Weak states and the commons

Vincent Geloso and Félix Foucher-Paquin have posted "Weak States and the Commons: Fisheries and Economic Development in the Gaspesian Peninsula circa 1830". The abstract:

The inefficiencies of common property fisheries are well-known to economists. To avoid over-exploitation, they propose multiple forms of government solutions like taxes, quotas and the enforcement of property rights regimes designed to avoid over-harvesting. However, can there be efficient arrangements under statelessness or in the presence of weak states? One such example is the Gaspesian Peninsula (in the Canadian province of Quebec) during the first half of the 19th century. There, a single firm (the Charles Robin Company) came to dominate the market and it was able to effectively to restrict entry. In this paper, we unveil that it was able to do so by reducing the prices of imported goods that it would give to local fishermen in exchange for a part of their catch. This had the effect of deterring fishermen to contract with other merchants as well as deterring other merchants from entering the market. It also had the effect of making the region, contrary to what historians depict, richer than most regions of Canada at the time. We take this as an example of the ability to deal with commons problems in the presence of weak states.

Alexander Henderson, Causapscal River (1872-1875)

Customary groundwater management in Japan

Recently published in Water History, Takahiro Endo's "The Kabu-ido system and factors affecting local groundwater extraction control: case study of a customary groundwater management in Japan". The abstract:

In the early 1800s, a water conflict occurred in a community named the Fukuzuka Ring Levee on the Noubi Plain, Japan. Upper villages required artesian wells for irrigation and domestic uses, but lower villages did not welcome them because drainage from the wells caused impoundment damage to their paddy fields. The Kabu-ido system was a set of rules, including regulation of the number of wells per village, introduced to de-escalate the conflict. Under the system, groundwater uses were controlled not by external authority, but by the community residents themselves. This paper has two purposes. First, it reconstructs the daily operations of the Kabu-ido system, principally by referring to surviving local diaries, to describe hitherto unknown details regarding the management of groundwater by local people 200 years ago. The diaries show that well managers, selected from residents, regulated the use of wells using various tools, including permission and surprise inspection. Second, this paper evaluates to what extent self-imposed numerical regulation was successful by checking the number of wells listed in village expenditure notes. The documents indicate that regulation did not always work. The factors underlying this are considered using the analytical framework from the commons studies. Analysis shows that, while institutional arrangements of the Kabu-ido system, such as well management with keys, rules of joint responsibility, and the prohibition of indoor wells, work positively in enforcing numerical regulation by lowering the costs of monitoring for unauthorized wells, the natural characteristics of groundwater and climate conditions such as sudden drought work negatively.

Noubi Plain

The legal environment and communal irrigation

The latest issue of the International Journal of the Commons has an article by Steven M. Smith, "Dynamics of the Legal Environment and the Development of Communal Irrigation Systems". From the Introduction (citations removed):

Archinia, Acequia System of El Rancho de las Golondrinas

Given the importance of external forces to the success of the commons, calls to integrate political ecology with the commons literature are becoming a common refrain. The combination can be approached from both directions: how do power structures shape institutions and how do institutions shape power structures? I take a historical perspective to explore both questions and their dynamic relationship. Specifically, I consider how external legal changes alter the incentives for how local users organize themselves and how those changes in local organizations alters the political coalitions, affecting subsequent legal changes.

To explore the question, I document and analyze the evolution of the legal environment and the development of communal irrigation systems, known as acequias, in current day New Mexico, US. Acequias have been held up as a case of a long-lived successful communal management regime of a natural resource . In the region of study, some acequias date back to the 16th century when Spain first colonized the area. The acequias have experienced sizeable shifts in their external legal surroundings, most rapidly and significantly during the US territorial period (1851–1912), that can be used to assess the relationship of external legislation and communal irrigation systems.

Problems with formalizing rights in the commons

Political Geography recently published "Grabbing the commons: Forest rights, capital and legal struggle in the Carpathian Mountains", by Stefan Voicu and Monica Vasile. The abstract:

In this paper we show that formalizing communal rights is a process riddled with struggles leading to a partial or total grabbing of commons. Drawing on long-term research and using interviews, surveys, and historical sources, we analyze struggles that emerged from processes of formalizing rights to commons, occurring one century apart in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania. The first wave of formalization, initiated by the state in 1910, institutionalized a model of hybrid commons in which individual rights to communal forests and pastures were understood as inheritable and tradable shares. This generated never-ending contention and a vulnerability to capital, allowing timber companies to grab shares and dispossess rightsholders. The second formalization, post-1989, enabled local communities to regain rights to forests that had been nationalized by the state at the beginning of the socialist rule. However, this resurgence of mountain commons unleashed again a suite of legal struggles, bringing back to life previous vulnerabilities and dispossessions. We argue that the formalization of rights often does not bring clarity and security to commons rightsholders. Instead, it creates a suite of vulnerabilities, ambiguities, and complexity within regulatory texts, begetting the grabbing of the commons.

