Commons
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 manage for individual and collective benefit. Characteristically, this involves a variety of informal norms and values 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.
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, 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. 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", 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 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. 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.
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.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 had the most advanced commons structures, and were more inclined to keep them. The Lower Rhine region took an intermediate position. 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.
Global commons
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.Tragedy of the commons in the Wiki-Commons is avoided by community control by individual authors within the Wikipedia community.
The information commons may help protect users of commons. Companies that pollute the environment release information about what they are doing. The Corporate Toxics Information Project and information like the Toxic 100, a list of the top 100 polluters, helps people know what these corporations are doing to the environment.
Digital commons
proposed a definition of digital commons as "information and knowledge resources that are collectively created and owned or shared between or among a community and that tend to be non-exclusive, that is, be available to third parties. Thus, they are oriented to favor use and reuse, rather than to exchange as a commodity. Additionally, the community of people building them can intervene in the governing of their interaction processes and of their shared resources."Examples of digital commons are Wikipedia, free software and open-source hardware projects.
Following the narrative of post-growth, the digital commons can present a model of progress that guide commoners to build counter-power in the economic and political field. Being able to digitally share knowledge and resources through internet platforms is a new capacity that challenges the traditional hierarchical structures of production, allowing for a higher collective benefit and a sustainable management of resources. Non-material resources are digitally reproducible and therefore can be shared at a low cost, contrary to physical resources which are quite limited. Shared resources represent in this context data, information, culture and knowledge which are produced and accessible online. In accordance with the "design global, manufacture local" approach digital commons may link the traditional commons theory with existing physical infrastructures. It further connects with the degrowth communities since transformations in use-value creation by employing new technologies, decoupling society from GDP growth and lower carbon dioxide emissions, are envisioned.
Moreover, as a decentralized approach, there is a strong emphasis on inclusion and democratic regulation which has led Commons as an alternative, emancipatory and emerging form of social organization that goes beyond democratic capitalism. Accordingly, through the cooperation of diverse stakeholders and the equitable distribution of means of production, technological development becomes more accessible and bottom-up projects are fostered in communities.