Prosperity of the Commons.

Capitalism is as much an economic system as a propaganda machine. From the Tatcherism ‘There Is No Alternative’ to the notion that markets are efficient, capitalism has managed to ingrain their ideas so profoundly in the public mind that they are never questioned.

One of these ‘self-evident’ notion is the well-known “Tragedy of the Commons”. Introduced by Hardin in 1968, it tells a simple and seemingly reasonable story: As rational actors, each person having access to a shared natural resource (such as fisheries or forests) will face a situation akin to a ‘prisonner’s dilemna’, and her dominant strategy will always be to use the resource for their own interest and until it is overexploited. What’s more, Harding didn’t just claim that some commons turned tragic - he claimed that all commons would suffer this same inevitable fate.

“Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons”  Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons

Now, Hardin’s piece was neocolonialist propaganda in disguise. Among his proposed solutions to the tragedy of the commons was coercive population control: “Freedom to breed is intolerable,” he wrote in his 1968 essay, and should be countered with “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon”. As an eugenist, he also proposed that “those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more.”¹

Making abstraction of the author’s agenda, the problem is that his claim is just not true. Even in 1968, there were plenty of examples of successfully managed commons.

In her extensive research, Elinor Ostrom documented a large collection of successfully managed commons, from fisheries to forests, pastures or irrigation systems around the world.

Some of the examples she studied are fairly large scale, with complex setups and external constraints. For example, more than 12,000 farmers collectively manage an irrigation system in Spain, allocating scarce water between farmers, each with their different needs and claims over the resources. Some of these arrangements have been in place for hundreds of years, despite the many changes and challenges they had to face over time (such as increasing population, evolving laws, or changes in water flow patterss).

And taken together such initiatives add up: In Japan, more than 3 millions hectares of forests are managed as commons.

What’s more, we are not just talking about small-holder farmers or village families coming together to self-organize. In California, land owners and farmers created joint water management collectives together with cities and (public and private) water companies. Despite their vast differences in scale (and thus power), water rights, and interests², these different parties or appropriators (the technical term for the parties who have access and the right to use the commons) agreed to collectively cutback their withdrawls to ensure the long-term replenishment of their basins.

All these examples confirm that it is possible to successfully manage commons in complex setups and over many generations.

“Unfortunately, many analysts – in academia, special-interest groups, governments, and the press – still presume that common-pool problems are all dilemmas in which the participants themselves cannot avoid producing suboptimal results, and in some cases disastrous results.” Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons

Interestingly, Ostrom also examined cases where commons management would fail. From these sucesses and failures, she identified 8 design principles that characterize succesfull commons. Among them are the need for appropriation rules that are tailored to the local conditions, the ability of appropriators to participate in modifying the rules governing the commons, monitors that are accountable to the appropriators, and a conflict-resolution mechanism that can be accessed rapidly and at low cost (along with graduated sanctions).

In addition, one of the main success factor was that the right of appropriators to devise their own institutions without being challenged by external goverment entities. Put differently, one of the main threat to successfully establishing or managing commons over time are states imposing simplistic rules without recognizing the specificities of local conditions and the validity of local arrangements.

All this contrasts with the prevailing wisdom that shared resources need to be either fully privatized (rational economic actors will always be good stewards of the land) or managed centrally by the state to avoid the tragedy of the commons.

In many cases, fully privatizing or managing shared resources centrally by government entities are unlikely to succeed. Giving people the freedom to self-organize while supporting their monitoring and enforcement mechanics seems to provide a sweet spot for sucessful and long-term management of commons.

“But until a theoretical explanation – based on human choice – for self-organized and self-governed enterprises is fully developed and accepted, major policy decisions will continue to be undertaken with a presumption that individuals cannot organize themselves and always need to be organized by external authorities.” Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons

Ostrom’s insights finally came in the spotlight in 2007 when, aged 76, she received the ‘Nobel Prize of Economics’. Even so, her sophisticated work is still not widely known and hasn’t dislodged Hardin’s metaphor from the public imagination.

And herein lies the real tragedy: Simple and self-serving stories are amplified by capitalists and overshadow the more profound and complex reality that humans are able to collectively organize and thrive outside capitalism - and the state’s reach.