The commons are the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons can also be understood as natural resources that groups of people (communities, user groups) manage for individual and collective benefit. Characteristically, this involves a variety of informal norms and values (social practice) employed for a governance mechanism. Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.Classical theory based on Elinor Ostrom's book
Definition and modern use
The Digital Library of the Commons defines "commons" as "a general term for shared resources in which each stakeholder has an equal interest".
The term "commons" derives from the traditional English legal term for common land, which are also known as "commons", and was popularised in the modern sense as a shared resource term by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in an influential 1968 article called "The Tragedy of the Commons". As Frank van Laerhoven and Elinor Ostrom have stated; "Prior to the publication of Hardin's article on the tragedy of the commons (1968), titles containing the words 'the commons', 'common pool resources', or 'common property' were very rare in the academic literature."
Some texts make a distinction in usage between common ownership of the commons and collective ownership among a group of colleagues, such as in a producers' cooperative. The precision of this distinction is not always maintained. Others conflate open access areas with commons; however, open access areas can be used by anybody while the commons has a defined set of users.
The use of "commons" for natural resources has its roots in European intellectual history, where it referred to shared agricultural fields, grazing lands and forests that were, over a period of several hundred years, enclosed, claimed as private property for private use. In European political texts, the common wealth was the totality of the material riches of the world, such as the air, the water, the soil and the seed, all nature's bounty regarded as the inheritance of humanity as a whole, to be shared together. In this context, one may go back further, to the Roman legal category res communis, applied to things common to all to be used and enjoyed by everyone, as opposed to res publica, applied to public property managed by the government. Economic theories Tragedy of the commons
A commons failure theory, now called tragedy of the commons, originated in the 18th century. In 1833 William Forster Lloyd introduced the concept by a hypothetical example of herders overusing a shared parcel of land on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze, to the detriment of all users of the common land. The same concept has been called the "tragedy of the fishers", when over-fishing could cause stocks to plummet.Samuel Bowles, Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution, Princeton University Press, pp. 27–29 (2004) Forster's pamphlet was little known, and it was not until 1968, with the publication by the ecologist Garrett Hardin of the article "The Tragedy of the Commons",Hardin, G. (1968). "The tragedy of the commons". Science, 162 (3859), 1243-1248. that the term gained relevance. Hardin introduced this tragedy as a social dilemma, and aimed at exposing the inevitability of failure that he saw in the commons.
However, Hardin's (1968) argument has been widely criticized, since he is accused of having mistaken the commons, that is, resources held and managed in common by a community, with open access, that is, resources that are open to everyone but where it is difficult to restrict access or to establish rules. In the case of the commons, the community manages and sets the rules of access and use of the resource held in common: the fact of having a commons, then, does not mean that anyone is free to use the resource as they like. Studies by Ostrom and others have shown that managing a resource as a commons often has positive outcomes and avoids the so-called tragedy of the commons, a fact that Hardin overlooked.
It has been said the dissolution of the traditional land commons played a watershed role in landscape development and cooperative land use patterns and property rights.The end of the commons as a watershed' The Age of Ecology, Joachim Radkau, John Wiley & Sons, 3 April 2014, p. 15 ff However, as in the British Isles, such changes took place over several centuries as a result of land enclosure.
Economist Peter Barnes has proposed a 'sky trust' to fix this tragedic problem in worldwide generic commons. He claims that the sky belongs to all the people, and companies do not have a right to over pollute. It is a type of cap and dividend program. Ultimately the goal would be to make polluting excessively more expensive than cleaning what is being put into the atmosphere.
Successful commons While the original work on the tragedy of the commons concept suggested that all commons were doomed to failure, they remain important in the modern world. Work by later economists has found many examples of successful commons, and Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for analysing situations where they operate successfully. For example, Ostrom found that grazing commons in the Swiss Alps have been run successfully for many hundreds of years by the farmers there.
