Green politics and the commons
The commons is increasingly viewed as an alternative to private and state regulation. Green Parties and the wider green movement understand the commons in diverse ways as a means of environmental governance that helps us deal with climate change and other ecological threats. However, the commons as a self-managed institution cannot be legislated into existence. This article discusses the extent to which Green Parties can promote the commons, and is dedicated to the late Vincent Ostrom. Vincent Ostrom was concerned with how alternative property rights could promote environmental sustainability from the 1950s onwards. This article will examine how his work can be used to advance green politics and the pursuit of a republican commons.
Introduction
The concept of the commons as a form of collective property has been associated in the past with degradation of the environment via the phraseThe Tragedy of the Commons (Hardin, 1968). While the biologist GarrettHardin's 1968 Tragedy of the Commons paper for the journal Science is well known, the commons is increasingly seen as a solution to environmental problems rather than their cause (Bollier and Helfrich, 2012). A range of forms of commons, particularly in cyber space, but also in land and with the emergence of three-dimensional printing even in the form of formerly private goods, are growing. The absurdity of purely private approaches to resource use is poetically illustrated in an example cited by the French novelist Georges Perec:
In an old house in the 18th arrondissement I saw a WC that was shared by four tenants. The landlord refused to pay for the lighting of the said WC, and none of the four tenants was willing to pay for the three others, or had accepted the idea of a single meter and a bill divisible into four. So the WC was lit by four separate bulbs, each controlled by one of the four tenants. A single bulb burning night and day for ten years would have obviously been less expensive than installing a single one of these exclusive circuits. (Perec, 1999, pp. 44–45)
Green politics is increasingly associated with the idea of commons. This article argues that the concept of the commons can be linked to a wider republican politics based on self-governance. This is particularly well explained with reference to the work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. Green politics, commons and republicanism are all, of course, contested terms. Green politics associated with Green Parties, NGOs and grassroots direct action groups is not simply a manifestation of environmental concern. The German Green Party manifesto of 1983 provides four pillars of green politics, including ecology, grassroots democracy, social justice and non-violence (German Green Party, 1983, p. 7). Dobson (2007) argues it cannot be defined by environmental concern alone, but is a broader discourse that includes these pillars. There is a complex ideological history which cannot be discussed here; nonetheless with increasingly globalized environmental problems, green politics has become a more significant ideology or, if you like, family of ideologies or discourses, within recent decades.
‘Commons’, rather than being unmanaged and unowned, has been shown using empirical research to be sophisticated systems of collective management (Ostrom, 1990). The common encompassing language and other non-commodified resources shared by human beings can be distinguished from common pool property and common pool resources. Common pool resources can be managed via a number of different systems of ownership, while common pool property refers to specifically collective ownership. Commoning has been seen as the act of constructing and maintaining common pool property systems and in turn, may be associated with a community or via inter-commoning a number of different communities who share property. Republicanism, is a diverse set of political principles and practices, but originates from the Latin term res publica, meaning public space or public things. Indeed Vincent Ostrom noted its importance at the core of his political thought and observed, ‘[T]he term res publica – the public thing – is often viewed as the source of the word “republic”. The public thing – the open public realm – is the basic core of a democratic republic’ (Ostrom, 1989, p. 146).
Commons has been promoted as a solution within green politics sinceThe Ecologist magazine produced a special issue entitled Whose Common Future in 1992 (Hildyard et al., 1993). Green Parties are increasingly supportive of free- and open-source software, which are seen as commons-based alternatives. The Heinrich Böll Stiftung, a think tank associated with the German Green Party, has been a strong advocate of the commons (Helfrich et al., 2010). Commons promotes ecological sustainability through the principle of usufruct. The word denotes the right to use property as long as one leaves it as good a state as one found it. Usufruct promotes a fundamental principle of ecological sustainability. Incidentally, this was well expressed by Karl Marx
From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuries, and like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition. (Marx, 1976, p. 776)
Commons by promoting shared use also reduces resource impacts. In turn, commons is associated with self-governance and broad equality, promoting the green pillars of decentralization and social justice.
The subject of the commons has been explored from a variety of perspectives. Marx wrote extensively about common pool property (Linebaugh, 1976); Marxist historians such as Thompson (1991) extended his analysis. Much work on commons is carried out in an autonomist Marxist tradition by theorists such as Linebaugh (2008) and de Angelis (2007). The best-known commentators, perhaps, on the commons from an autonomist perspective are, of course, Hardt and Negri (2000). Legal scholars, anthropologists, geographers and others have examined the commons. The focus in this article is on the institutional analysis and development framework of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize, strictly speaking, the Swedish bank prize, for her work on the commons, in 2009. She collaborated with her husband Vincent Ostrom. They were both political economists rooted in an institutional approach.
