Routledge Handbook of the Study of the Commons

Blake Hudson, Jonathan Rosenbloom, Dan Cole, Blake Hudson, Jonathan Rosenbloom, Dan Cole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351669238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Environmental Law
• Index: Law

This comprehensive Handbook serves as a unique synthesis and resource for understanding how analytical frameworks developed within the literature assist in understanding the nature and management of commons resources. Such frameworks include those related to Institutional Analysis and Development, Social-Ecological Systems, and Polycentricity, among others. The book aggregates and analyses these frameworks to lay a foundation for exploring how they apply according to scholars across a wide range of disciplines. It includes an exploration of the unique problems arising in different disciplines of commons study, including natural resources (forests, oceans, water, energy, ecosystems, etc), economics, law, governance, the humanities, and intellectual property. It shows how the analytical frameworks discussed early in the book facilitate interdisciplinarity within commons scholarship. This interdisciplinary approach within the context of analytical frameworks helps facilitate a more complete understanding of the similarities and differences faced by commons resource users and managers, the usefulness of the commons lens as an analytical tool for studying resource management problems, and the best mechanisms by which to formulate policies aimed at addressing such problems.

Chapter 26 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1

INTRODUCTION

Commons analytical frameworks and case studies

Blake Hudson, Jonathan Rosenbloom and Dan Cole

The term “commons” has come to mean many things to many people and is used inconsistently within the literature. Understanding what constitutes commons resources and their use has become even more challenging in light of the expanded application of commons study. Although the dilemmas associated with commons resource management had been raised in academic scholarship far earlier, Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons (1968) popularized the management difficulties faced by users of common pool resources (or CPRs). Since 1968 commons scholarship has expanded dramatically, both in depth of theoretical analysis and breadth of subject matter covered. Further, a number of regimes have been utilized to manage CPRs, including common-property regimes, government regulation, and private property. Expansion of commons scholarship coupled with the existence of multiple definitions and perspectives on what constitutes a “commons” make studying CPRs and their management both a theoretical and analytical challenge.

This book endeavors to provide a holistic perspective on the current state of commons study. It provides a broad overview of the arc of commons scholarship to date, paying particular attention to varying definitions and components of particular categories of commons analyses. It identifies cross-cutting themes and deconstructs foundational principles presented in commons literature by addressing the following questions: Who are the actors utilizing resources? What are the activities in which they are engaged? What institutions condition their activities? What are the resources affected by the actors’ activities? What assumptions are embedded in the terms “commons”? How is the “commons” label designed to help understand resource appropriation behaviors and how to manage that appropriation? How should those understandings be used to inform management modifications and policy decisions?

Commons scholarship has developed in at least three ways—theoretically, metaphorically, and through empirical case study. Part I presents the increasingly firm foundation of theoretical scholarship on the commons, which has resulted, in part, from the development and application of “frameworks of analysis,” or lenses through which to undertake commons study and understand the nature and management of commons resources. Part I explores questions such as: Why develop analytical frameworks of analysis to begin with? What are the core components of analytical frameworks and the fundamental, overarching goals driving their use? What are the most prominent frameworks in the field of commons literature? Which frameworks are best utilized for certain subject matter? Which frameworks are more useful in facilitating the interdisciplinary lens of analysis sought by many commons scholars? Are certain frames of analysis more widely applicable across subject matters?

Chapter 2 explores the implications of scientific communities using analytical frameworks of general applicability to organize research, exploring differences in framing, languages, and heuristics, and assessing the strengths and weaknesses of existing analytical frameworks utilized and how they may be improved to facilitate interdisciplinary study of commons problems. Chapter 3 drills down more deeply into the specific frameworks of Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) and Social-ecological Systems (SES), assessing the ways in which frameworks steer scholarly attention, shape conclusions, and provide a common, meta-theoretical language to enable scholars to engage with each other and produce comparable findings. Chapter 4 analyzes the theoretical and empirical development of the polycentric system framework, with a view toward facilitating a more nuanced identification of categories of polycentric systems and detecting those polycentric features that need to be strengthened in order for such a system to thrive. Chapter 5 delves into the connection between the conceptual framework of IAD and the empirical subject matter of the commons, and explores important connections across the IAD, SES, and polycentric frameworks.

