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The Commons in History: Culture, Conflict, and Ecology
An argument that the commons is neither tragedy nor paradise but can be a way to understand environmental sustainability. The history of the commons--jointly owned land or other resources such as fisheries or forests set aside for public use--provides a useful context for current debates over sustainability and how we can act as "good ancestors." In this book, Derek Wall considers the commons from antiquity to the present day, as an idea, an ecological space, an economic abstraction, and a management practice. He argues that the commons should be viewed neither as a "tragedy" of mismanagement (as the biologist Garrett Hardin wrote in 1968) nor as a panacea for solving environmental problems. Instead, Walls sees the commons as a particular form of property ownership, arguing that property rights are essential to understanding sustainability. How we use the land and its resources offers insights into how we value the environment. After defining the commons and describing the arguments of Hardin's influential article and Elinor Ostrom's more recent work on the commons, Wall offers historical case studies from the United States, England, India, and Mongolia. He examines the power of cultural norms to maintain the commons; political conflicts over the commons; and how commons have protected, or failed to protect ecosystems. Combining intellectual and material histories with an eye on contemporary debates, Wall offers an applied history that will interest academics, activists, and policy makers.
183 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2014
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May 14, 2023
Notes on the Commons in Conflict
A good, brief, synopsis of much of the literature around commons. Wall also provides a strong commentary on their historic cultural/ecological importance, how they have been misapprehended by traditional economics, and how they can play a major role in humans reshaping our relationship with the non-human world in the future. Falls flat on applying them to modern problems, though to be fair that's an ongoing issue.
Ch1.
Starts with definition of commons as a resource that is an area/natural resource that is collectively owned and governed. Points out that it is hard to imagine from our modern capitalist system, where we associate ownership with exclusive access, but historically, collective ownership or use has been widely common. Wall also introduces the important topic of usufruct, the right to use someone else’s property, which was a crucial component of natural resource use in medieval Europe. He also describes this being a central concept in indigenous Native American communities, who didn’t share concepts of land ownership with invading Europeans but who were happy to trade for what they thought were rights to non-exclusively use lands they would still reside on.
Wall delineates three general academic approaches to studying commons: economics (want pared down models), historic (want to situate within broad political and social context), and anthropologic (want to look at the detailed cultural factors and situate within critically examined framework of values). Then sets up the contrast between Garret Hardins (author of tragedy of the commons, sees commons as unstable systems that will inevitably crash from selfish individualistic exploitation [i.e. free ridership]; any extant and seemingly stable commons are a puzzle to be figured out) and Elinor Ostrom (rebuts tragedy of the commons, sees commons as stable and beneficial resource management strategies so long as communities can follow certain criteria to enforce sustainable use of commons).
Then provides three case studies of commons in history in England, Mongolia, and India. In England, peasants had long-standing rights to the use of lands they didn’t privately own. They grazed their cattle in commons and also had legally enshrined rights to collect resources from forests owned by barons and other local aristocracy. However over long centuries of consolidating political and economic power, the aristocracy managed to alter the laws to exclude peasants from these resources. In particular, commons were lost to the process of enclosure, fencing off commons as private property under the justification that it wasn’t being maximally exploited by lazy peasants and therefore should be owned by someone who could make it more productive. This was the same justification for robbing native peoples of their land throughout the European colonial projects on multiple continents. Peasants, like native peoples, fought back and tore down fences and protested, sometimes successfully and staved off privatization of their communally owned and managed resources. However, a capitalist system that required ever expanding markets and intensification of resource use inevitably captured these commons after aristocrats / industrialists further consolidated power and tried again. Capitalists argue that agricultural intensification was necessary in the lead up to the industrial revolution in Britain and that, w/out privatization of commons, this would not have been possible. Wall points out elsewhere that there are actually remarkably few examples of commons that fail according to Hardin’s model in the Tragedy of the Commons. Instead, most commons are destroyed when they are privatized, the resource then overexploited, and the land left barren behind it. Or, it also happens that the ability of communities to regulate commons may be legally or economically compromised, allowing companies or profit driven individuals to unsustainably exploit commons that had previously been well maintained. The British empire imposed such legal resrtictions in India, forcing private property systems onto cultural contexts that were more oriented to community ownership, in the belief that this would increase the productivity of their colonies. It certainly allowed them to withdraw massive amounts of materials from India in their years of rule, though it also led to massive famines and destabilization of centuries long communal livelihoods. This process of stealing commons and forcing privatization onto communities continued post-independence and to this day.
Then goes over several examples of successfully regulated commons throughout history, many described by Ostrom. Ostrom drew the following 8 criteria for successful regulation from her survey:
1) need clearly defined boundaries so outsiders can be excluded
2) rules should be adapted to local needs
3) rules have to be agreed to by commoners
4) effective monitoring is needed to detect and punish rulebreaking
5) graduated sanctions are required so punishments get more severe with repeated infractions
6) conflict resolution needs to be cheap and easy
7) the community must be recognized by higher level government
8) Need nested organization with multiple overlapping organizations when regulating large scale resource pools or multiple tangential commons
Ch2.
Dives into the role of culture in regulating commons (and in structuring how we conceptualize what a commons is, what regulation should look like, for whose benefit, etc). Notes that anthropologists have criticized Ostrom for attempting to bring non-economic spheres of life under economic analysis. Economics is not a value neutral academic project (no such thing, but economics less so than most), there are cultural assumptions baked into its very foundations, w/ ideas of profit, benefit, cost, improvement, etc all have heavily European-capitalist biases in their very definitions. Ostrom ad her school represent a philosophy/movement called new institionalist economists who incorporate the power/influence of institutions into economic models and see rational self interest wrt commons as necessitating participation in a communal regulatory mechanism, lest the commons be destroyed by selfishness that people are all capable of anticipating. This assumes that institutions that exist are functional and evolved in response to pressures to serve an extant purpose. Separate scholars have demonstrated that commons are generally maintained via strong cultural norms/rules, e.g. values of sharing/non-selfishness, consideration of others and community well being, etc. The NIE school is pretty simplistic and again attempts to economize systems that are influenced by many factors – religion, aesthetics, social norms, gender norms, local ecological context, etc. If you really want to understand how culture influences commons regulation, you need to take a detailed, anthropologial approach that considers all factors and doesn’t try to simplify problems into economic models. Such an approach has been useful in describing gift economies, which existed across the world prior to hegemonic rise of capitalism. Also describes the now widely written contrast between, on the one hand, Christian/Abrahamic conceptions of nature as separate from human and identified with base/corporeal sinfulness and, on the other hand, shamanist/pagan religions that identify the natural world as inhabited and holy and thus necessitating mutual care and respect for sustainable management of relationships between the two (and resources).
Ends with synopsis of influence of culture. Culture both strongly influences commons regulation but also is the lens through which we define what a commons is, what sustainable management looks like, and what these things are for. Points out that the practice of Western conservation has often in practice been more a way of exerting power than sustainably managing resources (i.e. conservation as neocolonialism). This entails fencing humans out of an area that needs to be free of human influence to be ‘natural’ or ‘pristine’ (a metaphorical/philosophical antonym to enclosure). A slow shift in the culture in Western Europe, from mutual use/good neighborliness to maximum productive exploitation, is what ultimately enabled enclosure and industrialized imperialism.
Ch3
A broad history of the conflict around commons. Commoners fought back against the enclosure of their commons in England in the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution. Their eventual expulsion from the ecosystems that supported them, and the resultant destruction of their relatively independent economies, produced a massive class of unemployed that went on to fill cities and work in Europe’s factories. These people were also exported over seas to conduct their governments’ settler colonialist projects, subsequently depriving native peoples of their own commons on new continents. (Does make a side note that the Incan empire was foundationally supported by a commons agricultural system, and thus commons can exist within an imperialist framework).
