This is the second in a two-part blog series focused on the commons. To get acquainted with the concept of the commons, click here for the first installment, The commons: more than just resources.

In her Nobel Prize-winning work “Governing the Commons” (1990), Elinor Ostrom revolutionized academic understanding of collective resource management. “The commons” refers to the places and resources governed through a collaborative approach known as commoning. Ostrom’s work corrected the now-infamous doctrine of a certain “tragic” environmentalist, who argued that individual self-interest would inevitably destroy the commons (we try not to invoke his name too often at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS)). 

Ostrom rebutted that the commons are moderated by institutions with rules that ensure productivity and prosperity. And she proved that the commons and their institutions are rational—in many societies, commoning made good economic sense. 

Since then, scholars have unearthed numerous examples of successful commons and commoning institutions, as well as many failures. But a preoccupation with success and failure takes the outcome for granted. We know less about how commons and commoning institutions grow or, importantly, how they change and respond to change. As part of the Commons, Commoning and Social Change initiative, SEAS Professor Arun Agrawal and a team of graduate student researchers ask: What makes commons durable, even when disrupted? What makes commons resilient, providing them with the “capacity to handle disturbance whilst maintaining the capacity for adaptation, learning and transformation”? (Baibarac and Petrescu 2017).

So far, the research team has read more than 350 peer-reviewed articles and extracted more than 200 empirical examples of commoning. We find that it’s best to think of commons not as tidy case studies or sets of buttoned-up institutions, but as human-environment experiments rolling on the currents of change. Here are a few lessons we’ve learned about commoning and change. 

Changing motivations

Understanding commoners’ motivations is key to understanding how commons survive turbulence. Ostrom’s scholarly framework focused on rational, productivity-minded motivations. But this obscures “irrational” reasons for commoning—things like cultural, symbolic, and emotional significance.

These types of motivations are particularly prominent where there is long-term continuity between a people and a place. For millennia, the Hunzakutz people in northern Pakistan have sustainably managed and distributed glacial water through a cultural system known as rajaki. Rajaki combines traditional environmental knowledge and hydrological engineering practices. It has endured partly because the relationship between people and environment is central to Hunzakutz identity, surviving religious transformation, out-migration, a new reliance on imported goods, and—with increasing urgency—the impacts of climate change on glaciers. The inseparability of culture and environment provides a strong foundation for commoning to persist through tremendous change: “In the case of the Hunzakutz, nature and culture, commons and community, or commoning and communal continuity are inextricably intertwined” (Khalid 2021).

Symbolic motivations can be powerful even after a culture has been cut off from traditional environmental relations. Satoyama (“village hills” or “village woods”) near Tokyo were lands traditionally managed by villages. But these traditions were lost as the woods shifted into private and then state ownership, declining in health along the way. Then, in the 1960s, sentiments of nostalgia and cultural loss among Japanese suburbanites sparked a “satoyama renaissance” in which volunteer groups restored parts of the fragmented woodlands. Historic and symbolic attachments, rather than economic logic, explained this motivation. 

What these show is that cultural, symbolic, and emotional motivations can create commons, sustain them through change, or even re-initiate commoning after a lapse—and those motivations may not be adequately explained by “rational” frameworks that measure success in terms of productivity or wealth. 

Changing contexts

But productivity and wealth are highly valued in Western economic logic and law. So are free-market capitalism, private property, and individualism—none of which are conducive to commoning. This is a recipe for disruption. When commoning contradicts the status quo, it can provoke confusion or pushback. Sometimes, this results in failure or capitulation. Other times, commoning strengthens in resistance to external pressure.

The growth of commoning is often a trigger. In an example from Galicia, Spain, local people known as comuneiros collectively owned hundreds of acres of land and managed the land’s outputs, including its organic waste. To promote sustainability, they proposed building a biomass composting plant. This expansion project required integration with external waste management rules and political partnerships, and at first, the comuneiros attracted outside support. But political and economic cohesion eroded, and the project became a victim of “political football,” neglected by diminishing municipal interest until it eventually withered to nothing.

In Germany, sustainable food advocates founded foodsharing.de, a volunteer-run digital commons that brokered food exchanges between participants. To strengthen their commitment to food security, volunteers in Berlin attempted to establish an open-access community fridge network. But public fridges clashed with Berlin Senate and European Union law, which apply codes of traceability and liability to food exchanges. These regulations are in place to keep consumers safe, but are incompatible with commons-based food sharing. An uncomfortable period of compliance ensued. Volunteers reframed the food as “club goods,” placing locks on fridges that required membership to open. This satisfied the law, but weakened the original purpose and vision.

Failure and capitulation are not the only options. When confronting an unsupportive or hostile external environment, commoners can also resist. Commoning in resistance—say, against corporate land grabs or state violence—is different from commoning to manage a resource. In these cases, commoners’ refusal to comply with laws, expectations, or economic logic is part of the strategy to transform their surroundings rather than submit to undesirable change themselves. 

Like the Hunzakutz in Pakistan, the Standing Rock Sioux in South Dakota have an ancient relationship with their lands and waters. But the colonial expansion of the United States utterly changed the political, legal, and ecological context of this relationship. This modern context was the one in which the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies launched protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline in 2016. The protests were accompanied by commoning practices of collective living and assemblies. The commons revived Indigenous principles of mutual respect and ceremony with the land, but they were also in conscious resistance to colonization: Standing Rock water protectors were not simply demonstrating reciprocal relations between humans and nature, but radically re-establishing collective sovereignty on their traditional territories.

