BOOK REVIEW
This Land is Our Land
Eduard Niesten
The Commons in the New Millennium: Challenges and Adaptations.
Edited by Nives Dol?ak and Elinor Ostrom.
xxiv + 369 pp.
The MIT Press, 2003. Paper, $26.95.
Many environmental and natural resources defy management as private
property, and one institutional response is to treat them as common
property. In The Commons in the New Millennium: Challenges and
Adaptations, edited by Nives Dol?ak and Elinor Ostrom, the
contributing authors take issue with the notion that this approach
is becoming obsolete. They argue that common-property management of
a variety of resources will endure, although it must evolve to adapt
to economic, social and legal changes taking place throughout the world.
Two defining features of the class of goods and services known as
"common-pool resources" shape the challenge of designing
effective rules for their management. The first is subtractability,
or rivalry, which refers to one person's use of a resource reducing
the ability of others to exploit it similarly. In the familiar
example of a fishery, this dynamic is clear, as one person's catch
reduces the amount of fish available for others to harvest. The
second feature is that controlling access is too costly to be done
effectively, allowing some to "free ride"—that is,
to use the resource without contributing to expenditures needed to
provide, maintain and regulate it. For instance, a company or even a
country has an incentive to emit pollutants without regard to the
absorptive capacity of the atmosphere, leaving it to others to
control emissions or absorb the costs of reduced air quality and
climate change.
Institutional responses to the challenge of managing common-pool
resources are shaped by the property rights involved, which can take
the form of government, private or common-property ownership. The
appropriate or most effective type of ownership depends on many
factors, including physical aspects of the resource, characteristics
of the group of users, reliability of the judicial context that
determines options for legal recourse, and economic considerations
that influence the intensity of resource use and the costs of
management. The contributing authors explore the impact of these and
other factors on institutional design and the degree of success in
common property management, using case studies of resources such as
fisheries, forests and the atmosphere, as well as a resource that is
less often examined as common property, namely social capital.
The title and the premise of this book raise the question of what
exactly is changing in the "New Millennium." The editors
present three questions to be answered in the volume: (1) What
contemporary developments challenge traditional common-property
institutions, and how are these institutions adapting? (2) How is
the ever-increasing scale of human interactions affecting the
governance of larger-scale common-pool resources? and (3) What
progress is being made in the design of institutions that
"privatize" some rights that individuals have to the use
of a common-pool resource? However, direct, complete answers to
these questions do not develop in the volume. Rather, we find
conclusions that are widespread in the existing literature. In this
sense, these essays yield little that is conceptually new, although
they do provide a series of rich and detailed case studies.
Passages that most directly address the book's basic premise are
thought-provoking. In particular, I was intrigued by various
reflections on the potential effects of today's accelerating
globalization. Global markets increasingly penetrate all parts of
the world, with an accompanying flow of ideas and technology that
often influence resource use and the institutions designed to govern
it. For example, some new technologies intensify pressure to exploit
a common resource; others reduce that pressure by promising more
sustainable or more efficient extraction. By expanding the available
means of monitoring and coordinating resource users' behavior, new
technologies and ideas can affect the workings of the management
institutions themselves.
The authors also comment that cultural globalization is resulting in
"an increasingly unified mindset" that emphasizes
consumption, which they associate with Western values. Greater
consumption implies greater pressure on various common resources.
This may undermine local institutions and cultural practices that
promote trust and restraint on the part of resource users. Yet at
the same time, Western nations can transmit environmental values,
including the ideal of responsible stewardship of local resources
within a global context; they can also provide the financial
resources to make such stewardship possible. Clearly, the effects of
economic and cultural globalization on common-property institutions
are unlikely to be uniformly detrimental or beneficial. These essays
point out that further reflection and case-specific analysis are
needed.—Eduard Niesten, Conservation International,
Washington, D.C.
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