By and large, commons are stolen from the poor and the rural by the wealthy and the urban using a justification of maximizing economic productivity (or in today’s parlance, creating jobs/fueling our economies). However, that is not to say that commons are an unblemished solution to ecological problems or that they automatically produce equitable societies. Sustainably regulated commons require the ability to exclude people from using the commons. This is generally to the benefit of a local community seeking to prevent others from exploiting their stewarded resources. However, deciding who gets to access resources is always a political process and open to potential corruption / injustice. There can also be hierarchies of rights, with some able to exploit more resources in the commons than others. Too, a commons may be privately owned but open to usufruct rights for others. And Aztec/Incan empires, which were violently expansionary, were based on communal land ownership. So they’re not a silver bullet. However they do have many virtues that can make them part of a more sustainable relationship between human societies and the rest of the world.
Ch4.
A wrap up of how we can incorporate lessons from history of commons and their functionality into rejuvenating and redesigning our global society and culture. Wall attempts to apply lessons to conservation of global commons (climate change, ocean overfishing) and here I think the book falls decidedly flat.
Traditionally, cultural discourse over regulation of global commons has focused on state regulation (often inefficient, doesn’t work well in international disputes, overly rigid/one-size fits all) and market based solutions (similarly crude and one size fits all, reductionist, don’t recognize/account for diversity of problems/ecosystems). The shortcomings of both of these can be seen in examining attempts to regulate carbon emissions - international agreements are non-binding and ineffectual while carbon trading markets remain underpriced b/c capitalism can’t both adequately value natural systems and also continue to consume them for materials to fuel constant requisite market expansion. Wall notes that commons tend to work well at small scales and aren’t very useful at global scales. Then he goes on to think about larger scale communal property ownership (e.g. sharing computing power, cars, tools). A nice idea, and definitely necessary (every individual owning their own complete set of tools, rather than having communal tools, is fairly ridiculous) for long term sustainable culture. But hardly sufficient to the problems he raises around managing global common resources like the atmosphere and oceans.
Ends with a call to rethink our relationships with land and the environment so that we have both ethical and sustainable resource management. Wall looks to indigenous communities and their ethics/relationships w/ land. He references the Haudenosaunee ideal to manage land so that it will remain in the same condition for the next seven generations of our descendants. We should all attempt to be good ancestors in this way.
A good, brief, synopsis of much of the literature around commons. Wall also provides a strong commentary on their historic cultural/ecological importance, how they have been misapprehended by traditional economics, and how they can play a major role in humans reshaping our relationship with the non-human world in the future. Falls flat on applying them to modern problems, though to be fair that's an ongoing issue.
Ch1.
Starts with definition of commons as a resource that is an area/natural resource that is collectively owned and governed. Points out that it is hard to imagine from our modern capitalist system, where we associate ownership with exclusive access, but historically, collective ownership or use has been widely common. Wall also introduces the important topic of usufruct, the right to use someone else’s property, which was a crucial component of natural resource use in medieval Europe. He also describes this being a central concept in indigenous Native American communities, who didn’t share concepts of land ownership with invading Europeans but who were happy to trade for what they thought were rights to non-exclusively use lands they would still reside on.
Wall delineates three general academic approaches to studying commons: economics (want pared down models), historic (want to situate within broad political and social context), and anthropologic (want to look at the detailed cultural factors and situate within critically examined framework of values). Then sets up the contrast between Garret Hardins (author of tragedy of the commons, sees commons as unstable systems that will inevitably crash from selfish individualistic exploitation [i.e. free ridership]; any extant and seemingly stable commons are a puzzle to be figured out) and Elinor Ostrom (rebuts tragedy of the commons, sees commons as stable and beneficial resource management strategies so long as communities can follow certain criteria to enforce sustainable use of commons).
Then provides three case studies of commons in history in England, Mongolia, and India. In England, peasants had long-standing rights to the use of lands they didn’t privately own. They grazed their cattle in commons and also had legally enshrined rights to collect resources from forests owned by barons and other local aristocracy. However over long centuries of consolidating political and economic power, the aristocracy managed to alter the laws to exclude peasants from these resources. In particular, commons were lost to the process of enclosure, fencing off commons as private property under the justification that it wasn’t being maximally exploited by lazy peasants and therefore should be owned by someone who could make it more productive. This was the same justification for robbing native peoples of their land throughout the European colonial projects on multiple continents. Peasants, like native peoples, fought back and tore down fences and protested, sometimes successfully and staved off privatization of their communally owned and managed resources. However, a capitalist system that required ever expanding markets and intensification of resource use inevitably captured these commons after aristocrats / industrialists further consolidated power and tried again. Capitalists argue that agricultural intensification was necessary in the lead up to the industrial revolution in Britain and that, w/out privatization of commons, this would not have been possible. Wall points out elsewhere that there are actually remarkably few examples of commons that fail according to Hardin’s model in the Tragedy of the Commons. Instead, most commons are destroyed when they are privatized, the resource then overexploited, and the land left barren behind it. Or, it also happens that the ability of communities to regulate commons may be legally or economically compromised, allowing companies or profit driven individuals to unsustainably exploit commons that had previously been well maintained. The British empire imposed such legal resrtictions in India, forcing private property systems onto cultural contexts that were more oriented to community ownership, in the belief that this would increase the productivity of their colonies. It certainly allowed them to withdraw massive amounts of materials from India in their years of rule, though it also led to massive famines and destabilization of centuries long communal livelihoods. This process of stealing commons and forcing privatization onto communities continued post-independence and to this day.
Then goes over several examples of successfully regulated commons throughout history, many described by Ostrom. Ostrom drew the following 8 criteria for successful regulation from her survey:
1) need clearly defined boundaries so outsiders can be excluded
2) rules should be adapted to local needs
3) rules have to be agreed to by commoners
4) effective monitoring is needed to detect and punish rulebreaking
5) graduated sanctions are required so punishments get more severe with repeated infractions
6) conflict resolution needs to be cheap and easy
7) the community must be recognized by higher level government
8) Need nested organization with multiple overlapping organizations when regulating large scale resource pools or multiple tangential commons
Ch2.
Dives into the role of culture in regulating commons (and in structuring how we conceptualize what a commons is, what regulation should look like, for whose benefit, etc). Notes that anthropologists have criticized Ostrom for attempting to bring non-economic spheres of life under economic analysis. Economics is not a value neutral academic project (no such thing, but economics less so than most), there are cultural assumptions baked into its very foundations, w/ ideas of profit, benefit, cost, improvement, etc all have heavily European-capitalist biases in their very definitions. Ostrom ad her school represent a philosophy/movement called new institionalist economists who incorporate the power/influence of institutions into economic models and see rational self interest wrt commons as necessitating participation in a communal regulatory mechanism, lest the commons be destroyed by selfishness that people are all capable of anticipating. This assumes that institutions that exist are functional and evolved in response to pressures to serve an extant purpose. Separate scholars have demonstrated that commons are generally maintained via strong cultural norms/rules, e.g. values of sharing/non-selfishness, consideration of others and community well being, etc. The NIE school is pretty simplistic and again attempts to economize systems that are influenced by many factors – religion, aesthetics, social norms, gender norms, local ecological context, etc. If you really want to understand how culture influences commons regulation, you need to take a detailed, anthropologial approach that considers all factors and doesn’t try to simplify problems into economic models. Such an approach has been useful in describing gift economies, which existed across the world prior to hegemonic rise of capitalism. Also describes the now widely written contrast between, on the one hand, Christian/Abrahamic conceptions of nature as separate from human and identified with base/corporeal sinfulness and, on the other hand, shamanist/pagan religions that identify the natural world as inhabited and holy and thus necessitating mutual care and respect for sustainable management of relationships between the two (and resources).
Ends with synopsis of influence of culture. Culture both strongly influences commons regulation but also is the lens through which we define what a commons is, what sustainable management looks like, and what these things are for. Points out that the practice of Western conservation has often in practice been more a way of exerting power than sustainably managing resources (i.e. conservation as neocolonialism). This entails fencing humans out of an area that needs to be free of human influence to be ‘natural’ or ‘pristine’ (a metaphorical/philosophical antonym to enclosure). A slow shift in the culture in Western Europe, from mutual use/good neighborliness to maximum productive exploitation, is what ultimately enabled enclosure and industrialized imperialism.
