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In the last post in this series , we looked at the way early modern "stadial theory" connected between stages of civilization and property regimes. Now let us examine some of the classics of modern commons theory, noting the fondness of theorists for stories reminiscent of various aspects of stadial theory. I wish to highlight here not simply that commons theorists of many stripes tend to connect pressure on resources to property regimes, as unanimity on this point could plausibly be explained by observations of a pervasive phenomenon. It is rather the connection of these two parameters — pressure and property — with the early modern idea of civilizational stages characterized by hunting, pastoralism, agriculture, and sometimes commerce, that I find striking. Whether seeing these stages in terms of the march of Progress or a fall from Edenic bliss, nearly all commons theorists seem to be attracted to the basic narrative of stadial theory. Garret Hardinʼs “Tragedy of the Commo...

(Part II of the series, Part I is here .) The second half of the eighteenth century saw the development, primarily in Scotland (though with significant French and other precedents),  of what would come to be known as “stadial theory” or “four-stages theory.” This group of theories built on an age-old interest in the origins of society and its institutions, sharpened by contact with New World societies that reminded Europeans of societies described in classical Greco-Roman and biblical sources, and raised the issue of what separated “savage” or “barbaric” peoples from “civilized” ones. Stadial thinking offered a theory of progress: In its most specific form, the theory was that society ‛naturally’ or ‛normally’ progressed over time through four more or less distinct and consecutive stages, each corresponding to a different mode of subsistence, these stages being defined as hunting, pasturage, agriculture, and commerce. To each of these modes of subsistence, it came to be argued, there c...

To cap the series I've been doing on "The Tragedy of the Commons at 50"  (the last post is here ), I'm going to post my own contribution to the issue ( SSRN , Academia ), in installments. I'd be really happy to get feedback. This series makes a simple claim: that the commons theory of the last half century, in its various forms and schools, has been substantially shaped by early modern ways of thinking about the evolution of civilizations. In particular, it has hewed closely to models that gelled in the Enlightenment-era works known as “stadial theory,” passed down to the twentieth century through the disciplines of anthropology and human ecology, and strongly entrenched in the patterns of thought of property theorists to this day. I do not wish to argue that recent thinkers deliberately or consciously based their theories on early modern precedents, nor do I claim that their theories simply recast old theories, pouring old wine into new bottles. What I wish to ar...

Next to last in our series on "The Tragedy of the Commons at 50"  (the previous post, on Carol Rose's article, is here ) is Giacomo Bonan's piece, "Confronting Hardin: Trends and Approaches to the Commons in Historiography" . The abstract: This Article analyses both the role of historiography in Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons (1968) and his paper’s impact on historiographical debates of the last five decades. Concerning the role of historiography in Hardin’s argument, the ‘tragedy of the commons’ itself derived from a pamphlet written by a nineteenth century supporter of English enclosures, who proposed a variant of Malthus’ theory. If Hardin inevitably dealt with previous historical interpretations of the commons, the reverberations aroused by his paper have strongly influenced subsequent historical research on this subject. It is possible to group the historiographical production of the last decades concerning the commons into three main lines of rese...

Next in our series on "The Tragedy of the Commons at 50"  (the last post is here ) is Michel Morin's "Indigenous Peoples, Political Economists and the Tragedy of the Commons" . The abstract: In “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin implicitly moved from bounded commons — a pasture or a tribe’s territory — to the case of boundless commons — the ocean, the atmosphere and planet Earth. He insisted on the need for imposing limits on the use of these resources, blurring the difference between communal property and open access regimes. The success of his paper is due in great measure to his neglect of economic, scientific, legal  and anthropological literature. His main lifelong focus was on limiting population growth. He could have avoided the conceptual confusion he created by turning to well-known political economists such as John Locke and Adam Smith or, for that matter, jurists, such as Blackstone. Instead, he simply envisioned indigenous lands as an unbou...

