Commons and their Role in the Ecological Transition

* Report: The Commons and their Role in the Ecological Transition. By Wojtek Kalinowski. Veblen Institute, 2013

URL = http://www.veblen-institute.org/The-Commons-and-their-Role-in-the pdf

Description

"Thanks to the work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom, the commons have become fashionable, and yet the term’s meaning lends itself to various usages. Beyond a few well-known cases, such as the management of natural resources or digital commons, the concept’s true potential remains to be explored, particularly in the realm of the joint production of services.

The “toolkit” of environmental policy experts is full of regulatory devices conceived “from above”: through quality standards, direct intervention, and financial incentives (envi-ronmental taxes, subsidies, permit trading, etc.), central authorities decree the rules of the game that markets, individuals, and companies are expected to follow. These tools are often indispensable. They rest, however, on (at least) two improbable assumptions:

that the decision-making authority is better informed than local actors about what should be done; that the same causes always produce the same effects, regardless of the local context. Consequently, these policies depend heavily on experts, even as they distance themselves from local knowledge and the idea that some goods—for instance, certain kinds of local natural resources—could be regulated and managed directly by the concerned populations, rather than indirectly via the state and the market. Decision-makers grow even more skeptical when it is sug-gested that these goods could be managed “in common”—that they could be shared, in other words, by a community of users that creates its own usage rules and ensures that they are respected.

Yet this form of management does indeed exist and has often proved effective. The American scholars Elinor and Vincent Ostrom have demonstrated this fact, drawing on many concrete examples: a water basin shared by Californian farmers, an irrigation system managed by Spanish cultivators, Indian villages that share surrounding forests, a fishing village in Brazil, etc. In traditional societies and developed countries alike, they have shown the persistence of models of local manage-ment, based on cooperation rather than competition, in which sharing is regulated locally rather than by a central authority and where collective user rights replace exclusive property rights and commercial relationships. The issue is not only the level at which decisions are made, but determining which management forms can ensure that resources are used in a sustainable way."