Ch3
A broad history of the conflict around commons. Commoners fought back against the enclosure of their commons in England in the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution. Their eventual expulsion from the ecosystems that supported them, and the resultant destruction of their relatively independent economies, produced a massive class of unemployed that went on to fill cities and work in Europe’s factories. These people were also exported over seas to conduct their governments’ settler colonialist projects, subsequently depriving native peoples of their own commons on new continents. (Does make a side note that the Incan empire was foundationally supported by a commons agricultural system, and thus commons can exist within an imperialist framework).
By and large, commons are stolen from the poor and the rural by the wealthy and the urban using a justification of maximizing economic productivity (or in today’s parlance, creating jobs/fueling our economies). However, that is not to say that commons are an unblemished solution to ecological problems or that they automatically produce equitable societies. Sustainably regulated commons require the ability to exclude people from using the commons. This is generally to the benefit of a local community seeking to prevent others from exploiting their stewarded resources. However, deciding who gets to access resources is always a political process and open to potential corruption / injustice. There can also be hierarchies of rights, with some able to exploit more resources in the commons than others. Too, a commons may be privately owned but open to usufruct rights for others. And Aztec/Incan empires, which were violently expansionary, were based on communal land ownership. So they’re not a silver bullet. However they do have many virtues that can make them part of a more sustainable relationship between human societies and the rest of the world.
Ch4.
A wrap up of how we can incorporate lessons from history of commons and their functionality into rejuvenating and redesigning our global society and culture. Wall attempts to apply lessons to conservation of global commons (climate change, ocean overfishing) and here I think the book falls decidedly flat.
Traditionally, cultural discourse over regulation of global commons has focused on state regulation (often inefficient, doesn’t work well in international disputes, overly rigid/one-size fits all) and market based solutions (similarly crude and one size fits all, reductionist, don’t recognize/account for diversity of problems/ecosystems). The shortcomings of both of these can be seen in examining attempts to regulate carbon emissions - international agreements are non-binding and ineffectual while carbon trading markets remain underpriced b/c capitalism can’t both adequately value natural systems and also continue to consume them for materials to fuel constant requisite market expansion. Wall notes that commons tend to work well at small scales and aren’t very useful at global scales. Then he goes on to think about larger scale communal property ownership (e.g. sharing computing power, cars, tools). A nice idea, and definitely necessary (every individual owning their own complete set of tools, rather than having communal tools, is fairly ridiculous) for long term sustainable culture. But hardly sufficient to the problems he raises around managing global common resources like the atmosphere and oceans.
Ends with a call to rethink our relationships with land and the environment so that we have both ethical and sustainable resource management. Wall looks to indigenous communities and their ethics/relationships w/ land. He references the Haudenosaunee ideal to manage land so that it will remain in the same condition for the next seven generations of our descendants. We should all attempt to be good ancestors in this way.
December 1, 2014
I found Derek Wall's take on the Commons enlightening, thought provoking and satisfying. Wall's writing style is easy to digest and yet not "dumbed down" to the lowest common denominator.
I live on an island with vast tracts of land that are attractive to visitors (beaches and forests) and most of these lands are held in privately titled ownership, although we have a substantial portion designated as parks or habitat. As a tourist and bedroom community for one of the larger cities in the US, our island is a prime target for urban densification. As I was reading, I found a number of ideas proposed by Wall connected to work I was doing in my own community and issues we were facing.
I would have liked to have had this book as a resource to share with my fellow commissioners during my tenure on an urban planning commission and I have already recommended this book to several other people working in the arena of planning and development policy.
My conclusion - Good Read, Prof. Wall.
I live on an island with vast tracts of land that are attractive to visitors (beaches and forests) and most of these lands are held in privately titled ownership, although we have a substantial portion designated as parks or habitat. As a tourist and bedroom community for one of the larger cities in the US, our island is a prime target for urban densification. As I was reading, I found a number of ideas proposed by Wall connected to work I was doing in my own community and issues we were facing.
I would have liked to have had this book as a resource to share with my fellow commissioners during my tenure on an urban planning commission and I have already recommended this book to several other people working in the arena of planning and development policy.
My conclusion - Good Read, Prof. Wall.
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