Is the so-called tragedy of the commons¹ ever averted in the biological world and might this possibility provide solutions for our own species? One plausible scenario is natural selection at the level of groups. A selfish farmer might have an advantage over other farmers in his village, but a village that somehow solved the tragedy of the commons would have a decisive advantage over other villages. Most species are subdivided into local populations at various scales, just as humans are subdivided into villages, cities and nations. If natural selection between groups (favoring cooperation) can successfully oppose natural selection within groups (favoring non-cooperation), then the tragedy of the commons can be averted for humans and non-human species alike.

At the time that Hardin published his article and I was working on my thesis, this possibility had been considered and largely rejected. A book titled Adaptation and Natural Selection, written by evolutionary biologist George C. Williams and published in 1966, was on its way to becoming a modern classic. Williams described between-group selection as theoretically possible but almost invariably weak compared to within-group selection. By his account, attempts to explain evolutionary adaptations as “for the good of the group” reflected sloppy and wishful thinking. Hardin’s article reflected the same pessimism about avoiding the tragedy of the commons other than by top-down regulation. My interest in rethinking the plausibility of group selection placed me in a very small group of heretics (see Okasha 2006, Sober and Wilson 1998, Wilson and Wilson 2007, and Wilson 2015 for more on the controversy over group selection, which in my opinion has now been mostly resolved).

Evolutionary theory’s individualistic turn coincided with individualistic turns in other areas of thought. Economics in the postwar decades was dominated by rational choice theory, which used individual self-interest as a grand explanatory principle. The social sciences were dominated by a position known as methodological individualism, which treated all social phenomena as reducible to individual-level phenomena, as if groups were not legitimate units of analysis in their own right (Campbell 1990). And UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher became notorious for saying during a speech in 1987 that “there is no such thing as society; only individuals and families.” It was as if the entire culture had become individualistic and the formal scientific theories were obediently following suit.

Unbeknownst to me, another heretic named Elinor Ostrom was also challenging the received wisdom in her field of political science. Starting with her thesis research on how a group of stakeholders in southern California cobbled together a system for managing their water table, and culminating in her worldwide study of common-pool resource (CPR) groups, the message of her work was that groups are capable of avoiding the tragedy of the commons without requiring top-down regulation, at least if certain conditions are met (Ostrom 1990, 2010). She summarized the conditions in the form of eight core design principles: 1) Clearly defined boundaries; 2) Proportional equivalence between benefits and costs; 3) Collective choice arrangements; 4) Monitoring; 5) Graduated sanctions; 6) Fast and fair conflict resolution; 7) Local autonomy; 8) Appropriate relations with other tiers of rule-making authority (polycentric governance). This work was so groundbreaking that Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009.

I first met Lin (as she preferred to be called) just a few months before she was awarded the prize, at a workshop held in Florence, Italy, titled “Do Institutions Evolve?” (recounted in Wilson 2011a). Similar events were taking place all over the world in 2009 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species. Multilevel selection theory, which envisions natural selection operating on a multi-tier hierarchy of units, had become more widely accepted by then, especially with respect to human cultural evolution, making me much in demand as a speaker. I had also cofounded a think tank called the Evolution Institute² that formulates public policy from an evolutionary perspective, giving me a strong interest in the workshop topic. I had become somewhat familiar with Lin’s work but having the opportunity to talk with her at length had a transformative impact.

I quickly realized that Lin’s core design principle approach dovetailed with multilevel selection theory, which my fellow-heretics and I had worked so hard to revive. Her approach is especially pertinent to the concept of major evolutionary transitions, whereby members of groups become so cooperative that the group becomes a higher-level organism in its own right. This idea was first proposed by cell biologist Lynn Margulis (1970) to explain how nucleated cells evolved from symbiotic associations of bacteria. It was then generalized during the 1990s to explain other major transitions, such as the rise of the first bacterial cells, multicellular organisms, eusocial insect colonies and human evolution (Maynard Smith and Szathmary 1995, 1999).

