The Commons as Governance Model

Excerpt from David Bollier:

"The Commons is a regime for managing common-pool resources that eschews individual property rights and State control. It is a system of governance that relies on common property arrangements that tend to be self-organized and enforced in complex and sometimes idiosyncratic ways (which distinguish it from communism, a top-down, State-directed mode of governance whose historical record has been unimpressive). Today the commons can be seen in such diverse resources as the Internet, rural forests, fisheries, town squares, universities and community life.

A commons is generally governed by what we call Vernacular Law – the “unofficial” norms, institutions and procedures that a peer community devises to manage its resources on its own, and typically democratically. State law and action may set the parameters within which Vernacular Law operates, but the State does not directly control how a given commons is organized and managed.

In its classic form, a commons operates in a quasi-sovereign way, similar to the Market but largely escaping the centralized mandates of the State and the logic of Market exchange. By mobilizing decentralized participation on the ground, commons could become important vehicles for assuring a right to environment at local, regional, national and global levels. Moving in this direction, however, will require innovative legal and policy norms, institutions and procedures to recognize and support commons as a matter of law."