Commoning Knowledge: Working Together to Preserve our Cultural Wealth

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Commoning Knowledge Working Together to
Preserve our Cultural Wealth

• Charlotte Hess
• Associate Dean for Research, Collections, and
  Scholarly Communication
• Syracuse University Library
• hess_at_syr.edu

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The most basic questions of human societies

• How do disparate people
• come together and agree
• on rules and decisions
• in order to manage and
• sustain resources.?

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Commons History

• European commons and the Enclosure Movements
  (1200-1900)
• Shared (British) university dining halls
• New England town commons (US)
• Indigenous shared natural resources (forest,
  grazing and agricultural lands fisheries, etc.)
• Global Commons (outer space, atmosphere, high
  seas, Antarctica)
• New Commons (Internet and knowledge commons,
  genetic resources, urban commons, etc.)

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Ostrom Design Principles

• Group boundaries clearly defined
• Rules governing the use of collective goods are
  well matched to local needs and conditions
• Most individuals affected by these rules can
  participate in modifying the rules
• The right of community members to devise their
  own rules is respected by external authorities
• Monitoring mechanisms by community
• Graduated sanctions

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Study of commons is recent

• 1950s Work of Gordon, Scott, and Vincent Ostrom
• 1968 Hardins Tragedy of the Commons
• 1977 Ostrom and Ostrom
• 1985 Conference on Common Property Resource
  Management
• 1989 formation of International Association for
  the Study of Common Property (IASCP) (E. Ostrom
  first president)
• 1990Publication of Ostroms seminal work
  Governing the Commons
• 1995 IASCP conference Reinventing the Commons
  in Norway
• 2006Association name change to International
  Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC)
  (See Hess and Meinzen-Dick 2006)
• 2009Elinor Ostrom wins Nobel Prize in Economics
  for her work on economic governance, especially
  the commons

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Commons

• Resources shared by a
• group of people
• Vulnerable to enclosure,
• degradation, and social
• dilemmas
• They can be
• small (the family refrigerator)
• community-level (sidewalks, playgrounds,
  libraries)
• large, at the international and global levels
  (deep-sea oceans, the atmosphere, the Internet,
  and scientific knowledge)

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Characteristics of Commons

• Self-governing
• Participatory
• Social dilemmas
• Social capitaltrustreciprocity
• Communication dialogue
• Locally-designed rules
• Governance of shared resources is hard work
• Community members are artisans who craft
  appropriate institutions

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The Study of New Commons is More Recent1995

• Focus on evolution or building new types of
  commons
• No pre-existing rules and norms
• Increasingly complex
• Size, communities, incentives often unknown
• Extremely dynamic

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Characteristics of New Commons

• Reactions to threats of enclosure
• In the process of evolving
• No clear rules
• Heterogeneous community
• New forms of collaboration and collective action
• We dont know much about them
• We know less about global commons

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Complexity

• Complexity refers to attributes of natural
  resources, ecological systems, and socioeconomic
  and political systems that affect the ability of
  resource users to recognize how their actions
  affect the condition of the resource. Complexity
  limits the ability of individuals to identify the
  full set of possible outcomes or assign
  probabilities to particular outcomes of specific
  actions. Difficult to discern cause-effect
  relationships. Studies that grapple with
  complexity often generate new hypotheses about
  appropriate collective action. (Poteete,
  Janssen, Ostrom. 2010)

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Why do commons arise?

• New Technologies
• New Laws
• New Communities
• Sudden change
• (disasters)

• New enclosures
• New (competing) demands
• New capabilities for collective action and new
  communities

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Enclosure a revolution of the rich against the
poor

• Dramatic rise of
• Intellectual property rights (i.e. patenting of
  everything, including life)
• New enclosure movementBoyle
• New colonization -- Shiva
• Privately owned public resources (such as
  water systems groundwater basins, highways)
• Globalization and Corporate domination (Of the
  100 largest economies in the world, 51 are global
  corporations only 49 are countries) also the
  corporatization of Higher Education

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Natural Resource Commons vs. Knowledge and
Information

• Forests and Fisheries
• Rivalrous
• Depletable
• Open Access -- Bad
• Rapid change
• Threat of Overuse
• (tragedy of the commons)

• Knowledge
• Non-rivalrous
• Non-depletable
• Open Access Good
• More rapid change
• Threat of Underuse (anticommons)

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Diagnostic Tool for Commons Analysis
Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD)
Framework
Begin with identifying the resource and then with
the outcomes, the action arena, or the exogenous
characteristics (left side)
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R i v a l r y
Low High
Exclusion
ppp
Public Goods
Common-Pool Resources
Easy Difficult
Private Goods
Club Goods
Types of Goods (adapted from Ostrom and Ostrom
1977 )
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R i v a l r y
New uses
New laws and rules
New technologies
New communities of users
Low High
ppp
Exclusion
New disasters
Public Goods
Common-Pool Resources
Easy Difficult
Private Goods
Club Goods
The Assault on Public Goods (Hess 2009)
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Types of Enclosure

• Lack of preservation
• New IPR Legislation
• New technologies
• Resource scarcity through growing competition
• Overpatenting
• Withdrawal
• Censure
• Destruction
• Loss
• Neglect

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Why is the commons helpful?

