With a bit of a grounding via Nordman, I'm digging directly into Nostrom's Governing the Commons now. It's fairly dense so I appreciate giving myself a bit of a primer. A brief aside: this was how I was taught to study the works of great, past thinkers in my Masters. Begin with a biography to help contextualize their thinking within their life.

Ostrom breaks down the false dichotomy between state and private enterprise as being the only solutions to shared resource management, suggesting (as Nordman has shown) that plenty of communities across history have self-governed. She looks at three models that have tended to form theory—and then policy—that have enabled this dichotomy. I'm not going to go into them here, but what I want to note is that these models are concerned with what she calls the free-rider problem: when individuals become incentivized to take the benefits without contributing. The concern being that if everyone free-rides, then the collective benefit is lost.

These models suggest that the only way to deal with this problem is through an outside institutional force—whether state or private enterprise—that distributes the resource and disincentivizes free-riders. What Ostrom rightfully points out, however, is that these forces are incentivized to benefit themselves and everyone else becomes subject to the state or private enterprise's enforcement methods.

What's important here is that we have see this over and over again. When the state or the private sector takes control of a limited and essential resource, it is exploited for their benefit while those who rely on the resource suffer.

Solving disputes is essential to shared resources and how to do that made up the core of Elinor Ostrom's principles for managing a commons. Nordman presents a case study on the Water Tribunal in Valencia, Spain that handles conflicts related to their water irrigation system. The system is made up of 8 canals, each one making up its own district. It is a system that has been self-managed for over a thousand years.

Every Thursday, the council—made up of 1 elected representative per district—meets outside the cathedral in Valencia to handle any disputes brought forward. Key to this is that anyone who owns land in one of the districts can come before the Tribunal seeking justice. In Valencia, this has long included women. As per Ostrom's principles, conflict-management needs to be accessible.

Nordman shares a painting of this by Bernardo Ferrandiz in 1863 that portrays a woman standing before the Tribunal. It's a beautiful portrayal of a system that has effectively managed an essential, shared resource in that area for centuries. He once again notes how social shame continues plays a role here, no farmer wants to be brought before the Tribunal—so interpersonal conflict management is key.

Elinor Ostrom's Eight Design Principles for Managing a Commons (per Nordman):

• The physical and social boundaries are clearly defined;

• Locally tailored rules define resource access and consumption;

• Individuals who are most affected by the rules can participate in rule making;

• Resource monitors are accountable to resource users;

• Graduated penalties can be imposed on rule breakers;

• Conflict management institutions are accessible;

• Authorities recognize the right to self-organize;

• Complex systems are organized into layers of nested governance.

Ostrom developed these through the study and analyzing of about 5000 examples of common-pool resource management around the world. The ones that were successful, had some version of these.

One of the chapter case studies in Nordman's book on the work of Elinor Nostrom highlights a lobster fishing community in Maine that is predominantly self-organized. One thing that stuck out to me was the way he described "gossip, slander, and ostracism" as a means of enforcing adherence to the system. If a rogue lobsterer goes and takes from someone else's trap or encroaches on an area that isn't theirs, social shame is an effective form of punishment.

Shame is a really interesting concept. I think in a lot of ways, we've maybe overly sanitized our culture in our approach to it. Of course the question of who gets to define what constitutes as shameful behaviour in any given society is crucial to this conversation, but I don't think the use of shame should be entirely dismissed. When dealing with shared resources, like Ostrom was working with, shame plays an important role in preventing people from abusing the common system.

Not everything needs to be policed from the top down, in fact there are times when it can be better when its done by the community.

The last month or so has been very dominated with tech-related reading (Zuboff, Wu, Hao, Doctorow) and I wanted to go in a bit of a different direction as I move into the summer so I picked up a book on Elinor Ostrom and Ostrom's more well known work, Governing the Commons. I've been tangentially aware of Ostrom but never actually read her despite my larger interests somewhat aligning.

I've spent most of the last week reading through some of Nordman's book just to get a bit of a primer on her work before diving into her. Here's a good jumping off point:

"Ostrom’s work, influenced by her anthropologist and sociologist colleagues, put the resource users front and centre. Too often the assumption was that the resource users don’t know anything and it is up to the government to impose rules. This colonial attitude was not universally true and often harmful... What [Ostrom] learned was the government isn’t the only way to manage a common-pool resource. Neither is private property the only way. In between these extremes are communities—large and small, formal and informal—and the institutions they use to govern their resources. Community is nowhere to be found in Hardin’s tragedy of the commons." (emphasis mine)

I appreciate that this is offering a bit of a third way beyond the public-private dichotomy that is easy to get locked into. Ostrom's work seems to sit if a fuzzier middle ground, one that makes space for both sides when necessary but is more focused on the way communities have successfully managed their common resources on their own.