Changing practices

Commoning practices—the structures, routines, and humdrum acts that make up the daily work of commoning—reflect both motivations and contexts. Ostrom’s work highlighted the rules and practices that support successful commons, like delineating community membership and weeding out free-riders. Later scholars emphasized that practices of inclusivity, frequent communication, and horizontalism—open, non-hierarchical decision-making—are key to successful commons. But these practices aren’t static, and we’ve found that they, too, evolve to help commons navigate change.

Idealistic practices of open communication and horizontalism, for example, can be warped in a commons where there is a history of power imbalance or inequality. While the Standing Rock water protectors welcomed settlers and white allies to their commons, many of these visiting participants were originally motivated by principles of environmentalism rather than Indigenous sovereignty. For the movement to stay true to its purpose and integrity, allies’ participation was based on an expectation that they would follow Standing Rock leadership and refrain from speaking over Indigenous voices. As scholar Dorothy Kidd explained, “In a context of power inequalities, we cannot assume that more (face-to-face) communication necessarily leads to cooperation; indeed it may contribute to increasing aggression” (Kidd 2019).

Ostrom emphasized the practice of creating rules and institutions to sustain the commons. In Germany, foodsharing.de institutionalized formal rules to govern safe food-sharing practices. And at Standing Rock, leadership established codes of conduct in common spaces. But both of these commons included some level of voluntary participation, and they also align with some scholars’ observations that formalized rules and practices are more appropriate for commoning contexts where trust is low, or risk is high.

In other contexts, flexibility toward rules is a more important practice than rigid adherence. This is particularly relevant in commons where participants may find themselves part of the group due to circumstance, not purely by choice. 

Flexibility can take several forms. While the Hunzakutz people have a traditional communal obligation to participate in rajaki, some villagers may choose not to participate and instead pay a fine that supports the work. And in examples of housing commons from the U.S. and Belgium, differential commoning emerges as a key practice. Both the Pine Grove manufactured housing park in New Hampshire and the Comensia affordable housing unit in Brussels adopted cooperative ownership models, which changed the expectations and responsibilities of residents. In both places, a similar challenge emerged: the same residents were serving on the board or volunteering to maintain the commons, while others participated minimally or sporadically. Practices evolved to welcome, rather than resist, such “uneven commoning.” This helped smooth over differences and incorporate members into the commons without extracting equal time commitments from everyone. In Pine Grove, residents were encouraged to contribute whatever skills they had, even toward a single project. In Comensia, the co-op attracted stable involvement through introductory commoning activities such as crafts workshops. 

As a result, both Pine Grove and Comensia differ from Ostrom’s research on established institutional rules: there are no well-enforced rights or duties, no attempt to weed out free riders. But these practices evolved to accept that uneven circumstances and different abilities within communities can never be fully eliminated. They must be allowed and accommodated for the commons to survive.

Commoning into the future

Elinor Ostrom's groundbreaking work challenged the notion of a tragic end for the commons, emphasizing successful examples of commons and commoning. Our research expands these success stories to explore how commons endure disruption and disturbance—sometimes successfully, other times less so. Commons may be dormant for years, then re-emerge. Cultural and symbolic motivations can fuel resilience even in the face of significant changes. Commoning can contort in response to external pressures that seek to absorb the commons into a mainstream, property-dominated world, and practices evolve to cope with challenges arising both internally and externally.

The more we understand about what makes the commons resilient and durable, the more likely we are to experiment with the commons as a new model of collective management for our everyday lives. Our hope is that our research—in its future form as a series of articles—will contribute to these collective understandings and these experiments with commoning.  

Jess Silber-Byrne (MS ’23) studied environmental justice and sustainability and development at SEAS, and earned the Science, Technology, and Public Policy certificate at the U-M Ford School for Public Policy. Under the guidance of SEAS Associate Professor Bilal Butt, her master’s thesis is a systematic review of wildlife-livestock research across East Africa’s rangeland commons, private landscapes and public parks, addressing the evidence’s implications for future conservation policy.

References

Aernouts, Nele, and Michael Ryckewaert. "Reproducing housing commons. Government involvement and differential commoning in a housing cooperative." Housing studies 34.1 (2019): 92-110.

Baibarac, Corelia, and Doina Petrescu. "Open-source resilience: A connected commons-based proposition for urban transformation." Procedia Engineering 198 (2017): 227-239.

Bolthouse, Jay. "End of tradition, reworking of custom: re-assembling satoyama woodlands on Tokyo’s urban fringe." Cultural Severance and the Environment: The Ending of Traditional and Customary Practice on Commons and Landscapes Managed in Common. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2013. 387-399.

Khalid, Zainab. "Rajaki: An indigenous approach to commoning in Hunza, Pakistan." Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas. Routledge, 2021. 202-219.

Kidd, Dorothy. "Standing rock and the Indigenous commons." Popular Communication 18.3 (2020): 233-247.

Morrow, Oona. "Sharing food and risk in Berlin’s urban food commons." Geoforum 99 (2019): 202-212.

Noterman, Elsa. "Beyond tragedy: Differential commoning in a manufactured housing cooperative." Antipode 48.2 (2016): 433-452.

Smets, Peer, and Louis Volont. "Institutionalizing Non-institutionalization: Toward Sustainable Commoning." Frontiers in Sustainable Cities 4 (2022): 742548.

Swagemakers, Paul, Maria Dolores Dominguez Garcia, and Johannes SC Wiskerke. "Socially-inclusive development and value creation: how a composting project in Galicia (Spain)‘hit the rocks’." Sustainability 10.6 (2018): 2040.