Why should we common things?

We’re all feeling the pinch. The essential things in life like housing, food, water and energy are becoming more and more expensive. Commoning returns these resources to the hands of the people who rely on them, making them affordable and accessible once again.

Imagine a world where neighbours share cheap energy produced by solar panels, where communities own their housing forever, where affordable, local food is distributed fairly among members. Commoning isn’t just a solution to save money; it reconnects us to one another, restores our sense of control and creates a system that works for everyone.

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How does it work?

Ownership

For commons to work, a few key things need to be in place:

1. To make sure the benefits remain in the community and are shared fairly amongst the members, the things we bring into commons need to be owned by the community who will use them.
2. What we bring into the commons stays in the commons for good. This means preventing it from being sold off, privatised, or taken away from the community at any time in the future, through strong asset locks.

Governance

Once we have ownership and ways to keep it forever, we have to figure out how to manage it well as a community.

The ‘tragedy of the commons’ is the idea that if ordinary people were given access to a common resource like a pasture, they would act selfishly, overuse it and destroy it altogether. Therefore, the argument goes, it should be privatised or state-controlled. We now know that this is wrong. People in communities know each other, and there are social consequences if one person overuses the resource.

Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize in Economics for her work on commons, studied how people in local communities manage shared resources, such as pastures, fishing waters and forests, sometimes for hundreds of years. She showed that when resources are owned in common, rules can be established around how they’re used, in ways that are both economically and ecologically sustainable.

In Governing the Commons, Ostrom summarised eight principles that were seen in successful commons:

1. Clearly define who can use the resource and what the resource area covers.

• Imagine a community garden. Only members with a garden pass can pick vegetables, and the garden’s boundaries are marked with a fence.

2. Rules should reflect local conditions, like the available labour, tools, and funds.

• A shared fishing lake may have rules allowing fishing only during specific months to protect fish breeding seasons.

3. People affected by the rules should have a voice in making or changing them.

• Apartment residents decide together on rules for using a shared laundry room.

4. Regular monitoring to ensure resources are used responsibly, and monitors should be accountable to the group.

• In a carpool group, members track who uses the car and when to ensure fair sharing.

5. Rule-breakers face consequences that fit the offence and the situation.

• A community library fines members more for keeping books for months but less for a few extra days.

6. Provide accessible ways to resolve disagreements without needing expensive or complicated systems.

• A neighborhood committee mediates conflicts over who gets to use the basketball court.

7. People should have the right to create their own rules without interference from outside authorities.

• A group of farmers agrees on how to share irrigation water without government interference.

8. Work together at different levels: layers of cooperation, from local groups to regional or national ones.

• A city recycling program coordinates with local neighborhood teams and a national waste management agency.