Chapters 6 and 7 shift gear from the more frequently analyzed analytical frameworks and lay a foundation for understanding emerging commons frameworks—Anticommons and the Knowledge Commons Research Framework, respectively. Chapter 8 introduces the reader to how the metaphorical use of commons stories can itself provide a theoretical lens useful for understanding commons problems and solutions. Chapter 9 uses experimental economics to present an analytical framework for understanding the strategic incentives associated with the use of natural resources based upon the complementary analysis of production externalities and degradation externalities. Chapter 10 concludes the book’s theoretical section by developing an analytical framework that departs from narrow self-interest as the primary description of human behavior, and that describes the problem of cooperation in terms of fundamental needs and social cognition. The chapter examines three elements of governance systems—shared decision making, enforcement, and communication—that help to address several persistent questions about cooperation and outline the next generation of behavioral theories of the commons.

The aggregation and analysis of analytical frameworks developed in Part I lays a foundation for Part II’s exploration of how various analytical frameworks are applied by scholars from various disciplines. Part II presents case studies across diverse disciplines to demonstrate the modern day breadth of study on the commons. Part II covers traditional natural resource commons, like public lands, water, fisheries, and wildlife (Chapters 11, 12, 13, and 16) as well as emerging areas of natural resource commons study, such as coastal ecosystems, climate change, and ecosystem services generally (Chapters 14, 15, and 17). Part II then moves to the “new commons,” with chapters focused on the urban environment and infrastructure as commons (Chapters 18, 19, and 20). It further includes chapters on medical information and genomic data as commons, as well as technological commons (Chapters 21, 22, and 23). Chapter 24 places the “revival” of commons case studies into a historical perspective, while subsequent chapters look at governance structures and commons through the lenses of customary authority, post-socialist societies, civil society organizations and self-governance, and indigenous rights (Chapters 25, 26, 27, and 28). Chapter 29 provides a segue into Part III’s analysis of global scale commons by discussing globalization, local commons, and a framework for assessing multiscale ecosystems.

The interdisciplinary approaches presented in Part II within the context of analytical frameworks help facilitate a more complete understanding of both the shared and unique challenges faced by commons resource users and managers across a broad range of disciplines, the usefulness of the commons lens as an analytical tool for studying resource management problems, and the best mechanisms by which to formulate policies to address those problems. Part III provides a discussion of the future of commons study (Chapter 30) and the implications of managing resources on a global scale (Chapter 31).

The structure of this book is meant to both summarize the current state of commons literature and add to the literature by structuring the commons inquiry in a useful manner—that is, to illuminate the usefulness of analytical frameworks for commons study across various disciplines, to reveal which frameworks are most useful for forging interdisciplinarity, to highlight the current breadth of subject matter to which commons study has and can be applied, to indicate the circumstances that make some disciplines more conducive to study through particular frameworks, and to detail how various disciplines utilize specific analytical frameworks, how they speak across disciplines, and how they help us resolve commons resource use and management challenges. We hope this book tells a story that demonstrates a progression through time of the many different ways society conceives of commons resources, the methods used to analyze those resources, management problems identified through theoretical analyses, and solutions to those problems. In doing so, we believe this book highlights the most critical themes in commons scholarship to provide a broad and in-depth understanding of the current state of commons study.

Reference

Hardin, G. (1968) “Tragedy of the Commons” Science 162(3859): 1243–1248.

PART I

Theoretical frameworks and alternative lenses for analyzing commons

2

BRIDGING ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORKS AND DISCIPLINES TO WHICH THEY APPLY

Konrad Hagedorn, Philipp Grundmann and Andreas Thiel

Why develop a...