Continuing the series on "The Tragedy of the Commons at 50" (the last post is here ), Fabien Locher's "Historicizing Elinor Ostrom: Urban Politics, International Development and Expertise in the U.S. Context (1970-1990)"  provides interesting historical context for the work of Ostrom and the huge body of commons studies she inspired. The abstract: The goal of this article is to write a social and political history of the now preeminent approach to the ‘commons’ institutions, by focusing on Elinor Ostrom’s contributions to its development. My methodology is that of Science and Technology Studies (STS). I focus here on the materiality of E. Ostrom and her team’s research practices (fieldwork, data collecting, indexing and analysis), on their intellectual and institutional strategies, their networking practices, how their research was funded, and their interactions with administrative and academic institutions and actors (USAID, NSF, National Academy of Sciences). ...

Next in the series of posts (the last one is here ) on "The Tragedy at 50" (by the way, if anyone wants a hard copy of the journal issue, please email me), is Harry Scheiber's "The 'Commons' Discourse on Marine Fisheries Resources: Another Antecedent to Hardin’s 'Tragedy'" . The abstract: Throughout the fifty years since its publication, Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” has been regarded as a seminal paper in the environmental movement, although his emphasis on population control (which actually formed the core concern of the article) has been largely forgotten. Hardin argued that free access by a growing population to common resources would inevitably lead to the depletion of those resources, citing as one example how maritime nations’ belief in the freedom of the seas, combined with their belief in the inexhaustibility of marine resources, had brought whales and many species of fish close to extinction. Hardin failed, however, to take acc...

Next in the series of posts on "The Tragedy at 50" (the last one is here ), we have Monica Eppinger's "Cold-War Commons: Tragedy, Critique, and the Future of the Illiberal Problem Space" . The abstract: Major twentieth-century social theories like socialism and liberalism depended on property as an explanatory principle, prefiguring a geopolitical rivalry grounded in differing property regimes. This article examines the Cold War as an under-analyzed context for the idea of “the tragedy of the commons.” In Soviet practice, collectivization was meant to provide the material basis for cultivating particular forms of sociability and an antidote to the ills of private property. Outsiders came to conceptualize it as tragic in both economic and political dimensions. Understanding the commons as a site of tragedy informed Western “answers” to the “problem” of Soviet collective ownership when the Cold War ended. Privatization became a mechanism for defusing old tragedie...

Irrigation canal in Provence Continuing the series of posts on "The Tragedy at 50 " (the first one is here ), here's the abstract of an article with a new, historical perspective on commons debates: Alice Ingold's "Commons and Environmental Regulation in History: The Water Commons Beyond Property and Sovereignty" : Do commons outline a different way of considering historical forms of environmental regulation? Might they represent a sort of alternative, apart from the usual model of environmental law which rests on public authorities and forms of restrictions of private rights? In order to grasp the complex relationship between environmental law and history, it is essential to pay attention to the state’s radical transformation in the nineteenth century, especially the separation (and separate definition) of administration and the judiciary. This article aims to historicize the commons, but also the state in order to escape the projected shadow of public adm...

As promised, I'm going to post on some of the articles that were published as part of the issue of Theoretical Inquiries in Law  on "The Tragedy at 50" , which I co-edited with Carol Rose. These articles attempt to provide historical context for the modern commons discourse. First up is Stuart Banner's "The Banality of the Commons: Efficiency Arguments Against Common Ownership Before Hardin" . The abstract: The Tragedy of the Commons tends to be remembered today as the canonical statement of the idea that commonly-owned resources will be overused. But this idea was well known for centuries before Hardin wrote. Hardin acknowledged that he got the example of cattle in a common field from the early nineteenth century economist William Forster Lloyd, and by Lloyd’s time the idea was already familiar and was already being applied to the analysis of overpopulation, Hardin’s primary concern. This paper will trace the history of the idea that common ownership is ine...

Last June we held a conference at TAU Law to explore the history of commons thought:  The Tragedy of the Commons at 50: Context, Precedents, and Afterlife . I'm happy to report that the papers have now been published in the latest issue of Theoretical Inquiries in Law , edited by Carol Rose and myself,  available here . I'll post more on the individual articles later; in the meantime here's the table of contents (the issue also has a couple of additional unrelated articles not listed below): The Banality of the Commons: Efficiency Arguments Against Common Ownership Before Hardin Stuart Banner Before the Tragedy of the Commons: Early Modern Economic Considerations of the Public Use of Natural Resources Nathaniel Wolloch Commons and Environmental Regulation in History: The Water Commons Beyond Property and Sovereignty Alice Ingold Cold-War Commons: Tragedy, Critique, and the Future of the Illiberal Problem Space Monica Eppinger The “Commons” Discourse on Marine Fisheries Reso...