Barat Roland, Lambs in the autumn in the mountains

Success on the commons

Last year Environmental History published a review by Frederica Bowcutt of Mexico’s Community Forest Enterprises: Success on the Commons and the Seeds of a Good Anthropocene, by David Barton Bray (U. Arizona Press, 2020). Some excerpts:

According to Bray, Garrett Hardin justified enclosure and centralized land management based on an ahistorical understanding; shared-pool commons have always been regulated by rules to prevent overuse. They are not, as Hardin suggested, a free for all. Ownership of land with valuable forest resources incentivizes rural Mexican communities to adopt, develop, and adhere to rules designed to prevent a tragedy of the commons. Results thus far indicate that community-based management of local forest resources “can be as effective as public protected areas in conserving forest cover and biodiversity, while also generating income for local communities” (p. 246).

The New England river commons

H-Environment recently published Zachary Bennett's review of Erik Reardon's Managing the River Commons: Fishing and New England's Rural Economy (U Mass Press, 2021). From the review:

After more than two centuries of damming and polluting their rivers, Americans are reversing course. Dams are coming down and the migrating fish that astonished early European explorers are returning.... Although rivers are coming to resemble their pre-industrial state now more than ever, few serious studies of early American waterways exist. Erik Reardon shows that these struggles to preserve riverine ecosystems are much older than river restoration advocates may have considered...

*****

The first two chapters establish the importance of river fisheries in indigenous and early colonial communities, arguing that both created sustainable common-use practices to protect fish. Reardon quotes heavily from other secondary sources and his arguments echo the likes of Jeffrey Bolster who have shown that colonists severely depleted fisheries immediately upon their arrival. Reardon effectively demonstrates that colonists both noticed that decline and realized they needed to enact conservation measures at least a full century before industrialization.

Chapter 3 reads as a composite biography of four river fisherman from Maine to Rhode Island who lived at the turn of the nineteenth century.... Their way of life came under considerable threat when commercial fishing practices entered rivers in the nineteenth century that netted the salmon and shad for sale in distant markets and enriched an emerging merchant class. Reardon shows that this class of farmer-fishermen ultimately turned to the state to punish unsustainable fishing practices and preserve rivers as traditional commons space.

Ecological consequences of Spanish colonialism

Last year's The Americas published an article by Christopher Woolley, "'The Forests Cannot be Commons': Spanish Law, Environmental Change, and New Spain's Council on Forests". The abstract:

This article examines the sylvan political ecology of late colonial New Spain and the colonial government's attempt to address deforestation through the Council on Forests, the first body in the kingdom's history dedicated to the conservation of natural resources. Drawing primarily from the corpus of documents produced by and remitted to the council, this article gives a trans-regional perspective on colonial forest use and argues that the Spanish crown's usurpation of indigenous communities' eminent domain over forests was the first step in a process that over centuries progressively severed the cultural ties that bound communities and forests by converting common-pool resources into open-access commons. The catastrophic mortality of the Spanish invasion was the second step, which rendered conservation measures seemingly unnecessary among both woodcutters and officials. But it was during the eighteenth century that older Habsburg notions of protectionism intersected with economic and political changes associated with Bourbon rule to further compel this cultural severance. While previous works have studied the ecological impacts of mining, ranching, and flood control, this article moves beyond the study of a single industry to suggest some of the larger ecological consequences of Spanish colonialism.

Forest in the Sierra Juarez, Oaxaca, Mexico (credit: Prsjl)

Trends in commons scholarship

More on (transatlantic) commons scholarship: The editors of the International Journal of the Commons (Frank van Laerhoven, Michael Schoon, Sergio Villamayor-Tomas) just published an interesting quantitative review of commons scholarship over the last five decades, "Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of Ostrom’s Governing the Commons: Traditions and Trends in the Study of the Commons, Revisited". There are interesting statistics and tables on journals, citations, disciplines, and more. (For a different take on the history of the field, see The Tragedy of the Commons at 50.) Some highlights:

The start of commons scholarship can be understood as growing out of a rejection of Hardin’s prediction of natural resource degradation unless managed by governments or through private property rights (Poteete et al. 2010). Over time, however the approach appears to have been evolving.

*****

Arguably, commons studies grew out of concerns associated with the tragedy of the commons. Accordingly, typical studies of the commons have been associated with local contexts, particularly with common pool resources such as forests, fisheries and irrigation, and an interest in the opportunities and challenges of common property rights and rules....

Hardin (1968) asked us to “picture a pasture, open to all.” Pastures, together with fisheries, forests, irrigation systems, and water management belong to what the authors of the 2007 study referred to as the “Big Five” in the study of the commons. Through 2007 these topics drew most of the combined attention of commons scholars. Overall, we find that this trend continues [unabated]. Over time, we see a relative increase in interest in water and fisheries since 2007.

*****

Where Hardin claimed that only the state or the market could prevent a tragedy of the commons, Ostrom dedicated most of her career to showing how there is a lot of room on the spectrum that ranges between these two extremes (e.g. Ostrom, 1994). Figure 18 presents a crude way to gauge our field’s attention to the market, the state, and self-governance over time.

Italian forest commons

As summer bakes Jerusalem and flights are indefinitely suspended, thoughts of Italy's Cadore region, discussed in Giacomo Bonan's The State in the Forest: Contested Commons in the Nineteenth Century Venetian Alps (White Horse Press, 2019), are beguiling. (Bonan wrote an excellent paper, "Confronting Hardin: Trends and Approaches to the Commons in Historiography", for a collection I edited a couple of years ago.) ARO recently published a review by Richard Hölzl of the book; some excerpts:

At the center of Bonan’s book are the Alpine valleys of the Cadore, a region in the Eastern Italian Alps to the North of Venice and bordering on Alto Adige/South Tirol and Austria. The region came under the rule of the Serenissima of Venice in the early fifteenth century and remained so until its fall in 1797. After the brief but very important period of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, it was part of the Habsburg Empire from 1815 to 1866, when the Veneto was annexed to the new Kingdom of Italy. Since the thirteenth century the families of the Cadore, constituted as the Community of the Cadore, organized the local forests and their exploitation as commons under a system known as regole. Regole initially meant regular decision-making at assemblies by the heads of the households of several Cadore villages, who also appointed officers to enforce regulations of communal life. With the increasing success of Venice as a maritime and commercial power, the forests of the Cadore became of importance to the Venetian economy, as they provided timber for shipbuilding and city extension. Timber entrepreneurs of the Cadore cooperated with Venetian merchants and established a vibrant business that also dominated the income and livelihoods of the local households of the Cadore. Timber trade provided decently paid labor for members of every household and subsidized food imports to the mountain valleys, which did not support much agriculture. It also resulted in considerable population growth before and after 1800. Moreover, it furthered the stratification of local society in wealthy timber entrepreneurs, established families who claimed access to and common ownership of forests, and a class of newcomers and landless without such benefits.

The Napoleonic Age brought fundamental changes to this system – changes, which lasted the better part of the nineteenth century and had the established families of the Cadore look back nostalgically on the seemingly good old times, when the regole system was intact and the timber trade supported communities and households well. The advent of modern forestry in the Napoleonic and Austrian period meant that regional and central administrative officers were tasked with supervising the felling process as well as introducing new cutting and conservation measures. The administrative elite in Venice adopted the new scholarship on forests which emerged out of France and Germany and attempted to implement it on Venetian territory.

The Cadore, however, is an interesting exception to the general trend to abolish and privatize the forest commons in the early nineteenth century. Rather than abolishing the commons, the successive administrations tried to modernize their administration by transferring the management from the regole and villages to larger municipalities and regional forest authorities, and by using the profits from the forest commons for road building and schools, rather than supplementing food import. 

Savagery, civilization, and property VI: Conclusion

In the last post we looked at how stadial thought reached modern commons thought through the worlds of colonial development and conservationism. This post concludes the series.

I have argued in this series of posts that various strands of modern commons theory, though based, as well, on novel theoretical and empirical work, seem to lean heavily on the structures, examples, and sensibilities of stadial theories of civilization that rose to prominence in the late eighteenth century. These Enlightenment-era ways of thinking are admittedly outmoded as theories of history, but why should the historical sources of current theory matter?

Beyond the important goal of understanding the sources of our theories, foregrounding the continuing influence of stadial thinking on current theories of the commons should help us question some aspects of these theories by highlighting some of their oddities — such as the disproportionate weight of studies of hunting, herding, and the like among a far more diverse universe of commons situations that could be studied.

Possibly more important are the residues of the narrative of civilizational progress that continue to adhere to property theory. Carol Rose has noted ("Evolution of Property Rights", in 2 The New Palgrave Dictionary of Law and Economics 93, 94 (1998)) the quasi-religious belief in the advantages of private property held by some property theorists, especially those associated with the modern law and economics movement, according to which “an evolving property rights regime might lead humankind toward a new kind of earthly Paradise,” “a secular Eden of peace and plenty.” Rose’s own work, as well as that of some of the other commons theorists surveyed above, is free of this bias, remaining pointedly agnostic as to the direction of evolution among property regimes. But others — not only law and economics types but Hardinians and others — seem to accept (though they might not put it in these terms) that private property represents a more advanced stage of civilization than does the commons. This type of thinking lies at the root of many neoliberal policy prescriptions, from the importance of secure private property regimes to developing countries to the salience of cap-and-trade as a solution for climate change and other environmental problems.

Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Garden of Eden (1530)

On the other hand, the Romantic and Marxist reactions to the Enlightenment stories of stadial progress continue to inform another set of prescriptions and critiques, most prominent among them the many studies of successful indigenous commons management following Ostrom’s work. Whatever the normative and ethical attractions of these positions, it seems that their appeal rests partly on a narrative of fall from grace, a sort of negative image of the economists’ story described by Rose, and a yearning to return to an Eden of primitive and community-based commons.