The commons within an institutional analysis and development framework
Elinor Ostrom became the first women to win a Nobel Prize for economics. This was for her work on the commons. Very much a network scholar, her work on the commons was collaborative, undertaken with members of her research workshop at Indiana University and with both academics and commoners across the world. Her work on the commons was rooted in institutional economics. While institutional economics is very diverse, for example, both Karl Marx and Friedrich von Hayek have been conceptualized as institutional economists, in all its diverse forms it argues that economic activity occurs within a legal structure. Economic activity is impossible without institutions to govern it and to some extent all economics is a form of political economy.
Ostrom's work focused on environmental sustainability; her PhD study was on examining how water users in California worked together to prevent the destruction of their shared water resource. After hearing Garret Hardin lecture at Indiana University, where she worked, she focused her research on the commons. The water resource she had studied in the 1960s was a commons, and she knew from her work studying it that commons did not always fail. She was disturbed by Hardin's metaphor of ‘the tragedy of the commons’ and the way he used it to promote what she saw as authoritarian solutions to environmental problems. He insisted that in the absence of external control, a ‘commons in breeding’ would destroy the environment, suggesting that ‘Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all’.
For her doctorate, Ostrom had studied how communities organized to sustain water in Los Angeles West Basin, by rationing water use to stop salt water from being sucked in from the sea. Listening to Hardin she realized that she had studied something he claimed was impossible, a successful commons. In a 2010 interview, she recalled
That gave me insights into people, some of whom had spent 20, 30 years trying to solve this tough problem. There had not been one thing they did. They did a number of different things, including building a barrier against the ocean coming by putting water down through wells—very ingenious. I didn't know I was studying the commons.
[Hardin argued that such cooperation was impossible but] he really was worried about population. He indicated that every man and every woman should be sterilized after they have one child. He was very serious about it… .
I was somewhat taken aback. ‘My theory proves that we should do this,’ and people said, ‘Well, don't you think that that's a little severe?’ ‘No! That's what we should do, or we're sunk.
Well, he, in my mind, became a totalitarian. I, thus, had seen a real instance where his theory didn't work. (Annual Reviews Conversations, 2010, p. 8)
While there are a number of ways of conceptualizing the commons, Ostrom's starting point was to use empirical research ranging from case studies to statistical analysis and even experiments, to study actual commons (Ostrom, 2005). She saw academic politics and other human sciences as practical endeavours that should help us understand how we can individually and collectively make better governance decisions. The problem of how to use a resource such as a fishing ground or a forest or grazing land, without destroying the resource was the focus of her work. Thus her concern with environmental sustainability and her work on how this can be achieved practically have an obvious interest for both green political theorists and green activists.
Her initial findings, which were based on case studies of commons in Switzerland, Japan, Spain and the Philippines, provided the basis for her book Governing the Commons. She agreed with Hardin that an unowned, unmanaged form of commons would lead to disaster. However, she argued that privatizing a commons by selling it or nationalizing it by giving it to the government were often unrealistic alternatives. She found that successful commons were carefully managed by commoners, use was rationed and collective work such as building fences or digging ditches was undertaken. Although sometimes difficult, it was possible for people to work collectively to sustain their environments. In turn, she was careful to distinguish between common pool resources and common pool property. A resource might be common such as a fisheries, but governed by a range of property systems, for example, it might be controlled and owned by the state. Common pool property, in contrast, is an institution that denotes collective ownership by a group of commoners. One of the case study examples she examined was that of Torbel in Switzerland, where communal land has been owned and managed collectively since at least the thirteenth century:
Written legal documents dating back to 1224 provide information regarding the types of land tenure and transfers that have occurred in the village and rules used by the villages to regulate the five types of communally owned property: the alpine grazing meadows, the forests, the ‘waste’ lands, the irrigation systems, and the paths and roads connecting privately and communally owned properties (Ostrom, 1990, p. 62).
Ostrom's broad approach developed with her husband Vincent was known as the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework, and it used a wide variety of techniques within a research structure that sought to understand how individuals worked with sets of rules to develop solutions to practical governance problems. While her complex and subtle work cannot be easily summarized in a few words, her initial study of commons in Governing the Commons helped her develop eight broad design principles that she felt were common to long-lasting commons. A non-dogmatic thinker, she did not seen any of these as absolute rules and revised them in the light of further research and criticism (Ostrom, 2012, p. 78). Her work on the commons, both in the form of resources and property, can be understood within a tradition of civic republican politics, informed by the work of her husband Vincent Ostrom.
