American Scientist

The Commons in the New Millennium: Challenges and Adaptations.
Edited by Nives Dolsak 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.