In recent years, the case for "The Tragedy" has been rebutted by Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrum, who wrote "Beyond the Tragedy of the Commons." Ostrum examined how commons were actually used. She found that the so-called tragedy of the commons was not prevalent, nor was it difficult to solve. Indeed, people from local communities routinely develop controls over the commons to protect it from "the tragedy." In 1990, she wrote, "Governing the Commons," which examined the governance of natural resources. She found that neither state control nor privatization of resources was the appropriate answer and that commons are sometimes governed by voluntary organizations. She developed eight "design principles" of stable local management of commons. These are:
1. Clearly defined boundaries.
2. Rules regarding the appropriation and provision of common resources that are adapted to local conditions.
3. Collective-choice arrangements that allow most resource appropriators to participate in the decision-making process.
4. Effective monitoring by those who are part of or accountable to the appropriators.
5. A scale of graduated sanctions for those who violate community rules.
6. Mechanisms of conflict resolution that are cheap and of easy access.
7. Self-determination of the community recognized by higher-level authorities.
8. In the case of larger commons resources, organization in the form of multiple layers situated inside one another, like Russian nesting dolls.
These have been refined to include additional principles, e.g. effective communication, internal trust and reciprocity, and making connections between the various parts of the resource system as a whole.
The real tragedy of the commons is enclosure, which is what privatization used to be called. Marx called it "primitive accumulation" and observed that it is the origin of feudalism (landlordism with emphasis on "lord")) and capitalism (ownership of the means of production by a privileged class). Marx disputed Adam Smith's imagined narrative of the original enclosure arising spontaneously as hard workers utilize available resources, while slackers goofed off. Marx pointed to history, which is the record of powerful interests appropriating the commons by force, creating a privileged class of have's and a class of have-not's that whose existence was to serve the privileged class with their labor in order to use what had previously been held in common. This with their fellow countrymen. And with the rise of colonialism the process was even more brutal to the point of genocide in some places, for example, in America, when the native population resisted.
Building the Commons as an Antidote to the Predatory Market Economy
Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese
