One of the chapter case study's 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.