Finally, on a more general level, I would like to highlight the central role that historical narratives or myths continue to play in nominally theoretical and normative scholarship. Myths are important, but so is clear-headed thinking about policy. By recognizing the myths on which much commons scholarship is built, we might be able to improve it.

I'd be happy for readers' thoughts. The full article is here.

Public property and the rise of the individual

Historical articles on the commons keep coming. Victorian Studies recently published an article by Daniel Stout, "Uncommon Lands: Public Property and the Rise of the Individual". (I'm happy to say that the article cites extensively from my "How Blackstone Became a Blackstonian".) The abstract:

This article examines the theoretical hurdles that the English legal system faced in trying to come up with a coherent conception of public land in the Victorian period. Rapid urbanization and industrialization meant that the pressure to preserve open space was intense, but a conception of public land—land that belongs to everyone—was strikingly absent from English law. “The commons,” this article stresses, is importantly different from “the public.” The absence of the public from the English theory of property helps us see the ways in which the regime of liberal private property continued to carry traces of older customary forms of tenure, and to be governed by ideas (use, access, etc.) that complicate—and, often, contradict—liberal assumptions about the nature of property.

And an excerpt:

William Hartley, Justice Scrutton

[W]e have inherited from the nineteenth century a certain story about property as an institution whose rise inevitably entails the cancellation of some prior collective. And of the available names for that prior collective (family, status, clan, custom, etc.), none attaches us to it quite like “the commons.” Compared with “commons,” terms like “family,” “status,” “clan,” and “custom” seem both too privative—“the commons” has an openness and flexibility that the unnervingly tribal “clan” or aristocratic “family” clearly lack—and somehow not personal enough—the “commons” grounds an affective warmth that the cold institutionalism of “status” and the archaic proceduralism of “custom” can’t match. The appeal of the commons is that it allows us to lament the privacy of property without, at the same time, having to sacrifice an individualism—the capacity for meaningful, personal attachment—that we have come to cherish. The commons is, in this sense, liberalism’s name for what it doesn’t like about liberalism. Hence, the perfect fluency of Thomas Edward Scrutton (a highly successful commercial lawyer) complaining in 1881 that “the speculative builder and the wealthy landowner alike prey upon roadside wastes, and neighbouring Commons”: “the poor, who are deprived of any interest in the land, and the public, more and more restricted to the hard high road, are affected by the Policy of Enclosure and Individualism”. Reading closely, one can see that Scrutton elides what are actually three nonidentical constituencies—the “commons,” “the poor,” and “the public.” But to the degree that the elision works it’s because commonness could already, in 1881, serve as a kind of penumbral keyword for the opposite of “Enclosure and Individualism.” To see that the “commons” continues to function in this generic way, one need look no further than Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s recent call for a “democracy of the multitude” in which “we all share and participate in the common... —the air, the water, the fruits of the soil” and focus on “the practices of interaction, care, and cohabitation in a common world”.

Savagery, civilization, and property V: Colonial development and Neo-Malthusian conservationism

In the last post in this series we saw how Enlightenment-era stadial thought was passed on to modern commons theory through the aboriginal property rights debate among twentieth-century ecologists. Today I'll discuss what I believe two more lines of influence. (The full article is here.)

The first was by way of the work of anthropologists and scientists associated with British colonial development efforts under the aegis of colonial administrator Malcolm Hailey. Lord Hailey, after a career in the Indian Civil Service, was tapped to run the African Survey in the 1930s and the Colonial Research Committee in the 1940s, and was an advocate of multidisciplinary social science research, particularly anthropological, in the colonies.

The staff of Hailey’s African Survey seem to have created something of a nexus for stadial thought in the context of colonial development. London School of Economics anthropologist Lucy Mair’s chapter on land made heavy use of the stadial framework for considering “the evolution of the most suitable form of land tenure”:

Lucy Mair

In some areas land custom is changing rapidly under the influence of new conditions, such as the increase of the pressure of population or the spread of a market economy. These changes will eventually involve official intervention . . . ; the need must, for example, be envisaged for the definition and recording of title . . .

There is nothing peculiar to Africa in the general direction which the evolution of land custom is taking; its adjustment in response to economic changes is a natural process which would occur independently of any action taken by the administration. 

In Mair’s analysis, traditional, communal forms of African land tenure needed to progress to more private rights in order to encourage development:

All discussions on the subject agree as to the value of giving security to the occupier of land, and the further advantage of what is generally termed the individualization of tenures. It has been urged on different occasions that the extended system of rights, vested in the family or group, has proved in Africa to be an obstacle to improved agriculture.

Strikingly, Mair also reported on Hardin’s tragedy of the commons, avant la lettre, herdsman and all:

Those who have had to deal with East African conditions have added the . . . argument that there is little incentive to natives to reduce their live-stock in order to prevent the wastage of pasture and consequent erosion, since nothing done by the individual will avail unless his neighbours take corresponding action . . . 

Moreover, in a remarkable anticipation of later legal scholarship that highlighted potential “comedies of the commons” and “tragedies” of its disappearance,  she also warned of the advantages of common property in some situations: “The question of rights over grazing commonages presents its own difficulties; the partition of grazing grounds into small units would be a bar to the adoption of that rotational use of pasture which many hold to be the best preventive of erosion in East African conditions.”

Savagery, civilization, and property IV: The aboriginal property rights debate

In the last post in this series we saw how modern commons theory tracked many of the features of stadial theory. In this post I begin trying to uncover the routes by which the early modern theory reached modern thinkers on property.

The modern commons theorists discussed in the last post did not explicitly refer to the Enlightenment or Romantic thinkers whose theories may have influenced them. Yet the striking similarities between these two groups of theories, separated though they were by two centuries, seem to provide evidence of influence. It is likely that thinking in terms of civilizational stages was simply so deeply entrenched in the intellectual baggage of educated Westerners, whether through study of the classics, of Blackstone, or of Gibbon, that modern commons theorists replicated its patterns as a matter of course. Nevertheless, I suggest we can also trace more concrete lines of influence through the intertwined disciplines of anthropology and human ecology, as well as through the worlds of international development and conservationism.

Eleanor Leacock

An important branch of the field of anthropology’s research agenda was largely set in the mid-nineteenth century by stadial theory, and thereafter developed to a significant degree in dialogue with it. Anthropological works that clearly influenced modern commons thought, in particular those cited by Demsetz in his important 1967 article, were very much part of this dialogue, thereby infusing his work and that of others writing in the economic tradition with a large dose of stadial thinking.

The Victorian-era thinkers who strongly influenced anthropology in its founding era — Henry Maine, Lewis Henry Morgan, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels — were themselves influenced by the stadial theories of the late eighteenth century, and saw societies as evolving through modes of subsistence or production, viewed largely through the lens of property. But while Maine saw the transition from common to private property as a sign of civilization, Morgan, and, following him, Marx and Engels, saw this transition as a form of injustice and source of inequality (though perhaps a necessary one). 

Morgan, based on his knowledge of American Indians and reading of classical sources, argued that property was a key factor in the evolution of society as it progressed from a state of savagery (based on hunting) to barbarism (based on herding and farming) to one of civilization:

The idea of property was slowly formed in the human mind, remaining nascent and feeble through immense periods of time. Springing into life in savagery, it required all the experience of this period and of the subsequent period of barbarism to develop the germ, and to prepare the human brain for the acceptance of its controlling influence. Its dominance as a passion over all other passions marks the commencement of civilization. It not only led mankind to overcome the obstacles which delayed civilization, but to establish political society on the basis of territory and of property. A critical knowledge of the evolution of the idea of property would embody, in some respects, the most remarkable portion of the mental history of mankind.

As twentieth century anthropology developed the tool of ethnographic fieldwork, the work of many anthropologists, particularly in North America, revolved around supporting or disproving Morgan’s evolutionary account, with one arena of contention concerning the question of whether “primitive” hunting societies had private property or not.

Savagery, civilization, and property III: The commons theorists

In the last post in this series, we looked at the way early modern "stadial theory" connected between stages of civilization and property regimes. Now let us examine some of the classics of modern commons theory, noting the fondness of theorists for stories reminiscent of various aspects of stadial theory. I wish to highlight here not simply that commons theorists of many stripes tend to connect pressure on resources to property regimes, as unanimity on this point could plausibly be explained by observations of a pervasive phenomenon. It is rather the connection of these two parameters — pressure and property — with the early modern idea of civilizational stages characterized by hunting, pastoralism, agriculture, and sometimes commerce, that I find striking. Whether seeing these stages in terms of the march of Progress or a fall from Edenic bliss, nearly all commons theorists seem to be attracted to the basic narrative of stadial theory.

Garret Hardinʼs “Tragedy of the Commons” illustrated its argument against common property with a parable of a common pasture.  While neither Hardin nor William Forster Lloyd, from whom he borrowed the story, argued that society does or should progress along stages of development, their descriptions of the common pasture echoed some elements of stadial theory: shepherds have no “property” in their pastures, a characterization consistent with stadial thinking (and clearly disproved by historical work on actual common pastures).  Such pastures are subject to overgrazing, as in the story of Abraham and Lot adduced by Dalrymple.  Moreover, Hardinʼs article echoed stadial theory at several points, such as when he writes that “the logic of the commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate,”  or in his argument that increasing pressure on resources drives enclosure of the commons:

Perhaps the simplest summary of this analysis of man’s population problems is this: the commons, if justifiable at all, is justifiable only under conditions of low-population density. As the human population has increased, the commons has had to be abandoned in one aspect after another.

First we abandoned the commons in food gathering, enclosing farm land and restricting pastures and hunting and fishing areas.