An issue of Theoretical Inquiries in Law on "The Tragedy of the Commons at 50" that I am co-editing should be out in a couple of months, at which time I'll post about it. In the meantime I received this call for papers for a conference on a similar theme. Please contact the organizers if you have any questions. Georgetown University, Washington D.C. October 5-6, 2018 This year marks the 50th anniversary of Garrett Hardin's  The Tragedy of the Commons . In one of the most cited articles of the 20th Century, Hardin provided a stylized and memorable cautionary tale of how self-interested actions can destroy common resources. However, even as Hardin's work gained traction with a broad array of scholars in many fields of study, it also garnered its fair share of criticism. Indeed, while Hardin popularized the notion of the commons, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for her rigorous research refuting the core tenets of Hardin's cautionary tale-- namely that open acce...

At the end of  the previous post in this series  I argued that the history of environmental law remains in need of extensive work both in uncovering the legal roots of contemporary environmental law and in making the lateral connections between historical environmental law and other historical topics. I would like to suggest that of these two dimensions—we might think of them as longitudinal and lateral—the first order of business should be longitudinal, deepening the temporal dimension of environmental law. We will be hard pressed to assess the significance of historical environmental law or its interactions with other areas of law and life without knowing what it was or what people thought about it. However, given that 'environmental law' is a recently coined term, where are we to look for historical environmental law? I will offer several directions of inquiry, some of them already explored by environmental and other historians, though often without the sensitivity to...

I recently came across what seems to me a really important article, John Wagner's "Water and the Commons Imaginary" , published in 2012 in Current Anthropology (along with a series of responses by other social scientists of the commons, including Elinor Ostrom, in what must have been one of her last writings). The abstract really doesn't do justice to the article's central argument, so I'll bring some excerpts here (citations omitted): The term “commons” has been appropriated over recent decades by individuals, corporations, and interest groups seeking to benefit from the positive emotional responses that the term seems to evoke. In some cases—shopping commons, for instance—use of the term appears to be mainly a marketing strategy, but in other cases the term carries a definite political argument, most typically an argument against commodification, privatization, or enclosure and in favor of egalitarian, grassroots approaches to resource management. It is at t...

(Continuing  the series on water rights :) The question of how and why water has been governed by regimes of private, public, and common property has occupied scholars for some time, often in tandem with the normative issue of which type of property regime is best for the resource.  Harold Demsetz As in many other fields, economic analysis has proved to be a dominant theoretical lens for understanding the development of water rights, generating both direct insights and provoking trenchant critiques. On the level of positive theory, many have built on the framework of Harold Demsetz's (1967) theory of property rights, according to which property regimes progress from common to private property as the increasing value of the resource in question, or pressure on it, renders the advantages of its privatization greater than the administrative costs of establishing and maintaining a private-property regime. According to this theory, we should expect to see water regimes characterized by...

Wastwater, the Lake District, England ( Canoekayak,com ) Rounding out coverage of September's issue of Water History,  Marianna Dudley published “Muddying the waters: recreational conflict and rights of use of British rivers” . The abstract: Rivers have historically been spaces of recreation, in addition to work, trade, and sustenance. Today, multiple groups (anglers, canoeists, rowers, swimmers) vie for the recreational use of rivers in Britain. But, this paper argues, legal definitions of rights of use have not kept up with the growth of recreational river use. Focusing on two groups, anglers and canoeists, it explores the emergence of conflict between recreational users of British rivers in the twentieth century, and subsequent campaigns for universal public rights of navigation on inland waterways. As a result of conflict (real and perceived), small-scale organized groups have re-conceptualized river spaces in ways that reflect a modern engagement with, and understanding of, wa...