David Bollier

For newcomers to the commons wishing to acquaint themselves with Elinor Ostrom’s work, it can be a hard slog.  Her scholarly treatises, while often quite insightful, can be quite dense in delivering their hard research results and refined insights.  It is a real pleasure, therefore, to greet Sustaining the Commons, a new undergraduate textbook that has just been published.  The book provides a general overview of the intellectual framework, concepts and applications of Ostrom’s research on the commons. 

Best of all, in a refreshing departure from most academic publishing, the authors of the 168-page book decided to make it available for free as a downloadable pdf file.  Just go to the book’s website and blog, http://sustainingthecommons.asu.edu.

Sustaining the Commons is by John M. Anderies and Marco A. Janssen, both associate professors at Arizona State University and directors of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity, which is the publisher of the textbook.  Both authors worked with Ostrom from 2000 until her death in 2012.  Although Ostrom’s name is mostly associated with Indiana University, where she co-founded and ran the Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Ostrom was also a part-time research professor at ASU from 2006-2012.

Anderies and Janssen taught a course at ASU on Ostrom’s work, with a special focus on her books Governing the Commons (1990) and Understanding Institutional Diversity (2005).  Out of that teaching arose the idea for this book.  Ostrom herself saw and approved of the first draft of the book in April 2012, shortly before her death. 

The book is a lucid, logically presented introduction to the key concepts of Ostrom’s research.  There are chapters on “defining institutions,” “action arenas and action situations,” and “social dilemmas.”  There are also a series of case studies on the management of various types of common-pool resources – water, forests, domesticated animals – and a review of “design principles to sustain the commons.”  

There are a number of chapters on human behavior as it is studied by social science.  How do people make decisions about collective matters and how do they develop trust?  How are these behaviors studied in the laboratory?  What sorts of rules and social norms matter? 

In a major triumph for protecting genes as a commons, the US Supreme Court ruled last week that human genes cannot be owned and must be available to anyone for study and medical innovation.  The case involved a Utah company, Myriad Genetics, that had claimed patents on “breast cancer susceptibility genes,” which gave the company a monopoly on a $3,000 diagnostic test that could detect heightened risk of getting cancer.  The patents were widely criticized for impeding breast cancer research and stifling cheaper, more competitive diagnostic tests.

The Court’s unanimous ruling in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc. held that “a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated….”  Myriad had claimed that its isolation of the critical BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes in a person – a diagnosis that dramatically increases the risks of cancer in a person -- entitles it to patent those genes to the exclusion of others.

 But Justice Thomas held that “separating that gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention.”  The case was brought by an array of doctors, medical researchers and women’s health organizations that objected to the impact of the patents on research, competition and healthcare.

This sweeping ruling rolled back one of the most notorious enclosures of the past generation.  It also drew a bright line limiting the capacity to legally own a naturally occurring element of nature.  This is a significant legal development that one might not have expected from the Roberts Court.  I suspect that the sheer incoherence and contradictions of patent law were just becoming too egregious for any other outcome but this one.

Biotech experts now expect that new diagnostic tests will be offered that dramatically lower the costs of assessing one’s risk of cancer.  It is also likely that there will be more robust, innovative research focused on these genes now that the risk of patent infringement has been swept aside.  It’s been estimated that there may be about 8,700 gene patents that might be jeopardized by the Myriad decision. 

Our knowledge about what makes digital commons work is terribly under-theorized.  Yes, there are famous works by Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler, and there are lots of projects and websites that are based on commoning such as like Wikipedia, free software, Arduino, open access journals, among countless others.  But can we identify core principles for organizing digital commons?  Can we use that knowledge to engineer the evolution of new commons?  Identifying such principles just might let us move beyond “openness” as the ultimate goal of online life, to a more sustainable goal, the self-governed commons.

It has been a pleasure to discover that some computer scientists are actively exploring how Elinor Ostrom’s principles for successful commons might be applied to the design of software.  Consider this intriguing essay title: "Axiomatization of Socio-Economic Principles for Self-Organizing Institutions: Concepts, Experiments and Challenges,“ which appeared in the ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, in December 2012.  

The piece is by British electrical and electronic engineer Jeremy Pitt and two co-authors, Julia Schaumeier and Alexander Artikis. The abstract is here.  Unfortunately, the full article is behind a paywall, consigning it to a narrow readership.  I shall quote from the abstract here because it hints at the general thinking of tech experts who realize that the social and the technical must be artfully blended:

We address the problem of engineering self-organising electronic institutions for resource allocation in open, embedded and resource-constrained systems.  In such systems, there is decentralised control, competition for resources and an expectation of both intentional and unintentional errors.  The ‘optimal’ distribution of resources is then less important than the sustainability of the distribution mechanism, in terms of endurance and fairness, based on collective decision-making and tolerance of unintentional errors.  In these circumstances, we propose to model resource allocation as a common-pool resource management problem, and develop a formal characterization of Elinor Ostrom’s socio-economic principles for enduring institutions. 

The International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) is considering developing one or more training programs on the commons, in cooperation with Countryside and Community Research Institute of the University of Gloucestershire (UoG); the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales-UNAM; and the CGIAR Program on Collective Action and Property Rights Program (CAPRI). 

Before moving ahead, the organizers want to learn more about student interests and needs.  You can help them out by taking part in a short online survey in either English or Spanish.  It only takes about five minutes.  The course organizers are tentatively thinking of offering courses on the following commons-related topics:

I. Introduction to the Commons.

II. Biodiversity and forests. Covering issues such as: ecological principles, biodiversity as a “commons”, forest rights, indigenous utilization, and the capacity for multi-functional use, Valuing biodiversity and influencing policy, and Carbon sequestration and the role of forests in climate change and environmental management.

III. Water. Covering issues such as: water as a finite and shared resource, application of commons concepts to water management under different conditions (trans-boundary management; inter-basin movement; within catchment management), legal regimes, water rights, and ‘markets’ for water.