Approximately contemporaneously with Hardin’s article, Harold Demsetz published his “Toward a Theory of Property Rights.”  Here the similarities to stadial theory were yet more prominent. Demsetz, relying on the work of anthropologists who had studied native tribes of the Canadian northeast, described societies that had moved from hunting to husbandry of fur-bearing animals (husbandry being either a sort of pastoralism or agriculture). Demsetz argued that this change in subsistence methods was accompanied by a change in property arrangements — lack of private property gave way, as a response to new, commercial demands for pelts, to defined property rights in land:

Herman Moll, inset from Beaver Map (1715)

We may safely surmise that the advent of the fur trade had two immediate consequences. First, the value of furs to the Indians was increased considerably. Second, and as a result, the scale of hunting activity rose sharply. Both consequences must have increased considerably the importance of the externalities associated with free hunting. The property right system began to change, and it changed specifically in the direction required to take account of the economic effects made important by the fur trade.

While not tracking Enlightenment stadial theory precisely, Demsetz’s account overlapped with it in several respects (not at all coincidentally, as we will see): echoes of the progression hunting-pastoralism-agriculture-commerce, an accompanying shift to increasingly defined property rights, and an explanatory mechanism based on increasing pressure on the resource.  Regarding this last point, Demsetz’s consideration of externalities was markedly similar to Adam Smith’s argument that “when flocks and herds come to be reared property then becomes of a very considerable extent; there are many opportunities of injuring one another and such injuries are extremely pernicious to the sufferer.”

Demsetz’s work was extremely influential on property theorists in the legal academy, many of whom continue to make use of the stadial paradigm. James Krier, for instance, recently advanced a modified Demsetzian account of the evolution of property rights from hunter-gatherer societies with communal ownership to agricultural ones with individual ownership.  Demsetz’s model also had major impacts on the economic literature on the commons (e.g. Anderson & Hill's "The Evolution of Property Rights" and the literature it spawned),  as well as on the “common pool resources” literature associated with Elinor Ostrom.

Perhaps less obvious, but in some respects uncannily similar to Adam Smith’s theory, is Carol Rose’s influential classification of management strategies for common resources.

Savagery, civilization, and property II: Civilization and its discontents

(Part II of the series, Part I is here.)

The second half of the eighteenth century saw the development, primarily in Scotland (though with significant French and other precedents),  of what would come to be known as “stadial theory” or “four-stages theory.” This group of theories built on an age-old interest in the origins of society and its institutions, sharpened by contact with New World societies that reminded Europeans of societies described in classical Greco-Roman and biblical sources, and raised the issue of what separated “savage” or “barbaric” peoples from “civilized” ones. Stadial thinking offered a theory of progress:

In its most specific form, the theory was that society ‛naturally’ or ‛normally’ progressed over time through four more or less distinct and consecutive stages, each corresponding to a different mode of subsistence, these stages being defined as hunting, pasturage, agriculture, and commerce. To each of these modes of subsistence, it came to be argued, there corresponded different sets of ideas and institutions relating to law, property, and government… (Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage 6 (1976))

From the beginning, property law had a central place in this type of theory — it was, it seems, the motivating factor behind the theory  — and the discussion of property displayed striking similarities to aspects of modern commons theory (to be discussed in Part III below). John Dalrympleʼs three-stage theory, the first published version of stadial theory (1757), connected the progress of society with increasing specification of property rights. Moreover, it attributed the transition between stages to what we might today call increasing pressure on resources:

The first state of society is that of hunters and fishers; among such a people the idea of property will be confined to a few, and but a very few moveables; and subjects which are immoveable, will be esteemed to be common. In accounts given of many American tribes we read, that one or two of the tribe will wander five or six hundred miles from his usual place of abode, plucking the fruit, destroying the game, and catching the fish throughout the fields and rivers adjoining to all the tribes which he passes, without any idea of such a property in the members of them, as makes him guilty of infringing the rights of others.

The next state of society begins, when the inconveniencies and dangers of such a life, lead men to the discovery of pasturage. During this period, as soon as a flock have brouzed [sic] upon one spot of ground, their proprietors will remove them to another; and the place they have quitted will fall to the next who pleases to take possession of it: for this reason such shepherds will have no notion of property in immoveables, nor of right of possession longer than the act of possession lasts. The words of Abraham to Lot are: “Is not the whole land before thee? Separate thyself, I pray thee, from me. If thou wilt take the left hand, then will I go to the right; or if thou depart to the right hand, then will I go to the left.” And we are told that the reason of this separation, was, the quantity of flocks, and herds, and tents, which each of them had, and which the land was unable to support; and therefore lord [sic] Stairs ingeniously observes, that the parts of the earth which the patriarchs enjoyed, are termed in the scripture, no more than the possessions.