– the defining criterion of a major evolutionary transition (Boehm 1993, 1999, 2011). With disruptive competition within groups held largely in check, succeeding as a group became the main selective force in human evolution. The entire package of traits regarded as distinctively human – including our ability to cooperate in groups of unrelated individuals, our ability to transmit learned information across generations, and our capacity for language and other forms of symbolic thought – can be regarded as forms of physical and mental teamwork made possible by a major evolutionary transition.

Lin’s design principles (DP) had “major evolutionary transition” written all over them. Clearly defined boundaries (DP1) meant that members knew they were part of a group and what the group was about (e.g., fisherman with access to a bay or farmers managing an irrigation system). Proportional equivalence of costs and benefits (DP2) meant that members had to earn their benefits and couldn’t just appropriate them. Collective choice arrangements (DP3) meant that group members had to agree upon decisions so nobody could be bossed around. Monitoring (DP4) and graduated sanctions (DP5) meant that disruptive self-serving behaviors could be detected and punished. Fast and fair conflict resolution (DP6) meant that the group would not be torn apart by internal conflicts of interest. Local autonomy (DP7) meant that the group had the elbow room to manage its own affairs. Appropriate relations with other tiers of rule making authority (DP8) meant that everything regulating the conduct of individuals within a given group also was needed to regulate conduct among groups in a multi group population.

The concordance between Lin’s core design principle approach and multilevel selection theory had three major implications. First, it placed the core design principle approach on a more general theoretical foundation. Lin’s “Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD)” framework emanated from political science and she was an early adopter of economic game theory, but her main case for the design principle approach was the empirical database that she compiled for common-pool resource groups around the world, as described in her most influential book Governing the Commons (Ostrom 1990). Multilevel selection theory showed how the core design principle approach follows from the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in all species and from our own evolutionary history as a highly cooperative species.

Second, because of its theoretical generality, the core design principle approach is likely to apply to a much broader range of human groups than those attempting to manage common-pool resources (CPRs). Almost any group whose members must work together to achieve a common goal is vulnerable to self-serving behaviors and should benefit from the same principles. An analysis of business groups, churches, voluntary associations and urban neighborhoods should yield the same results as Lin’s analysis of CPR groups.

Third, the core design principle approach can provide a practical framework for improving the efficacy of groups in the real world. It should be possible for almost any kind of group to assess itself with respect to the design principles, address shortcomings, and function better as a result. This prospect was especially appealing to me as president of the Evolution Institute, since I was now actively engaged in formulating and implementing public policy from an evolutionary perspective.

Lin inspired me to begin several projects in parallel with each other. One was to collaborate with her and her postdoctoral associate Michael Cox to write an academic article, “Generalizing the Core Design Principle for the Efficacy of Groups” that established the three major implications listed above for an academic audience (Wilson, Ostrom and Cox 2013). Michael was the lead author of a 2010 article that evaluated the core design principle approach for the literature on CPR groups that had accumulated since Lin’s original analysis (Cox et al. 2010). Our article was published in a special issue of the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization titled “Evolution as a General Theoretical Framework for Economics and Public Policy.” Both the article and the special issue should be consulted for more on the theoretical framework that underpins the design principle approach.

In addition, I started to use the design principle approach in projects that involved working with real-world groups in Binghamton, New York. One was a collaboration with the City of Binghamton and United Way of Broome County called “Design Your Own Park,” which used the opportunity to turn a neglected space into a neighborhood park. Neighborhood groups that formed to create a park would be coached in the core design principles and start to manage the affairs of their neighborhood in other respects. This project led to the creation of four neighborhood parks—and their groups—in our city (Wilson 2011b).

