The remarkable success of local commons in safeguarding their environments is well documented.
A detailed study of Japanese common land (iriachi) by Duke University political scientist M.A. McKean was unable to find a single example of a “commons that suffered ecological destruction while it was still a commons.” In Pakistan, the official national report to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development ranked traditionally managed shamilaat communal forests as more effective in environmental protection than forests owned and managed by the state.
That success depends more on more than just local knowledge of the environment, respect for nature or indigenous technologies. The extent to which sanctions against environmental degradation are observed depends greatly on the extent to which members of a community rely on their natural surroundings for their long-term livelihoods and thus have a direct interest in protecting it. Once that direct interest is removed—once members of the community look outside the commons for their sustenance and social standing—the cultural checks and balances that limit potential abuses of the environment are rendered increasingly ineffective.
How Modern Development Undermines the Workings of the Commons
The key to the success of commons management lies in the limits that its culture of shared responsibilities place upon the power of any one group or individual. The equality that generally prevails in the commons, for example, does not grow out of any modern notion that people have equal rights. Rather, it emerges as a by-product of the inability of a small community’s elite to eliminate entirely the bargaining power of any one of its members.
Where everyone has some degree of bargaining power, no one is likely to starve while others are comfortable. As in medieval European village society, any hardship must be shared.
Changes in the power base of a local elite or the increase in community size brought about by integration into a global social fabric can rapidly undermine the authority of the commons. At some point, “the breakdown of a community with the associated collapse in concepts of joint ownership and responsibility can set the path for the degradation of common resources in spite of abundance,” noted environmental studies professor Fikret Berkes and economics professor David Feeny in a 1990 paper.
It precisely this process that modern economic development fuels, resulting in a shrinking space for the commons. Today, virtually all “human communities are encapsulated within or fully integrated into larger sociopolitical systems” as are “local systems of resource use and property rights,” observed B.J. McKay and J.M. Acheson, authors of The Question of the Commons. This situation makes the decline of the commons a threat almost across the planet. For people everywhere, the struggle is to reclaim, defend or create their commons and with it the rough sense of equity that flows from sharing a truly common future.
-The Ecologist magazine
Excerpted from Whose Common Future: Reclaiming the Commons (New Society Publishers)