A third state of society is produced, when men become so numerous, that the flesh and milk of their cattle is insufficient for their subsistence, and when their more extended intercourse with each other, has made them strike out new arts of life, and particularly the art of agriculture. This art leading men to bestow thought and labour upon land, increases their connection with a single portion of it; this connection long continued, produces an affection; and this affection long continued, together with the other, produces the notion of property. (John Dalrymple, An Essay Towards a General History of Property in Great Britain 86–88 (1757))

Lord Kames

The jurist Henry Home, Lord Kames, also connected the stages of society to property law in his Historical Law Tracts (144–46 (Edinburgh, A. Kincaid & J. Bell, 1758), footnotes omitted and spelling modernized):

In the two first stages of the social life, while men were hunters or shepherds, there scarce could be any notion of land-property. Men being strangers to agriculture, and also to the art of building, if it was not of huts, which could be raised or demolished in a moment, had no fixed habitations, but wandered about in hordes or clans, in order to find pasture for their cattle. In this vagrant life men had scarce any connection with land more than with air or water. A field of grass might be considered as belonging to a horde or clan, while they were in possession; and so might the air in which they breathed, and the water of which they drunk: but the moment they removed to another quarter, there no longer subsisted any connection betwixt them and the field that was deserted. It lay open to new-comers, who had the same right as if it had not been formerly occupied. Hence I conclude, that while men led the life of shepherds, there was no relation formed betwixt them and land, in any manner so distinct as to obtain the name of Property.

Agriculture, which makes the third stage of the social life, produced the relation of land-property. A man who has bestowed labour in preparing a field for the plough, and who has improved this field by artful culture, forms in his mind a very intimate connection with it.

Elsewhere Kames connected the advance between stages with the pressure of growing populations on resources: 

Savagery, civilization, and property I: Introduction

To cap the series I've been doing on "The Tragedy of the Commons at 50" (the last post is here), I'm going to post my own contribution to the issue (SSRN, Academia), in installments. I'd be really happy to get feedback.

This series makes a simple claim: that the commons theory of the last half century, in its various forms and schools, has been substantially shaped by early modern ways of thinking about the evolution of civilizations. In particular, it has hewed closely to models that gelled in the Enlightenment-era works known as “stadial theory,” passed down to the twentieth century through the disciplines of anthropology and human ecology, and strongly entrenched in the patterns of thought of property theorists to this day.

I do not wish to argue that recent thinkers deliberately or consciously based their theories on early modern precedents, nor do I claim that their theories simply recast old theories, pouring old wine into new bottles. What I wish to argue, rather, is that modern commons theory is a series of variations on a theme, the theme being the passage of human societies from stages of “barbarism” or “savagery” to “civilization.” This way of thinking, largely elaborated in the eighteenth century, has proved to be so powerful that it continues to shape the discourse around common property and environmental commons into the twenty-first. As Nathaniel Wolloch has argued with respect to similarities between stadial theory and Norbert Elias’s civilizing-process theory, “the similarities between these two perspectives are much clearer than their differences, and point to a continuing tradition in modern historiographical interpretations of the rise of civilization.” For Elias’s theory substitute property theory, and for historiographical interpretations of the rise of civilization substitute theoretical interpretations of the rise of private property, and you have my argument.

The significance of this claim lies not only in its implication that modern commons theory has been somewhat confined by the straits of a discourse of which it is not even always aware. It lies also in that its portrayals of transitions between property regimes largely partake either of Enlightenment assumptions of civilizational progress or of a Romantic reaction to this attitude, with its valorization of the primitive. Thus do deep cultural attitudes, rooted in the speculative thinking of an earlier age, color todayʼs theories — positive and normative — of the commons.

A commons

To set the stage, consider the concrete examples or allegories used by commons theorists of the last half century, to be discussed in the next post. Nearly without exception, they have skipped over such familiar but prosaic commons as cooperatives, condominiums, corporations, and neighborhood associations, in favor of studies of the exotic worlds of hunters, herdsmen, and smallholding farmers. The reason, I suggest, is the continuing influence of early modern theories of civilization.

After describing (in post II of this series) these earlier ways of thinking I will note (in post III) the striking similarities of recent theories of the commons to the earlier models, and then (in post IV) try to trace the channels of influence. I will conclude with why I think this matters.

Trends and approaches to the commons in historiography

Next to last in our series on "The Tragedy of the Commons at 50" (the previous post, on Carol Rose's article, is here) is Giacomo Bonan's piece, "Confronting Hardin: Trends and Approaches to the Commons in Historiography". The abstract:

This Article analyses both the role of historiography in Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons (1968) and his paper’s impact on historiographical debates of the last five decades. Concerning the role of historiography in Hardin’s argument, the ‘tragedy of the commons’ itself derived from a pamphlet written by a nineteenth century supporter of English enclosures, who proposed a variant of Malthus’ theory. If Hardin inevitably dealt with previous historical interpretations of the commons, the reverberations aroused by his paper have strongly influenced subsequent historical research on this subject. It is possible to group the historiographical production of the last decades concerning the commons into three main lines of research. The first line has developed in the field of economic history and has been influenced by Elinor Ostrom’s principles for long-enduring institutions that efficaciously manage commons. The second line has focused on the conflicts caused by exogenous interferences in the management of common land, such as state or market intervention, and their social and environmental consequences. The third line has devoted attention to the role of common lands in the internal dynamics of the local communities and the conflicts over their use at the local level. The conclusion of this Article focuses on the role of Hardin’s legacy in the current debate on the global environmental crisis.