Republicanism and the commons
Elinor Ostrom died of pancreatic cancer in June 2012 and her husband died just a week later, also of cancer. While she won a Nobel Prize, it is easy to forget his contribution to the human sciences, but he was a remarkable and provocative thinker, whose work should be both critiqued and celebrated. He was a political scientist, and he married Elinor who was initially his student. They worked in a collaborative way and were advocates of ‘contestation’ by which they meant intellectual challenge. I suspect, although I do not know, that on some topic such as, perhaps, feminism they have had somewhat different opinions, but they valued difference as a way of testing and developing their views. They also made furniture together and believed that academic disciplines such as politics and economics were forms of craft (Ostrom, 2010, p. 17). One might design a chair for a combination of functionality and beauty but they also believed that political institutions involved similar processes of design. Focused disagreement in the form of ‘contestation’ was one of their tools.
It is extremely difficult to give a label to Vincent Ostrom's perspectives. There is much evidence that would suggest that he was a liberal or even a libertarian. He often cited liberal thinkers such as de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, Hayek and James Buchanan. He was highly critical of Marx and Lenin and was a president of the free market Public Choice Society. Yet he was greatly inspired by African revolutionary Amilcar Cabral (1997, p. 250), grew to reject public choice as too narrow, and while, like Elinor, he agreed that Hayek was right that planning might be oppressive, they both believed that without conscious human design political and economic systems would fall apart (Toonen, 2010). He was like Greens, a strong advocate of both decentralization and sustainability. His practical contribution to environmental policy making was impressive, for example, he helped write the Alaskan Constitution that provide rules for environmental sustainability. In the 1960s, both the US Republicans and Democrats invited him to contribute to writing environmental policies – he picked the Democrats (Allen and Ostrom, 2011).
Republicanism is not to be associated purely with the rightward shift of the US Republican Party, but is part of a long political tradition based on self-governance. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, like the Ostroms, are passionate advocates of the commons and suspicious of over might states and power concentrations. They are also strongly associated with Autonomist Marxism, the strain of Marxism that focuses most on the concept of the commons both as a resource and as a property relation. Michael Hardt is a US literary theorist; Antonio Negri is a philosopher and former political prisoner. Their wider body of intellectual work draws upon Marx and post-structuralist thinkers such as Foucault. Like the Ostroms, they are advocates of republican political thinkers. Republican politics as a way of running states and writing their constitutions, republicanism as another ‘ism’ along with anarchism, socialism and liberalism, can be also be linked to the micro politics of the management of shared things. Res publica literally means, as noted previously, public things, which, of course, is a good description of the commons. Hardt and Negri (2000) note that the civic republicanism of Ancient Greece and Rome, where kings were replaced with constitutional systems, had been embraced in the late medieval European city-states. While associated with a manipulative power politics, Machiavelli was also a strong advocate of republican democracy. Hardt and Negri, seen as communist advocates of the commons, never cited Vincent Ostrom, but their perspectives are parallel in advocating republican democracy. Political commentators such as Pocock (2003) and Skinner (1998) note that Machiavelli's work inspired English revolutionaries in the seventeenth century. During the English civil war and its immediate aftermath, radicals such as those who gathered for the Putney debates proclaimed their desire for a republic. Republican ideas travelled to America when, as Negri and Hardt note, ‘republican Machiavellianism that, after having inspired the protagonists of the English Revolution, was reconstructed in the Atlantic exodus among European democrats who were defeated but not vanquished’. (Hardt and Negri, 2000, p. 162). Vincent Ostrom proclaimed his belief that the authors of the US constitution had constructed a new science for a new age. He was enthusiastic about the fact that despite the later failings of the US system individuals had sat down to design a democratic political system (Ostrom, 1989).
Hardt and Negri's words closely parallel Vincent Ostrom's analysis arguing that
The American Revolution and the ‘new political science’ proclaimed by the authors of the Federalist broke from the tradition of modern sovereignty, ‘returning to origins’ and at the same time developing new languages and new social forms that mediate between the one and the multiple. (Hardt and Negri, 2000, p. 161)
Civic republicanism has been the subject of much recent debate and, in turn, there have been attempts most notably by the Irish political scientist and Green Party councillor John Barry to construct a green republicanism (1999). Vincent Ostrom's work provides a link between both the study of the commons and republican constitution making and a way of understanding the link between green politics and republicanism. While insititutionalist and autonomist Marxist conceptions of the commons can be contrasted, they both drew upon a republican tradition of self-government, which can be contrasted with either a centrally planned system or an anarchist rejection of all governance.