The second project was a collaboration with the Binghamton City School District to create a “school within a school” for at-risk youth called the Regents Academy (Wilson, Kaufmann, and Purdy 2011). This was our most ambitious and best documented project because we were able to employ the gold standard of scientific assessment, the randomized control trial, which randomly assigns participants into an experimental group and a control group to identify significant variables that might affect outcomes. To the best of its ability, the Regents Academy implemented the eight core design principles and two auxiliary design principles deemed to be important in a learning context (a relaxed and playful atmosphere and short-term rewards for long-term learning goals). Not only did the Regents Academy students vastly outperform the comparison group, but they even performed on a par with the average high school student on the state-mandated Regents exam (see Wilson, Kauffman and Purdy 2011 for details). This is a strong indication that the design principle approach can be generalized beyond CPR groups and can be used as a practical framework for improving the efficacy of groups in our everyday lives.

The third project was a collaboration with a number of religious congregations in Binghamton to reflect upon the core design principles in relation to their faith and social organization. These conversations did not lead to a formal effort to change practices but they were invaluable for exploring how the success of religious groups can be understood in terms of the design principles approach.

All of these projects were instructive and broadly confirmed the relevance of the core design principle approach for any group whose members must work together to achieve a common purpose. They also showed how the design principles can be sadly lacking in some groups, such as disadvantaged neighborhoods and public schools. It is important to remember that Ostrom was able to derive the core design principles for CPR groups because they varied in how well the design principles were implemented. Some did well without needing to be taught, while others did poorly and might benefit from some coaching. Based on my own projects, I became convinced that all groups are likely to face similar challenges in implementing the core design principles.

At the same time that I was working with Lin, I was working with three leaders in the applied behavioral sciences: Tony Biglan, past president of the US-based Society for Prevention Research; Steven C. Hayes, cofounder of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science; and Dennis Embry, a scientific entrepreneur who markets evidence-based practices for positive behavior change. I was excited to work with them because they had much more experience accomplishing positive behavioral change in real-world settings than I did. They were excited to work with me because they saw that evolutionary theory could provide a more general theoretical framework for their disciplines, in the same way as for the core design principles.

This experience underscored what’s special about evolutionary theory: Now that its generality within the biological sciences has been established, it can expand its domain into the basic and applied human behavioral sciences. One result of our collaboration was a major review article, “Evolving the Future: Toward a Science of Intentional Change” (followed by peer commentaries and a reply), published in the academic journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Wilson, Hayes, Biglan and Embry 2014), a piece that expanded the theoretical foundation I was building with Lin and Michael. The first half of the article sketches a basic science of intentional change centered on evolutionary theory. The second half reviews examples of successful positive behavioral and cultural change from the applied disciplines, which illustrate the concept of wisely managing the process of cultural evolution but are little known outside their disciplinary boundaries. As we conclude our article, we are closer to a science of intentional change than one might think.

These collaborations have resulted in an ambitious Evolution Institute project called PROSOCIAL (Wilson 2014), which has three objectives. The first is to create an Internet platform that will enable any group, anywhere in the world, to evaluate itself and increase its efficacy based on a fusion of the core design principle approach and evidence-based methods from the applied behavioral sciences. The second objective is to provide a way for these groups to interact with and learn directly from each other, which is an example of facilitating the process of cultural evolution. The third objective is to use information provided by these groups to create a scientific database, much as Lin had done for common-pool resource groups, which enabled her to identify the core design principles in the first place. This project has been in the development phase for several years and should be operational and accessible through the Evolution Institute website by mid-2015.

Sadly, Lin died of cancer in June 2012. I was with her only a few months before at a workshop, “Rules as Genotypes in Cultural Evolution,” which we organized together and hosted at her Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, at Indiana University. She was simultaneously trying to care for her aging husband Vincent, satisfy the worldwide demand for speaking appearances, manage her projects and care for herself. I am grateful to be among the many who were touched by her and proud to contribute to her legacy by helping to generalize the core design principle approach and make it available to any group whose members must work together to achieve shared goals.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

References

Boehm, Christopher. 1993. “Egalitarian Society and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy.” Current Anthropology, 34:227 – 254.

———. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest: Egalitarianism and the Evolution of Human Altruism. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

———. 2011. Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. New York: Basic Books.

Campbell, Donald T. 1990. “Levels of Organization, Downward Causation, and the Selection-Theory Approach to Evolutionary Epistemology.” In G. Greenberg & E. Tobach, editors, Theories of the Evolution of Knowing, 1 – 17. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Cox, M., G. Arnold & S. Villamayor-Tomas. 2010. “A Review of Design Principles for Community-based Natural Resource Management.” Ecology and Society. 15.

Hardin, Garrett. 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science. 162:1243-1248.

Margulis, Lynn. 1970. Origin of Eukaryotic cells. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Maynard Smith, John, & E. Szathmary. 1995. The Major Transitions of Life. New York: W.H. Freeman.

———. 1999. The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Okasha, Samir. 2006. Evolution and the Levels of Selection. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2010. “Polycentric Systems for Coping with Collective Action and Global Environmental Change.” Global Environmental Change. 20:550 – 557.

Sober, Elliot, & Wilson, D. S. 1998. Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Williams, George. C. 1966. Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wilson, D.S. 2011a. The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time. New York: Little, Brown.

———. 2011b. “The Design Your Own Park Competition: Empowering Neighborhoods and Restoring Outdoor Play on a Citywide Scale.” American Journal of Play. 3:538 – 551.

———. 2014. “Introducing PROSOCIAL: Using the Science of Cooperation to Improve the Efficacy of Your Group.” This View of Life.

———. 2015. Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Wilson, D.S., Kauffman, R. A., & Purdy, M. S. 2011. “A Program for At-risk High School Students Informed by Evolutionary Science.” PLoS ONE, 6(11), e27826. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0027826

Wilson, D.S., & Gowdy, J. M. 2013. “Evolution as a General Theoretical Framework for Economics and Public Policy.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. 90:S3 – S10. doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2012.12.008

Wilson, D.S., Hayes, S. C., Biglan, A., & Embry, D. 2014. “Evolving the Future: Toward a Science of Intentional Change.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 37:395 – 460.

Wilson, D.S., E. Ostrom & M. Cox. 2013. “Generalizing the Design Principles for Improving the Efficacy of Groups.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. 90:supplement, S21 – S32.

Wilson, D.S., & E.O. Wilson. 2007. “Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology.” Quarterly Review of Biology. 82:327 – 348.

David Sloan Wilson (USA) is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University in Binghamton New York, President of the Evolution Institute, and Editor in Chief of the online magazine This View of Life. His books include Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (2002),Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives (2007), The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time (2011), and Does Altruism Exist? (2015).

Photo by Szymon Stoma

The post Patterns of Commoning: Generalizing the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I’ve known Derek Wall for some time as a friend on Twitter, a fellow admirer of Elinor Ostrom, an Ostrom scholar, and an official in the Green Party of England and Wales. This is not my first introduction to him as a scholar; I read his The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom (2014), which he was kind enough to share with me in proof.

As is customary (and unfortunately necessary) in any general treatment of Ostrom, Wall begins his introductory chapter by citing Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” as a jumping off point. I say it’s unfortunately necessary because Hardin’s ahistorical nonsense has gotten around the world many times while Ostrom’s truth about the governance of actual, historical commons was just getting its boots on. Never mind that Hardin himself later admitted that he knew little to nothing about the actual history of commons governance, and conceded that the title was unfortunate. He is still a perennial “authority” for neoliberal ideologues and right-libertarians (many of whom apparently know nothing of the commons beyond Hardin’s reference to them) who wish to “prove” that efficient commons governance is impossible.

Elinor Ostrom’s most famous work, Governing the Commons, was a broad survey of case studies of commons governance in history — including some commons which persist under their old governance rules to this day — and a set of eight principles of successful commons governance which she inferred from that history.

Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel for ‘demonstrating how local property can be successfully managed by local commons without any regulation by central authorities or privatization’ (Nobel.org 2009). She argued that commons, including common land, forests or fisheries that were owned collectively, could be conserved. This was radical stuff; other economists argued, along with Garrett Hardin, that collective ownership would always fail because of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ which led to over use and disaster….

According to Ostrom indigenous people and others have often maintained commons for hundreds or even thousands of years without destroying these environments. Ostrom argued that democratic control, rather than top-down management or simple privatisation, works to conserve nature.

After a brief biographical sketch — including a childhood where she picked up a frugal DIY ethos, and the possible influence of her husband Vincent on her interest in the commons — Wall goes on to finish up the introductory chapter with an argument for the general importance of Ostrom’s work.

Although Ostrom did not regard herself as being on the Left, as Wall concedes, and could at least plausibly be accused of ignoring class conflict, her work is nevertheless of value to those of us on the Left who do use a class analysis. First, the commons — with the rules for successful governance she distilled from her historical studies — are an invaluable addition to the organizational toolkit for a postcapitalist society. Regardless of whether Ostrom herself paid adequate attention to the historic nature of the state as an instrument of class power, and in suppressing and enclosing the commons, those of us who are interested in resurrecting the commons as an organizing logic (e.g. the commons-based peer production model promoted by the P2P Foundation, the commons-based local economies promoted by the new municipalist movements, etc.) owe it to ourselves to take her seriously. And second, regardless of her arguable lack of historical class analysis, her findings are themselves a valuable weapon of class struggle.

She developed a body of research that can be used to defend the commons and commoners. Theory, including Ostrom’s, can have a material effect. For hundreds of years, perhaps thousands, collectively-owned resources have been stolen from communities with the simple justification that the commons was inevitably ‘tragic’. Left to collective ownership, it is often claimed, individuals would abuse the system and wreck the commons. Either privatisation or strong state control was needed to prevent catastrophe…. [Ostrom] found that commons could be made to work and were not automatically doomed because of an intrinsic flaw in human nature. Her careful research is a powerful weapon of self-defence for those who wish to protect a commons under threat.

“Equally radical and useful,” Wall continues, is Ostrom’s broader argument for political and economic organizational models “beyond the market and the state.” She demolishes, obviously, the neoliberal conception of corporate “privatization” as the only alternative to state ownership. But her work is more important still for the Left. In practice, the main currents of 20th century socialism adopted either some mix of market and state as their primary organizational model — the “market socialism” of Lange and Tito, or central planning that can only be distinguished from state control with heavy-duty squinting. With the commons, Ostrom offers the Left — and in particular Marxists — a way to recover Marx’s vision of a future society that is genuinely both post-capitalist and post-state.

Although Ostrom did not regard herself as a Leftist, and the main influences on her work were fairly mainstream (e.g. institutional economics, public choice theory and game theory), she developed those influences in directions that were, intentionally or not, quite congenial to certain currents of the Left. Her approach to research, in itself, reflected considerable elements of what would later be called a P2P ethos; her work “was based on what she termed co-production,” acting as “part of a larger network,” with knowledge and theory “constructed with the active participation of the community.”

And her idea of democracy, which she saw as the key to commons management and the solution of many other problems, was far from the conventional notions being peddled in academia at that time.

[B]y democracy she meant not just traditional liberal democracy but popular involvement through direct participation, not top-down institutions. She and her husband Vincent spent a lifetime arguing that the more that people were involved in constructing the rules of governance, the better the rules would work…. She thought the exact form that such direct democracy might take was likely to differ from place to place.

In this regard she resembles thinkers from Kropotkin to Graeber, who see “democracy” not as some crowning achievement of dead white males in a handful of privileged times and places, but something that people have naturally been doing in face-to-face groups everywhere since the beginning of humanity, in settings from folkmotes to pirate utopias, when their efforts were not suppressed — often by formally “democratic” states.

But in the end, Wall dismisses the question of whether Ostrom was “really” on the Left as irrelevant compared to that of what uses her work can be put to by the Left.

I am not ultimately making any claim in this book that Elinor Ostrom was on the left, nor even trying with much precision to pigeonhole Ostrom politically…. [M]y main aim is to make her work accessible and to show how those on the left, especially the ecosocialist left, can make productive use of her diverse and provocative thinking…. The extent to which she was radical can be judged by the effects of her work…. Thus, this book, chapter by chapter, examines her work and shows how it can be of practical use.

(NOTE: Anyone who enjoys this book but would like some more detailed background on Ostrom’s early life and the specific formative influences on her work can find plenty of both in Wall’s earlier book The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom.)

Chapters Two through Four are an examination, at increasing levels of generality, of the lessons of Ostrom’s studies on the commons: on the subject matter of Governing the Commons itself in Chapter Two, on the broader lessons of her research on the commons for ecological issues in general in Chapter Three, and the implications of an organizational model “beyond market and state” for society as a whole.

Chapter Two begins with the original context of Ostrom’s research into the commons: Hardin’s unfortunate article (doubly unfortunate in its influence) on the subject, and summarizes the results (including the eight rules for effective governance she distilled from her historical investigations).

Hardin’s presumption comes across as even more egregious in Ostrom’s account of the lecture she attended: not only did he feel justified in saying, based entirely on an a priori analysis of his totally imaginary and ashistorical model of the “commons,” that they were doomed absent massive state intervention, but he went so far as to proclaim that the only solution was mandating universal sterilization after the first child.

Hardin saw the overconsumption of resources as the inevitable result of overpopulation and human incapacity for self-restraint. I would note the irony of this, considering that: 1) the actual overgrazing of the commons in England was the work of landed interests — the same people pushing for enclosure in the interest of “efficiency” — using their political influence to ignore the rules by which villagers had up until then governed their commons quite effectively and sustainably; 2) overconsumption of resources is the result, not of a do-nothing state, but of the state actively promoting the consumption of subsidized resource inputs by capitalist industry through the enclosure of land and resource commons and giving big business preferential access to them. The real villain, in the destruction of natural resources, is not ordinary villagers overgrazing their sheep in the want of proper government or corporate oversight; it is Nestle draining aquifers free of charge and California factory farms wasting subsidized irrigation water, with the active help and encouragement of the state.

It’s also worth noting that Hardin’s right-libertarian fans have no coherent criterion for distinguishing the “private” property they favor from the “collective” property they oppose, and no basis for explaining how the capitalist corporation qualifies as “private property” but the natural resource commons does not. The corporation is every bit as much an example of collective ownership as the commons. It is legally not the property of the shareholders, either collectively or severally, but of a corporate person; the “property” rights of the shareholders consist mostly in participating in the election of the Board of Directors (in most cases a self-perpetuating oligarchy of inside directors selected by cooptation, in actual practice), and to whatever dividends management sees fit to issue.

If anything it’s the corporation that’s subject to a real tragedy of the commons because its de facto property rights are vested in a managerial oligarchy whose material interests are diametrically opposed to those of the people who are in direct contact with the day-to-day situation, experience the effects of the policies made by management, and whose situational knowledge, social capital and effort are the actual source of value. On the other hand it is in the interest of management to strip the organization of human capital and gut its long-term productive capacities for the sake of boosting quarterly earnings (and with them their own bonuses and stock holdings).

Although Ostrom was not an anarchist and not opposed in principle (or even practice) to either the state or the large corporation, her findings in Governing the Commons were nearly the opposite of Hardin’s assumptions. If Hardin believed humans were incapable of self-governance and could be saved from themselves only by the intervention of higher authority, Ostrom had faith in the ability of people in face-to-face groups to work out solutions to the problems they faced if they were not prevented from doing so by interference from above. Some five or six of her eight principles of governance, based on her observation of successful commons, involve either vesting ownership and decision-making authority in those who use the resources, directly experience the effects of the governance rules, and are in day-to-day contact with the situation, or preventing interference from above by authoritarian institutions beyond the control of users.

The design rule that commons should be “nested” or federated within larger systems — particularly at the bioregional level — is also the main principle of her views on environmental policy (Chapter Three). It strikes me that in Ostrom’s vision of a polycentric system of governance with the commons as its core logic, the state plays a role similar to that of Cosma Orsi’s “Partner State,” as developed by Michel Bauwens:  i.e. a platform which enables or facilitates the work of the commons, and maintains a congenial environment for their operation. In this she is in the very broad tradition going back to Saint-Simon, developed by Proudhon and Marx among others, that envisons “governance of persons” being replaced by “the administration of things.”

In her work on the commons, Ostrom showed that humans were capable of cooperative behavior mediated neither by the cash nexus nor by state administration. The larger application of this principle to society as a whole is the subject of Chapter Four. Ostrom was no one-trick pony. “Beyond Markets and States” does not mean simply the commons as a “third alternative,” but a whole ecosystem of cooperative and democratic options. She saw modern institutions like the corporation as commons prone to dysfunctions from incentive problems, and saw the stakeholder cooperative as a way to align the incentives of those in direct contact with the situation and who created the value with the success of the corporation. She also endorsed Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO) and supported the broader vision of a Solidarity Economy.

The knowledge and incentive principles that emerged from Ostrom’s study of the commons, and led her to support other Solidarity Economy institutions like the cooperative, also informed her general understanding of democracy — the subject of Chapter Five,”Deep Democracy.” All decision-making, she believed, is apt to be improved by involving those directly affected by it. And this vision of deep democracy is extremely relevant to libertarian strands of socialism. Although Ostrom shied away from the “socialist” label and tended to identify it with top-down state control, Wall notes, her concrete principles are quite compatible with socialist models like that of the autonomists Negri and Hardt. He also draws parellels between her thought and Bookchin’s confederalism (as well as Kurdish attempts to put this into practice in Rojava).

Given this preoccupation with empowering those affected by decisions, it only makes sense that Ostrom would have a broader interest in amplifying the voices of the unheard and powerless. This is the subject of the chapter on “Feminism and Intersectionality.” She was also heavily influenced by her own experience of discrimination, as a woman (about which you can read in more detail in the biographical material in Chapter One); for example, she was denied the opportunity to major in economics because she lacked adequate background in higher mathematics, but also was prevented from enrolling in a course of mathematical studies because faculty felt such studies would be wasted on a woman who would just get married anyway.

The chapter on “Trust and Cooperation” starts with the significant influence of game theory on Ostrom’s institutional analysis. As with most issues, Ostrom shied away from adopting general positions on “human nature,” whether they made cooperation or competition the more essential human characteristic. Rather, she focused on institutional designs and procedural rulesets to optimize for cooperative behavior.

Interestingly, the Prisoner’s Dilemma game — which influences many thinkers who are pessimistic about the potential for human cooperation — starts with the assumption that the subjects are isolated from direct communication with each other, and have all their contact with the world outside their cell filtered through authority figures. Ostrom’s approach to commons design and governance, on the other hand, assumes free and ongoing communication between those seeking to deal with their shared circumstances in an optimal manner. In other words, isolation and atomization tends to increase authoritarianism and betrayal, while communication produces the optimal result. Perhaps this is why authoritarians who promote the ugliest and most authoritarian pictures of “human nature” also have the biggest vested interest in turning groups of people against each other, and isolating them in the face of their rulers. People who are worried about nonsense like the threat to “traditional marriage,” or “illegal aliens,” or trans women in public restrooms, or “Sharia Law,” are a lot less likely to notice their areas of commonality and work together to promote their common interest against the billionaires who are actually screwing them over.

Ostrom found that, conversely, ongoing relationships with high levels of communication tend to build trust.

She found… that research suggested that cheap talk was useful. By cheap talk, she meant that if commoners or others were able to communicate directly with each other, trust was more likely to occur than if they did not meet and exchange views.

Given everything we’ve seen about Ostrom’s views so far, it would be reasonable to expect strong sympathies for a peer-to-peer approach to science. And as it turns out, that’s right on the mark (Chapter Eight, “Science for the People”). Science, she believed, was prone to dominance by elites whose paradigms became generational dogmas. She sought to empower dissidents and outsiders to challenge these dogmas. Ostrom’s approach to research, Wall writes, was similar to Paolo Freire’s: a co-learning process in which the community was involved, not a “Knowledge Bank.” It’s reflected in her approach to investigating the commons.

Her approach to this was to suggest that the people who participate in a commons are just as likely, probably more so to have good ideas about solving this problem than outside experts. Garrett Hardin argued that the commoners would fail to maintain the commons and an outside power would need to be brought in. The outside power would be equipped with expertise that the commoners lack.

She took a similarly Freirean attitude toward education as such, arguing that democracy, commons management, and other forms of self-governance would likely fail if public school pedagogy was passive rather than participatory.

Finally, she took the position that knowledge itself was a commons and put her P2P approach to research into practice in her workshops at Bloomington.

In her analysis of institutions (Chapter Nine, “Transforming Institutions”), Ostrom’s focus was on what people actually do, not on paper rules and tables of organization. Her mapping of institutions included actual power relationships within institutions, how powerful members could use formal rules and procedures to pursue their own interest, and how technical “legality” could serve as a cover for robbery.

At the same time, the form taken by institutional rules can affect the balance of power between different interests, and rules can be rewritten to make institutions more democratic and egalitarian. For example, the rules of corporate governance can be rewritten to empower internal and external stakeholders whose interests are currently ignored by self-aggrandizing management. But because of the law of unintended consequences, there must be a tentative and ad hoc nature to institutional design and rulemaking, and a willingness to frequently reassess policies in the face of ongoing experience. And obviously, based on previously examined considerations in Ostrom’s design philosophy, the best way to promote successful adaptation to circumstances is by empowering those directly involved to assess and respond to feedback from previous decisions.

The final chapter (“Conflict and Contestation”) is Wall’s overall assessment of Ostrom’s value for lessons. The biggest lesson he takes away is pluralism: a skepticism towards schematizers who want to build an entire society according to any one uniform blueprint, or any hegemonic organizational model. It’s this quality in Ostrom that made me include a C4SS study on her in my series on “Anarchists Without Adjectives” (I know she wasn’t an anarchist). Like Kropotkin and Ward, she had a fondness for the particularity and sense of place of all the different ad hoc experiments in cooperative organization that ordinary people have come up with in the nooks and crannies of history, and a faith and openness in whatever arrangements people happen to come up with when dealing with one another as equals.

At the same time, as a Marxist, Wall subjects her to some criticism. Ostrom failed to pay adequate attention — or much at all — to the class dimension in history. She treated issues like the workability of the commons as primarily a difference in ideas or understanding, a matter simply of showing where people like Hardin were mistaken and correcting his ideas, when in fact the driver of Enclosure historically has not been any disinterested concern for “efficiency” but rather naked power interest — with “thinkers” like Hardin serving, to borrow a phrase from Marx, as hired prize-fighters on behalf of the propertied classes. I noted this unfortunate tendency myself in researching my study of Ostrom: for example her dismissal as “conspiracy theories” of the suggestions that World Bank loans and other foreign aid served mainly the imperialist goals of integrating the Global South into the global system of corporate power.

Nevertheless, from Wall’s Marxist perspective and from other postcapitalist and anarchist perspectives, Ostrom’s functional analysis of commons and other institutions is of great value to those of us thinking about what kind of society we want to build in the future. Wall notes that Marx himself “in his later writings became more and more interested in the indigenous and actual working commons.” For example, he acknowledged late in life that open field systems like the Russian Mir might develop directly into components of a socialist society, without being amalgamated (on the later Soviet model) into state property under professional administrators.

Photo by derekbruff

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