The Commons (Common-Pool Resource Institution)

The commons is an institution of collective ownership and management under which a group of users holds and governs a shared resource, such as pastureland, fisheries, forests, or irrigation water, through community-established rules of access and use rather than through individual private ownership or direct state control. Historically prominent examples include the common land of medieval and early modern English villages, on which local farmers held customary grazing and gathering rights, Swiss alpine grazing commons managed by village cooperatives for centuries, and traditional communally managed irrigation systems documented in Spain, the Philippines, and numerous other agrarian societies, each maintaining its own locally evolved rules governing who may use the resource, how much, and under what enforcement. The institution attracted major scholarly attention following ecologist Garrett Hardin's influential 1968 essay on the tragedy of the commons, which argued that shared resources are inherently prone to overexploitation, but this thesis was substantially revised by the empirical and theoretical work of political economist Elinor Ostrom, whose comparative studies of long-enduring commons institutions worldwide, for which she was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009, demonstrated that communities frequently develop durable, self-governing rules that sustain shared resources over centuries without either privatization or state ownership. Common-pool resource institutions remain an active subject of research in economic anthropology and institutional economics, and analogous commons-style governance arrangements continue to be studied and proposed for contemporary shared resources, from fisheries to digital information commons.