Editor's Introduction: Questioning the Commons: Power, Equity, and the Meaning of Ownership

• Date: 01 March 2016
• Published date: 01 March 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12140

The AMERICAN JOURNAL of

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Volume 75 March 2016 Number 2

Editor’s Introduction

Questioning the Commons: Power, Equity,

and the Meaning of Ownership

Introduction

The concept of “the commons” might seem to the casual observer to

be something of antiquarian interest—a method of managing farms

and pastures in England in the Middle Ages, but of little relevance

today. This is, in fact, a typical way for a student to encounter the

commons for the first time—in a 1968 article by Garrett Hardin,

cited over 27,000 times, in which the term “tragedy” is permanently

affixed to the English commons. In Hardin’s imagined scenario, the

commons is overgrazed as each household adds more livestock to

the pasture at little cost to itself. He uses this parable to demonstrate

that self-interest will lead to the ruin of any openly accessible

resource.

Hardin’s story (not necessarily his analysis) was shot through with

mistakes and ironies. The major mistake was to characterize English

commons as unmanaged when, in fact, there were assigned rights

governing access to pasture in every village. The greatest irony is

that the English commons was only a metaphor for Hardin. His

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 75, No. 2 (March, 2016).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12140

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C2016 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

main concern was that the human population of the planet is not

self-regulating and that no institution is capable of limiting it. Thus,

the commons he was writing about was not a medieval pasture but

the prospect of overpopulation today. Nevertheless, stories are

invariably more powerful than facts, so the “tragic” label has stuck

to every commons, whether it is managed or an open-access

commons.

Some argue, as a matter of definition, that the term “commons”

should be limited to conditions in which there is unregulated use of

or access to a resource. But that was not the meaning of “the

commons” in medieval England, which was highly regulated. It

overlaps with the meaning of res communes (lit. “common things”)

in Roman law, which referred to objects like the ocean and the sky

that were open to everyone. Some things (such as monuments)

were publicly owned (res publicae), and some objects (such as wild

animals) belonged to no one (res nullius). The Romans thought of

the sky and oceans as limitless. They did not imagine the scale of

modern technology by which the commons could be destroyed

through human activity. Thus, res communes did not refer to

unmanaged commons because there was no reason to think man-

agement was needed.

Hardin’s story of an unmanaged commons was not clear or pre-

cise. He told it in way that has now convinced several generations

that the solution to every collective problem is to “divide and

privatize.” If a fishery is being depleted, privatize it. If a forest is

being destroyed, privatize it. If pastures are being overgrazed, pri-

vatize them. Nature does not always cooperate fully with these

efforts to treat dispersed resources as private property (as when fish

populations migrate or fluctuate), but that does not affect the mind-

set that hopes to assign clear title to everything under the sun.

From Hardin to Ostrom and George

This was the context in which Elinor Ostrom introduced the seem-

ingly new idea that commons can be managed by small local groups

rather than by central governments or by private ownership. Several

authors in this issue point out correctly that this idea was not new.

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology266