Governing the Commons - How to Escape the Traps of our own Making
There are some questions central to sustaining life that determine the world we live in today. Returning to these central questions can help us redesign society and eliminate the problems resulting from poorly-thought out answers manifested in reality.
Questions brought up by Elinor Ostrom:
“How do we best limit the use of natural resources so as to ensure their long-term viability?”
“How do we best govern natural resources used by many individuals in common?” p.1
She wants to explain:
“How communities of individuals fashion different ways of governing the commons”
Three models that justify state or market solutions:
The tragedy of the commons – each herder receives direct benefit from their own animals, while bearing costs from others
The prisoner’s dilemma game – individually benefical strategies lead to bad joint outcome
The logic of collective action – there is little incentive to contribute voluntarily to the provision of a public good (unless extrinsically motivated by withholding the good from them or coercing them to do so)
State and market solutions are extrinsic motivations. I’m curious how people assume the absence of any intrinsic motivation to create excellence, to see other people do well. That absence is simply not true. People are interested in solving emotional or engineering challenges because (1) it’s fun, and (2) it’s motivating to see others do well. There’s a joy in doing something with excellence and seeing it succeed. If you don’t believe that, that’s because we live in a society that is already a manifestation of philosophies based on extrinsic motivation. So what you are seeing is extrinsically motivated behavior. But that’s just inherent to the game, it’s not because it’s innate to human nature.
Indigenous people have had a value for preserving natural “resources” for the seven generations to follow. They had values such as learning from the animals around them, and caring for them, even if they had to hunt them to survive.
More notes on the profit motive: if a social construct, such as profit, is a motivation, then we can say that that motivation is socially constructed. Profit is something that we made up. We can’t just say that that’s the only thing that drives us as a species, because we were a species long before that construct was created.
The Indigenous cultures in the Coast Salish area, AKA Cascadia, or the “Pacific Northwest” in United States / Canada have had a respect for the animals, plants, and ecosystem:
“Observing other animals also taught the people how to use natural resources. Ravens line their nests with finely shredded cedar bark, bears know to eat certain barks and roots when sick, nests are woven with certain fibers to make strong containers to hold precious babies, squirrels stash acorns and cones in holes in the ground, and birds grow soft downy feathers to stay warm in winter.
These observations, and many more, may well have led to the first use by people of shredded cedar bark for warm clothing, certain barks and roots for medicine, the making of baskets in the form of a nest, the use of storage pits for nuts, and the weaving of fine robes made from soft and warm downy feathers.
These discoveries were passed on through five hundred generations, through the oral tradition, in legends that held the truths of daily life. The animals who were the teachers were important characters in the stories, and held in high regard for the lessons they taugh the people.” - p.10, The People of Cascadia, Heidi Bohan
The fact that it is inconceivable by some scholars and philosophers to be intrinsically motivated to care for others or anything beyond themselves only displays an emotional and imaginative deficit coming from whatever environment they were raised in. That emotional and imaginative deficit can be explained by the behavioral illusion embedded in social games. Behavior is strongly shaped by the games we play, as opposed to our innate human nature. Again, what is inherent to human nature is that we are philosophical: we ask how we should be, versus how we simply are. To engage philosophically with how we should be is an important aspect to changing ourselves—and the games we create—for the better.
Nothing about our tendency for defection or cooperation should be taken as a given. The belief in the tendency to defect creates the defection itself. The belief in the tendency for cooperation creates the cooperation. When it comes to psychosocial beliefs, the beliefs create the reality. So regardless of the belief, if it is about how people generally are, it will come true. That is because the belief about how everyone else behaves creates a belief about the game you are playing, and if you think you are playing monopoly, you will behave like you are playing monopoly, and you will create the game monopoly by acting out the strategy. We are the games. So when we believe something about a mass of people, we are believing something about a game, and we then play the best strategy for that game, and become the game iteslf. The belief creates the behavior which creates the game which creates the behavior which renders the belief true.
Other thoughts:
Charles Kolstad, environmental economist, once said to me: “it’s the absence of market forces that’s driving the overfishing” And seven years later, I can finally articulate that, no, it is the presence of market forces. It’s the strategy and the emotional conditions embedded in the privatization game that is driving the overfishing.
Also, “how best to use natural resources” has very much to do with what makes life worth living. That question must always be tied to a well-examined view of what makes life worth living. Any use of natural resources should have a clear argument about how it makes life worth living. Any mention of social constructs is a trigger that the reasoning is circular. Any mention of reasoning tied to “jobs” or “employment” is just a facet of our creation, and it’s something that I’m trying to make obsolete. When you tie things to survival or what makes life worth living, that makes sense. If you tie it to a social construct, then it could be entirely empty when you zoom out to see that it’s just a part of a self-fixing toolbox.
We always have to look at the reasoning of “why?” The why of justification, not the why of cause and effect. When we look at the justification, we can see that things are justified as a complement to other things. So we have to look at the aggregate or compound “why?”
Privatization as the only answer to the central question(s),
Privatization, or private ownership of parcels of a natural resource, is a suggested answer to the central questions of natural resources. “How do we best govern natural resources used by many individuals in common?” is a question that, because of the three models of selfishness mentioned earler, is commonly answered by private property. This pushes the question to another level: “how do we enforce private property rules?” which then creates complexities as investing in fences, monitoring, security, and enforcing the division of the common area. There also needs to be enforcement of rules, creation of regulatory institutions, and more. There are also other problems such as the game against nature that they are now playing, and that the rainfall might not fall evenly on these fields. If people go the privatization route, then there would need to be insurance and all those things, but that would be made obsolete if they could share the larger grazing area. This is one source of justification of the state system: to be the enforcer of private property rules as a way to solve the natural resource problem. And that’s how the philosophy goes in the United States, and that’s the foundation of the state-capitalist argument.
Assumptions: profit motive. The profit motive needs to be challenged in these settings. If we assume that the herders are playing a larger game of profit in the capitalism game, then profit will be a motive on these smaller settings, and it will appear that cooperation is difficult due to our nature, rather than due to the larger game we’re already playing.
External actor as solution
The external actor solution is extremely variable. It could be centralized or decentralized. There could be a central authority that makes the decisions about the resource. There could be a—as they say—“decentralized” situation in which private property rights are distributed, and people make decisions within those well-defined rights. But either way, centralized or decentralized, the external authority idea carries huge assumptions, and that is that “the state” (whatever that means) is necessary and effective at making good and just decisions about these resources. Another assumption is that the state would do so better than the people in resource community. How would anyone even come to make good decisions about these resources? What factors would they consider? Well then let’s talk about those questions instead.
Various solutions to various common resource situations
This is what Elinor Ostrom proposes: many solutions exist to cope with many different problems. Solutions require reliable information about time and place variables and a broad menu of culturally acceptable rules. Dilemma situations are not inescapable. The ability to create cooperation in a situation that appears to promote defection is highly variable. What factors does cooperation depend on? I like to pay attention to emotional and philosophical conditions: self-love, a lot of experience with intrinsic motivation, a history of friendships with the community, an internal moral compass, an actual concern and care for the others involved, and intelligence to process the information. In Governing the Commons, Ostrom is developing a “...better theory of collective action – one that will identify the key variables that can enhance or detract from the capabilities of individuals to solve problems.” I want to add that we need to have a robust philosophical view of what makes life worth living, and then allow children to be raised with the emotional dispositions for creating what makes life worth living.
When we get to the root of the justification for oppressive systems, we can replace them with liberatory ones, from the emotional ground up.
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Vanessa Molano is the author of Redesign Everything, a participatory, self-redesigning book that asks philosophical questions for a well-examined social reality.
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