• Tendency to privatize
• Critical need to better understand complex
  adaptive systems
• Need to devise effective governance systems
  Alternative ways of governing often not
  recognized. Global and national environmental
  policy frequently ignores community-based
  governance and traditional tools, such as
  informal communication and sanctioning
• Many only know about the commons from the tragic
  perspective.
• Concerted collective action is powerful

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Necessary Tools to Build Commons

• Collective action
• Communication and dialogue
• Information
• Social capital, trust and reciprocity
• Effective rules
• Participation
• Monitoring and sanctioning

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Lessons Learned

• Local matters
• Rules matter
• No one rules applies to all
• Participation counts
• Communication is essential
• Ostroms design principles

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Experiments show

• Trust and Reciprocity are very key to explaining
  levels of cooperation
• Social Dilemmas such as overharvestingcommunicati
  on and common understandings are essential for
  people to cooperate
• Incentives for authors and scientists
• Need robust and flexible institutional
  infrastructures

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Citations 1.

• Argyres, Nicholas S., and Julia Porter Liebeskind
  1998. Privatizing the Intellectual Commons
  Universities and the Commercialization of
  Biotechnology. Journal of Economic Behavior and
  Organization 35
• Benkler, Y. 2010. Law, Policy, and
  Cooperation. pp. 299-334, in Balleisen, E.J. and
  D. A. Moss, eds. Government and Markets Toward a
  New Theory of Regulation. Cambridge University
  Press.
• Benkler, Yochai. 2006. The Wealth of Networks
  How Social Production Transforms Markets and
  Freedom. New Haven Yale University Press.
• Berkes, F. J. Colding, C. Folke, Eds., 2003.
  Navigating Social-Ecological Systems Building
  Resilience for Complexity and Change .Cambridge
  UP.
• Blue Ribbon Task Force. 2010. Sustainable Digital
  Preservation and Access. http//brtf.sdsc.edu/
• Designing the Microbial Research Commons An
  International Symposium (website). 8-9 Oct. 2009.
  National Academy of Sciences. http//sites.nationa
  lacademies.org/PGA/brdi/PGA_050859
• Dietz, Thomas, Elinor Ostrom, and Paul C. Stern
  2003. The Struggle to Govern the Commons.
  Science 302(5652)1907-1912.
• Digital Library of the Commons (website)
  http//dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc
• Gordon, H. Scott. 1954. The Economic Theory of
  a Common-Property Resource The Fishery. Journal
  of Political Economy 62124-142
• Gray, Eve. 2010. Access to Africas Knowledge
  Publishing Development Research and Measuring
  Value. African Journal of Information and
  Communication vol. 10 http//link.wits.ac.za/journ
  al/AJIC10-Gray.pdf

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Citations 2.

• Heller, Michael A. 1998. The Tragedy of the
  Anticommons Property in the Transition from Marx
  to Markets. Harvard Law Review 111(3)622-688.
  http//papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id
  57627
• Hess, Charlotte. 2008. The Comprehensive
  Bibliography of the Commons. http//dlc.dlib.india
  na.edu/cpr/index.php
• Hess, Charlotte, and Elinor Ostrom, eds. 2007.
  Understanding Knowledge as a Commons From Theory
  to Practice. Cambridge, MA MIT Press.
• Hess, Charlotte, and Ruth Meinzen-Dick 2006.
  The Name Change or, What Happened to the P?
  The Commons Digest 21-4. http//www.iascp.org/E-
  CPR/cd02.pdf
• International Association for the Study of the
  Commons (new website---Mexico) http//www.iascp.or
  g/
• International Association for the Study of the
  Commons (old website Indiana U.)
  www.indiana.edu/iascp/
• Kristof, Nicholas. 2010.Death by Gadget. New
  York Times (June 26) http//www.nytimes.com/2010/0
  6/27/opinion/27kristof.html
• Lynch, Clifford A. 1994. Rethinking the
  Integrity of the Scholarly Record in the
  Networked Information Age. Educom Review 29(2).
  http//www.educause.edu/Resources/RethinkingtheInt
  egrityoftheSch/158190
• Linebaugh, Peter . 2008. The Magna Carta
  Manifesto Liberties and Commons for All.
  Berkeley University of California Press.
• Madison, M., B. Frischmann, and K. Strandburg.
  2010. Constructing Commons in the Cultural
  Environment. Cornell Law Review, Vol. 95(4).
  http//www.lawschool.cornell.edu/research/cornell-
  law-review/Volume-95-Number-4.cfm

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Citations 3.

• National Research Council, ed. 1986. Proceedings
  of the Conference on Common Property Resource
  Management, April 21-26, 1985. Washington, DC
  National Academy Press.
• Ostrom, Elinor. 1965. Public Entrepreneurship
  A Case Study in Ground Water Basin Management.
  (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California-Los
  Angeles, 1965). http//dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/ha
  ndle/10535/3581
• Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons The
  Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action.
  New York Cambridge University Press. (The
  Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions).
• Ostrom, Elinor. 2010. The Institutional Analysis
  and Development Framework and the Commons.
  Cornell Law Review. 95807-816.
  http//dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/handle/10535/5770
• Ostrom, Vincent. 1950. Government and Water A
  Study of the Influence of Water Upon Governmental
  Institutions and Practices in the Development of
  Los Angeles. (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of
  California-Los Angeles, 1950). http//dlc.dlib.ind
  iana.edu/dlc/handle/10535/3608
• Ostrom, Vincent, and Elinor Ostrom 1977. Public
  Goods and Public Choices. In Alternatives for
  Delivering Public Services Toward Improved
  Performance. E. S. Savas, ed. Boulder, CO
  Westview.
• Poteete, A. Janssen, M. Ostrom, E. 2010. Working
  Together Collective Action, The Commons, and
  Multiple Methods in Practice. Princeton
  University Press.
• Resilience Alliance (website) http//www.resallia
  nce.org/1.php
• Scott, Anthony D. 1955. The Fishery The
  Objectives of Sole Ownership. Journal of
  Political Economy 65116-124.

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