Allied to this is the "comedy of the commons" concept, where users of the commons are able to develop mechanisms to police their use to maintain, and possibly improve, the state of the commons. This term was coined in an essay by legal scholar, Carol M. Rose, in 1986.The Drama of the Commons By Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change, National Research Council, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, Board on Environmental Change and Society
Building off of Ostrom's work, other scholars such as Baggio et al.Baggio, J., Barnett, A., Perez-Ibarra, I., Brady, U., Ratajczyk, E., Rollins, N., ... & Janssen, M. (2016). Explaining success and failure in the commons: the configural nature of Ostrom's institutional design principles. International Journal of the Commons, 10(2)./ref> have continued to analyze what factors support the successful management of the commons and common-pool resources. Design principles are considered a form of soft human-made infrastructure that are a pillar of successful management of the commons. In "Governing the Commons", Ostrom describes the following design principles which she found are often used in cases where common-pool resources are governed successfully: Clearly defined boundaries, congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions, collective-choice arrangements, monitoring, graduated sanctions, conflict resolution mechanisms, minimal recognition of rights to organize, and nested enterprises. In addition to these principles, there are many others which may support the effective management of common-pool resources. Design principles are most effective in successful common-pool resource management when more than nine are used in combination <ref>Baggio, J., Barnett, A., Perez-Ibarra, I., Brady, U., Ratajczyk, E., Rollins, N., ... & Janssen, M. (2016). Explaining success and failure in the commons: the configural nature of Ostrom's institutional design principles. International Journal of the Commons, 10(2)./ref>.
Types Environmental resource European land use
Originally in medieval England the common was an integral part of the manor, and was thus legally part of the estate in land owned by the lord of the manor, but over which certain classes of manorial tenants and others held certain rights. By extension, the term "commons" has come to be applied to other resources which a community has rights or access to. The older texts use the word "common" to denote any such right, but more modern usage is to refer to particular rights of common, and to reserve the name "common" for the land over which the rights are exercised. A person who has a right in, or over, common land jointly with another or others is called a commoner.<ref name="Anon"> have continued to analyze what factors support the successful management of the commons and common-pool resources. Design principles are considered a form of soft human-made infrastructure that are a pillar of successful management of the commons. In Governing the Commons, Ostrom describes the following design principles which she found are often used in cases where common-pool resources are governed successfully: Clearly defined boundaries, congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions, collective-choice arrangements, monitoring, graduated sanctions, conflict resolution mechanisms, minimal recognition of rights to organize, and nested enterprises. In addition to these principles, there are many others which may support the effective management of common-pool resources. Design principles are most effective in successful common-pool resource management when more than nine are used in combination..
In middle Europe, commons were kept for relatively small-scale agriculture, especially in southern Germany, Austria, and the alpine countries, and some of these still exist. Some studies have compared the German and English dealings with the commons between late medieval times and the agrarian reforms of the 18th and 19th centuries. The UK was quite radical in doing away with and enclosing former commons, while southwestern Germany (and the alpine countries as e.g. Switzerland) had the most advanced commons structures, and were more inclined to keep them. The Lower Rhine region took an intermediate position.Hartmut Zückert, "Allmende und Allmendaufhebung". Vergleichende Studien zum Spätmittelalter bis zu den Agrarreformen des 18./19. Jahrhunderts (= Quellen und Forschungen zur Agrargeschichte; Bd. 47), Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius 2003, IX + 462 S., 4 Farb-Abb., review (in German) However, the UK and the former dominions have till today a large amount of Crown land which often is used for community or conservation purposes.
Types
Global commons
Energy commons
The commons framework has also been applied to infrastructure. Chris Giotitsas, Vasilis Kostakis and colleagues argue that energy systems could be reconfigured as a commons rather than governed through private markets or centralised state provision, proposing a commons-oriented "Energy Internet" in which production and distribution are governed by the communities using them. Kostakis, Giotitsas and Dimitris Kitsikopoulos have since sketched what such a system might look like in practice, depicting a landscape of energy cooperatives, makerspaces and open-source enterprises across urban, suburban and rural settings, and assessing it against energy justice criteria of availability, affordability, transparency and sustainability. A systematic review of the field by Thomas Bauwens, Robert Wade and Matthew Burke found that research on energy commons has concentrated on production, distribution and use while paying less attention to upstream extraction and downstream waste, and identified a recurring tension between treating the commons as an alternative to capitalism and acknowledging their co-optation by it.
Cultural and intellectual commons Today, the commons are also understood within a cultural sphere. These commons include literature, music, arts, design, film, video, television, radio, information, software and sites of heritage. Wikipedia is an example of the production and maintenance of common goods by a contributor community in the form of encyclopedic knowledge that can be freely accessed by anyone without a central authority.