Green politics and the commons
Elinor Ostrom did not advocate common pool property as a universal panacea as she felt that there was also a role for both private and market based property and mechanisms. However, she found that common pool property often worked well to promote sustainability. The argument for the commons as an ecological solution can be justified in a number of ways as has been noted. In addition, it is worth noting that commodification of society and the environment has destructive consequences resulting in market failure; however, top-down solutions from the state also often fail. The promise of common pool property as a governance mechanism is that it promotes long-term sustainability, whereas marketization can lead to an over-emphasis on short-term profit at the expense of sustainability. Central planning can fail to make use of local knowledge and produce inflexible approaches to environmental governance. Common pool property has, in many circumstances, a good record of maintaining sustainability. Elinor Ostrom noted the importance of a long-term perspective in policy making, observing
Our problem is how to craft rules at multiple levels that enable humans to adapt, learn, and change over time so that we are sustaining the very valuable natural resources that we inherited so that we may be able to pass them on. I am deeply indebted to the indigenous peoples in the U.S. who had an image of seven generations being the appropriate time to think about the future. I think we should all reinstate in our mind the seven-generation rule. When we make really major decisions, we should ask not only what will it do for me today, but what will it do for my children, my children's children, and their children's children into the future. (Cited in Wall, 2010, p. 49)
Commons, commoning and the common are increasingly part of the vocabulary of the left, the greens and of protest movement such as Occupy (Dean, 2012). They speak to those who reject capitalism, but acknowledge that state centred socialism has often led to inefficiency, environmental destruction and a lack of democratic input. The specific input of Elinor Ostrom and sometimes even Vincent Ostrom, who were not explicit anti-capitalists, is often acknowledged; however, I am not sure that the most important aspects of their work are always well understood. Both Ostroms were suspicious of broad generalities, and green politics can be marked by generalizations rather than specific measures. Her contribution was to study working common pool property systems in great detail to see how they worked best and where they did not work why they failed. It is built not on a broad ideological assumption that commons are beneficial, but a specific focus on understanding how they work best. Her shared normative concerns with green politics included both decentralized democracy and environmental sustainability but she applied huge intellectual effort to seek to operationalize these norms practically. If we are to extend the commons and run more institutions collectively and sustainably, similarly detailed research efforts must be undertaken. It is often wrongly thought that she rejected large-scale solutions: this is false, she was scathing about those who claimed she was an advocate of ‘small is beautiful’. In fact, during her last decade of work she applied her ideas to conceptualizing social-ecological systems, noting that local commons needed to be nested within other structures. She also argued that both social and natural sciences needed to provide expertise if we were to identify and solve environmental problems such as climate change, which are the product of social, economic and political forces.
There is a contradiction for Green Parties attempting to advance the commons – commons cannot be constructed by the state, but the influence of the state cannot be ignored. Common pool property is a legal category, which, like other forms of property, governs access to resources. Property is about power and the state continues to shape property rights. Thus, the state can enclose and dissolve the commons, as it did with the English commons historically. Yet communing, an active process cannot be wished into existence, but involves participation. This draws us back to the specific contribution of Vincent Ostrom. Common pool property is governed by sets of rules developed by the commoners. Like Foucault, he argued that power is constructive and runs right through society. The republican principle involves constructing sets of rules to allow both political and economic self-government. Republics do not just exist at the level of the state; different institutions at can potentially be managed democratically as republics. The rules of a school, a local association or a common can be conceptualized as instruments of self-governance. This insight is captured in the title of Robert Wade's book Village Republics(1988), which examines Indian common pool property systems.
Common pool property has been seen as contributing to the goals of the green movement broadly defined. There are number of different ways of conceptualizing the commons; however, I would argue the approach of Vincent and Elinor Ostrom is of value, for several reasons, from a green politics perspective. The Ostroms shared a number of key normative values with the green movement including sustainability and decentralization. Elinor, in particular, undertook detailed empirical research into the commons, along with social-ecological systems, which should inspire practical policy making. The Ostroms' work reminds us that commoning can be understood as part of a broader civic republican tradition. Yet while there has been increased interested in both civic republicanism and green republicanism, the Ostrom's observation that political science should be practical craft is an important and often over looked insight. As Vincent Ostrom might well have said broad statements of political intent mean very little, the puzzle and practice of how to specifically make governance work, ecologically and democratically, is what matters.
+Author Affiliations
- ↵*Address for correspondence: Derek Wall, Development House, 56–64 Leonard Street, London, EC2A 4LT, UK; email: wallddd@hotmail.com
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