methodologies have their
own historical and political contexts: game theory exploring non-destructive out-
comes of confl icts between rational adversaries became very popular during the cold
war, for example, while the assumption that optimal governance institutions can
be designed by academic experts and then handed to users is inseparable from the
history of colonial and post-colonial western interventions under the fl ag of 'devel-
opment'; in practice, interventions by 'experts' in institutional design have disrupted
functioning commons far more often than they have helped to establish them
(Goldman, 1998).
