Commons

The examples below illustrate types of environmental commons.

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.[7]

In middle Europe, commons (relatively small-scale agriculture in, especially, southern Germany, Austria, and the alpine countries) were kept, in some parts, till the present.[8] 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.[9] 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.

Based on a research project by the Environmental and Cultural Conservation in Inner Asia (ECCIA) from 1992 to 1995, satellite images were used to compare the amount of land degradation due to livestock grazing in the regions of Mongolia, Russia, and China.[10] In Mongolia, where shepherds were permitted to move collectively between seasonal grazing pastures, degradation remained relatively low at approximately 9%. Comparatively, Russia and China, which mandated state-owned pastures involving immobile settlements and in some cases privatization by household, had much higher degradation, at around 75% and 33% respectively.[11] A collaborative effort on the part of Mongolians proved much more efficient in preserving grazing land.

The widespread success of the Maine lobster industry is often attributed to the willingness of Maine's lobstermen to uphold and support lobster conservation rules. These rules include harbor territories not recognized by the state, informal trap limits, and laws imposed by the state of Maine (which are largely influenced by lobbying from lobster industry itself).[12] Essentially, the lobstermen collaborate without much government intervention to sustain their common-pool resource.

In the late 1980s, Nepal chose to decentralize government control over forests. Community forest programs work by giving local areas a financial stake in nearby woodlands, and thereby increasing the incentive to protect them from overuse. Local institutions regulate harvesting and selling of timber and land, and must use any profit towards community development and preservation of the forests. In twenty years, some locals, especially in the middle hills, have noticed a visible increase in the number of trees, although other places have not seen tangible results, especially where opportunity costs to land are high. Community forestry may also contribute to community development in rural areas – for instance school construction, irrigation and drinking water channel construction, and road construction. Community forestry has proven conducive to democratic practices at grass roots level.[13] Many Nepalese forest user groups generate income from the community forests, although the amount can vary widely among groups and is often invested in the community rather than flowing directly to individual households. Such income is generated from external sources involving the sales of timber from thinned pine plantations such as in the community forest user groups of Sindhu Palchok and Rachma, and internally in Nepal's mid-hills' broad leaf forests from membership fees, penalties and fines on rule-breakers, in addition to the sales of forest products. Some of the most significant benefits are that locals are able to use the products they gather directly in their own homes for subsistence use. [14]

Acequia is a method of collective responsibility and management for irrigation systems in desert areas. In New Mexico, a community-run organization known as Acequia Associations supervises water in terms of diversion, distribution, utilization, and recycling, in order to reinforce agricultural traditions and preserve water as a common resource for future generations.[15] The Congreso de las Acequias has since 1990s, is a statewide federation that represents several hundred acequia systems in New Mexico.[16]

In Paris, France, there are over 1200 free drinkable water fountains distributed throughout the city. The first 100 were donated by Englishman Sir Richard Wallace (1818–1890) in 1872, called the Wallace fountains, and since then the Parisian water company "Eau du Paris" have put more of them around the city, this give people living Paris and tourists all around the world access to free drinkable fresh water in Paris. Since then, many other countries like Spain, Brazil, Italy or Portugal have put these fountains on a lower scale. [17][18]

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.[19]

Tragedy of the commons in the Wiki-Commons is avoided by community control by individual authors within the Wikipedia community.[20]

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[21] and information like the Toxic 100, a list of the top 100 polluters,[22] helps people know what these corporations are doing to the environment.

Mayo Fuster Morell 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 (generally freely) 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."[23][24]

Examples of digital commons are Wikipedia, free software and open-source hardware projects.

Urban commons present the opportunity for the citizens to gain power upon the management of the urban resources and reframe city-life costs based on their use value and maintenance costs, rather than the market-driven value.[25]

Syntagma Square in Athens as urban commons

Tahrir Square in Cairo as urban commons

Urban commons situates citizens as key players rather than public authorities, private markets and technologies.[26] David Harvey (2012) defines the distinction between public spaces and urban commons. He highlights that the former is not to be equated automatically with urban commons. Public spaces and goods in the city make a commons when part of the citizens take political action. Syntagma Square in Athens, Tahrir Square in Cairo, Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv, and the Plaza de Catalunya in Barcelona were public spaces that transformed to an urban commons as people protested there to support their political statements. Streets are public spaces that have often become an urban commons by social action and revolutionary protests.[27] Urban commons are operating in the cities in a complementary way with the state and the market. Some examples are community gardening, urban farms on the rooftops and cultural spaces.[28] More recently participatory studies of commons and infrastructures under the conditions of the financial crisis have emerged.[29][30]