Thomas Malthus

Indigenous peoples, political economists and the tragedy of the commons

Next in our series on "The Tragedy of the Commons at 50" (the last post is here) is Michel Morin's "Indigenous Peoples, Political Economists and the Tragedy of the Commons". The abstract:

In “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin implicitly moved from bounded commons — a pasture or a tribe’s territory — to the case of boundless commons — the ocean, the atmosphere and planet Earth. He insisted on the need for imposing limits on the use of these resources, blurring the difference between communal property and open access regimes. The success of his paper is due in great measure to his neglect of economic, scientific, legal  and anthropological literature. His main lifelong focus was on limiting population growth. He could have avoided the conceptual confusion he created by turning to well-known political economists such as John Locke and Adam Smith or, for that matter, jurists, such as Blackstone. Instead, he simply envisioned indigenous lands as an unbounded wilderness placed at the disposal of frontiersmen. Though he eventually acknowledged the existence of managed commons, he had little interest in community rules pertaining to resource exploitation. For him, these were simply moral norms which inevitably became ineffective after a community reached a certain level of population. He also took economists to task for failing to include in their analysis the true environmental and social costs of public decisions. Still, the famous example of the indigenous people of Northeastern Quebec illustrates a shortcoming of his analysis: community members did not act in total isolation from each other. On the contrary, communal norms could prevent an overexploitation of resources or allow for the adoption of corrective measures.

Beaver Hunting in Canada,
from Charles Theodore Middleton’s A New and Complete System of Geography…, after Chiedel, 1777-1778
(Library and Archives Canada)

The roots of Ostrom's commons work

Continuing the series on "The Tragedy of the Commons at 50" (the last post is here), Fabien Locher's "Historicizing Elinor Ostrom: Urban Politics, International Development and Expertise in the U.S. Context (1970-1990)" provides interesting historical context for the work of Ostrom and the huge body of commons studies she inspired. The abstract:

The goal of this article is to write a social and political history of the now preeminent approach to the ‘commons’ institutions, by focusing on Elinor Ostrom’s contributions to its development. My methodology is that of Science and Technology Studies (STS). I focus here on the materiality of E. Ostrom and her team’s research practices (fieldwork, data collecting, indexing and analysis), on their intellectual and institutional strategies, their networking practices, how their research was funded, and their interactions with administrative and academic institutions and actors (USAID, NSF, National Academy of Sciences). I analyze the history of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, the research center that E. Ostrom and her husband Vincent founded and animated for some 40 years at Indiana University, Bloomington. By doing so, I hope to be able to analyze the close ties between the form and content of the Ostromian theories on the commons and the main lines of tension in the U.S. society of the 1970s and 80s that saw their emergence: urban crisis and “neighborhood revolution”, increasing distrust of modernization and centralization ideals, mutations in U.S. development policies and doctrines, rise of neoliberalism.

The marine "commons" discourse

Next in the series of posts (the last one is here) on "The Tragedy at 50" (by the way, if anyone wants a hard copy of the journal issue, please email me), is Harry Scheiber's "The 'Commons' Discourse on Marine Fisheries Resources: Another Antecedent to Hardin’s 'Tragedy'". The abstract:

Throughout the fifty years since its publication, Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” has been regarded as a seminal paper in the environmental movement, although his emphasis on population control (which actually formed the core concern of the article) has been largely forgotten. Hardin argued that free access by a growing population to common resources would inevitably lead to the depletion of those resources, citing as one example how maritime nations’ belief in the freedom of the seas, combined with their belief in the inexhaustibility of marine resources, had brought whales and many species of fish close to extinction. Hardin failed, however, to take account of the extensive debates throughout much of the twentieth century by scientists and policymakers on the general problem of the ocean commons — what they generally termed the “dilemma of the commons” — as it applied not only to living marine resources but also to mineral resources. By mid-century, as improved fishing technology gave rise to ever greater catches, the notion of the inexhaustibility of fisheries was largely discredited; hence scientists as well as experts in both national and international law became focused on addressing the dilemma of the commons through fisheries management, and specifically by determining the Maximum Sustainable Yield. Some economists, arguing instead for maximum efficiency, urged that open access be abandoned in favor of limited entry. Such measures to resolve the dilemma of the commons were the subject of numerous conferences (including the second UN Conference on the Law of the Sea in 1958) and were widely debated in scholarly publications and, indeed, by the late 1960s had been practically implemented by a number of laws and treaties. By 1966, national control over a twelve-mile fishing zone offshore of coastal nations had been well established. These developments regarding the oceans commons, predating Hardin’s article, were apparently either of no interest to him or (if he knew of them) purposefully subordinated to his main polemical objective, which was his Malthusian analysis of the commons issue and his call for limits on “human breeding.”