Commons governance
Commons governance is the management of a shared resource, such as a pasture, a forest or a water supply, by the people who use it, under rules they set and enforce themselves. The Logos activist course Building a Parallel Society uses it as evidence that ordinary people can run lasting institutions with no one above them. It is a building block of the parallel society that Logos promotes.
The basics
The course calls commons governance the "prior claim" on which the idea of a parallel society rests: that ordinary people can run institutions that last. It cites two cases:
- Alpine villages that have run their common pastures under their own rules for centuries, one of them under a written charter since the 1200s.
- Spanish farming communities that have shared irrigation water among thousands of families for over five hundred years.
The course says these cases have been studied closely, including failures. It names "fisheries where no rule could stick" and "water systems that tried to fix everything at once". From this record it draws four build rules:
- Membership. A group knows who is in and who is not. The course says rules without a membership boundary do not last.
- Scale. A group starts small and wins something real before it grows.
- Disputes. A group settles disputes in its own arena, with people it recognises.
- Nesting. Small groups nest into larger ones, never in one leap.
The course names no researcher.
Ostrom's design principles
Both cases appear in the work of the political scientist Elinor Ostrom. In her 1990 book Governing the Commons she proposed eight principles that contribute to the success of self-governed commons. The book won her a share of the 2009 Nobel prize. A chapter of the book is titled "Analyzing Institutional Failures and Fragilities".
The P2P Foundation summarises the eight design principles as:
- Clearly defined boundaries, which define who has access to the resource.
- Rules for use and provision that are tailored to local conditions.
- Collective-choice arrangements that let most users take part in decisions.
- Effective monitoring by people accountable to the users.
- Graduated sanctions for those who break the rules.
- Conflict-resolution mechanisms that are cheap and quick to reach.
- Recognition of the community's right to organise by higher authorities.
- Nested enterprises, with small local units inside larger layers.
Criticism
Samuel Garrido examined the Spanish cases in the journal Historia Agraria in 2011. He wrote that Ostrom's information on them "came from works that defended their democratic character", views with which "most Spanish experts disagree". He tested whether her eight principles were present in the huertas and found that "sometimes they were not".
How it applies to Logos
The course applies the build rules to Circles. It says a Circle starts with one need, one activation day and one community, and grows into a working institution. In its words: "That is the build rules at work: know who is in, start small, win something real, then grow."
Examples
- Törbel, Switzerland. Törbel is a village in the Upper Valais that Ostrom visited in the 1980s. Its first written entries on the division of land date back to 1224. On 1 February 1483 its members set up an association whose rules for governing the commons are still in effect, according to a study of Ostrom's work by the legal scholar Grzegorz Blicharz.
- Huertas of eastern Spain. Ostrom's sample included the irrigation communities in the huertas of Valencia, Murcia, Orihuela and Alicante. Blicharz dates the written laws of the huertas to 29 May 1435. The Water Tribunal of the Plain of Valencia, listed by UNESCO in 2009 as intangible cultural heritage together with the Council of Wise Men of the Plain of Murcia, has eight elected administrators representing 11,691 members from nine communities. UNESCO says its members are elected democratically and settle disputes orally.
See also
Takes on this idea
None yet. See Takes.
Sources
- Building a Parallel Society, Logos activist course, 2026
- The Swiss commune that inspired a Nobel prize-winning theory on communal ownership, Le News, 13 December 2016
- Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons, Cambridge University Press
- Elinor Ostrom's Eight Commons Governance Design Principles, P2P Foundation Wiki, 2020
- Learning how to share: principles for governing the commons, Arizona State University, 7 October 2016
- Samuel Garrido, Las instituciones de riego en la España del este. Una reflexión a la luz de la obra de Elinor Ostrom, Historia Agraria 53, April 2011
- Grzegorz J. Blicharz, Governing the Commons in the Era of Decodification and Self-Responsible Societies, Digital Library of the Commons, Indiana University
- Irrigators' tribunals of the Spanish Mediterranean coast, UNESCO, 2009