In 2007, Elinor Ostrom along with her colleague Charlotte Hess, did succeed in extending the commons debate to knowledge, approaching knowledge as a complex ecosystem that operates as a common – a shared resource that is subject to social dilemmas and political debates. The focus here was on the ready availability of digital forms of knowledge and associated possibilities to store, access and share it as a common. The connection between knowledge and commons may be made through identifying typical problems associated with natural resource commons, such as congestion, overharvesting, pollution and inequities, which also apply to knowledge. Then, effective alternatives (community-based, non-private, non-state), in line with those of natural commons (involving social rules, appropriate property rights and management structures), solutions are proposed. Thus, the commons metaphor is applied to social practice around knowledge. It is in this context that the present work proceeds, discussing the creation of depositories of knowledge through the organised, voluntary contributions of scholars (the research community, itself a social common), the problems that such knowledge commons might face (such as free-riding or disappearing assets), and the protection of knowledge commons from enclosure and commodification (in the form of intellectual property legislation, patenting, licensing and overpricing).[1] At this point, it is important to note the nature of knowledge and its complex and multi-layered qualities of non-rivalry and non-excludability. Unlike natural commons – which are both rival and excludable (only one person can use any one item or portion at a time and in so doing they use it up, it is consumed) and characterised by scarcity (they can be replenished but there are limits to this, such that consumption/destruction may overtake production/creation) – knowledge commons are characterised by abundance (they are non-rival and non-excludable and thus, in principle, not scarce, so not impelling competition and compelling governance). This abundance of knowledge commons has been celebrated through alternative models of knowledge production, such as Commons-based peer production (CBPP), and embodied in the free software movement. The CBPP model showed the power of networked, open collaboration and non-material incentives to produce better quality products (mainly software).[31]

A commons failure theory, now called tragedy of the commons, originated in the 18th century.[8] 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.[35] The same concept has been called the "tragedy of the fishers", when over-fishing could cause stocks to plummet.[36] Forster's pamphlet was little known, and it wasn't until 1968, with the publication by the ecologist Garrett Hardin of the article "The Tragedy of the Commons",[37] 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,[38] 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[39] 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.[40] 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.[41]

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.[42][39] For example, Ostrom found that grazing commons in the Swiss Alps have been run successfully for many hundreds of years by the farmers there.[43]

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.[44] This term was coined in an essay by legal scholar, Carol M. Rose, in 1986.[44][42][45]

Women have traditionally been at the forefront of struggles for commoning "as primary subjects of reproductive work". This proximity and dependence on communal natural resources has made women the most vulnerable by their privatization, and made them their most staunch defendants. Examples include: subsistence agriculture, credit associations such as tontine (money commons) and collectivizing reproductive labor. In "Caliban and the Witch",[48] Federici interprets the ascent of capitalism as a reactionary move to subvert the rising tide of communalism and to retain the basic social contract.

The process of commoning the material means of reproduction of human life is most promising in the struggle to "disentangle our livelihoods not only from the world market but also from the war machine and prison system." One of the main aims of the process of commoning is to create "common subjects" that are responsible to their communities. The notion of community is not understood as a "gated community", but as "a quality of relations, a principle of cooperation and responsibility to each other and the earth, the forests, the seas, the animals.[47] In communalizing housework, one of the supporting pillars of human activity, it is imperative that this sphere is "not negated but revolutionized." Communalizing housework also serves to de-naturalize it as women's labour, which has been an important part of the feminist struggle.[47]

As reproductive rights over unwanted pregnancies have been denied in many countries for many years, several resistance groups used diverse commoning strategies in order to provide women safe and affordable abortion. Care, knowledge, and pills have been made commons against abortion restriction. In New York, U.S., the group Haven Coalition[49] volunteer provide pre and post abortion care for people who have to travel for abortion which is considered illegal in their places of origins, and with New York Abortion Access Fund,[50] they are able to provide them with medical and financial assistance.[51] Underground networks outside medical service establishments are where women's networks oversee the abortion and assist each other physically or emotionally by sharing the knowledge of herbalism or home abortion. These underground groups operate under codenames like Jane Collective in Chicago or Renata[52] in Arizona. Some groups like Women on Waves from Netherlands use international waters to conduct abortion. Also, in Italy, Obiezione Respinta movement[53] collaboratively map spaces related to birth control such as pharmacies, consultors, hospitals, etc., through which users share their knowledge and experience of the place and provide access to information that is difficult to obtain.