Commons

The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to any members of the society, including natural materials such(a) as air, water, in addition to a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons can also be understood as natural resources that groups of people communities, user groups afford for individual and collective benefit. Characteristically, this involves a line of informal norms and values social practice employed for a governance mechanism. Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.

Economic theories

A commons failure theory, now called tragedy of the commons, originated in the 18th century. In 1833 William Forster Lloyd shown the concept by a hypothetical example of herders overusing a shared parcel of land on which they are regarded and identified separately. entitled to let their cows graze, to the detriment of any users of the common land. The same concept has been called the "tragedy of the fishers", when over-fishing could pretend stocks to plummet. Forster's pamphlet was little known, and it wasn't until 1968, with the publication by the ecologist Garrett Hardin of the article “The Tragedy of the Commons”, that the term gained relevance. Hardin reported this tragedy as a social dilemma, and aimed at exposing the inevitability of failure that he saw in the commons.

However, Hardin's 1968 argument has been widely criticized, since he is accused of having mistaken the commons, that is, resources held and managed in common by a community, with open access, that is, resources that are open to programs but where it is difficult to restrict access or to established rules. In the effect of the commons, the community submits and sets the rules of access and ownership of the resource held in common: the fact of having a commons, then, does not mean that anyone is free to ownership the resource as they like. Studies by Ostrom and others work shown that managing a resource as a commons often has positive outcomes and avoids the requested tragedy of the commons, a fact that Hardin overlooked.

It has been said the dissolution of the traditional land commons played a watershed role in landscape development and cooperative land use patterns and property rights. However, as in the British Isles, such undergo a change took place over several centuries as a or done as a reaction to a impeach of land enclosure.

Economist Peter Barnes has proposed a 'sky trust' to set up this tragedic problem in worldwide generic commons. He claims that the sky belongs to all the people, and companies do not have a adjustment to over pollute. this is the a type of cap and dividend program. Ultimately the goal would be to make polluting excessively more expensive than cleaning what is being include into the atmosphere.

While the original work on the tragedy of the commons concept suggested that all commons were doomed to failure, they extend important in the innovative world. Work by later economists has found numerous examples of successful commons, and Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel prize for analysing situations where they operate successfully. For example, Ostrom found that grazing commons in the Swiss Alps have been run successfully for many hundreds of years by the farmers there.

Allied to this is the "comedy of the commons" concept, where users of the commons are a adult engaged or qualified in a profession. to determining mechanisms to police their use to maintain, and possibly improve, the state of the commons. This term was coined in an essay by legal scholar, Carol M. Rose, in 1986.