UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM
GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
Political Science department
UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM
Is there a Future for the Common University?
Managing the knowledge commons
Masters dissertation Political Theory and Political Behavior
Danna Harmsen
5813999
31 August 2016
Supervisor: Enzo Rossi
Second reader: Marcel Maussen
2
Table of contents:
1. Introduction
3
2. Return of the Commons
6
2.1 Public goods provision: States, markets and beyond
6
2.2 The Commons
0
2.3 Defining the Commons
13
3. The Knowledge Commons
19
3.1 Introducing the Knowledge Commons
19
3.2 The modern university
20
3.3 Defining universities and academia
22
3.4 Knowledge
24
3.5 What type of resource is knowledge?
26
4. Managing the Common University
35
5. Conclusion
37
3
1. Introduction
Universities are one of the most fascinating institutions in society. On the one hand, they are among our oldest and most stable institutions, having been around for over a millennium. On the other hand, subjected to rapidly changing social and economic conditions, universities are transforming rapidly. One transformation that has come under scrutiny the last decades, is the move from a university regarded as a public institution towards a market-oriented university. This change occurred during the last decades of the 20th century as a result of perceived problems with state provision, the decline of the welfare state in
general and increasing importance of being integrated in the global economy. Universities were forced to move to the semi-public sector and rely more and more on private investments. This transition was accompanied by the introduction of a managerial market model in university governance, under the assumption that if the university would be run more like a business, some standard of ‘efficiency’ will surely be achieved. Consequentially, top-down management, standardisation, centralisation and an increased output oriented way of evaluation have become dominant in modern higher education Struggling to find proper funding, while at the same time trying to educate to a exponentially increasing number of students, universities gladly accepted any help they good get, especially in the form of
investments. .
Recently, however, universities were the centre of staff and students protesting against alleged privatisation and commodification of higher education. A wide range of issues – decreasing funds for humanities departments parallel to large investments in real estate; increasing bureaucratisation; evaluation on the basis of output, such as pressures for publication for staff, and pressures on students to graduate as fast as possible; and many more) was used to argue that when a university is run as a business, something essential about the university is lost.
These criticisms are part of scholarly debate as well.1 Academics argue that the shift towards a
market-oriented university is not without consequences for the what many claim is the major raison d’être of the university: the production and transmission of knowledge: “knowledge that was free, open and for the benefit of society is now proprietary, confidential and for the benefit of private companies.”2
Universities are facing an increasing demand to produce knowledge that is directly relevant for markets, and students that see themselves as ‘entrepreneurs’, ready to face the global market place and serve the fast-moving economy. Knowledge has become a form of property that can be sold on the market and has to be protected with copy-rights, patents and pay-walls.
The recent protests that haunt the universities try to convince us that in this process, something is lost. It is the sense of knowledge as a shared good, and the university as a common institution. The university as a place where students and staff come together in collaboration, not just competition,
1 See for example: Buchbinder, H., The Market Oriented University and the Changing Role of Knowledge (1993);
Bollier, D., Preservering the Academic Commons (2003); and McMurtry, J., Education and the Market Model (2002).
4 producing and sharing knowledge as a common resource. Not denying this the merit of academia as a shared good, others have argued that it simply is not feasible anymore to organize academia around this type of good. With rampant budget cuts, increasing and diversifying demands, and diverging ideas about what the university should be, there is no ideal university that can autonomously focus on its own ideas about knowledge production and transmission. Choices have to be made, and the economy demands output.
This thesis examines the assumption that in our times it is not feasible, and therefore not desirable, to organise our universities around a common good. Is there really no way back from the market university with is privatized knowledge? The central question I will try to answer is: ‘Is it desirable and feasible to organise academia (i.e. research and university life) primarily around goods that are non-excludable and subtractable (i.e. common-pool resources)?’
The commons
The concept of the commons, a resource shared by a group of people subject to social dilemmas,3 almost
disappeared from the academic debate after Garret Hardin argued that common resources are subject to inevitable degradation in his seminal Tragedy of the Commons. His argument often serves as evidence that the only way to guarantee sustainable and efficient management of a common resource, is by assigning an external enforcer, in the form of a private property-rights regime, or authoritarian state control. This view matches the dichotomy between state and market provision of public goods, which is still a key debate in political science.
Much to the credit of Vincent and especially Elinor Ostrom, who spent half a decade compiling a large body of evidence on examples where a community of users and producers actually manage to develop rules for appropriate use of a resource without external enforcers, the concept of the commons is now making a gradual return among social scientists. According to this paradigm, there are types of goods that are best managed as a commons, instead of under state, market or ‘Third Way’ solutions. These types of goods are properly called common-pool resources (CPR), defined as “a valued natural or human made resource or facility that is available to more than one person and subject to degradation as a result of overuse”.4 Common-pool resources are resources where it is impossible or very costly to exclude others
from using the good once it is produced. They are also rivalrous, or subtractable, meaning that one person’s use of the resource does not reduce the amount left.5 These dimensions make this type of good
subject to specific social dilemmas, for which the solutions depend to a large extent on the social context.
The knowledge commons
While research on the commons traditionally succeeded in demonstrating that some natural resources are
3 Hess, 2012, p.14 4 Dietz et al., 2002, p.13
5 Ostrom, V., & Ostrom, E. (1977). Public Goods and Public Choices. In E. Savas (Red.), Alternatives for Delivering
5 best managed as a commons, commons scholars rarely discussed intangible resources. This changed around the turn of the millennium, when “people started to notice behaviours and conditions on the web –congestion, free riding, conflict, overuse and pollution– that had long been identified with other types of commons.”6 The traditional way of regarding these goods as either strictly private or public resources was
not sufficient to understand these behaviours and conditions. The commodification and privatization of knowledge, for instance, led scholars to notice that analysing knowledge from a commons perspective made it easier to understand how different problems were related.
Building on the emerging amount of literature on ‘the knowledge commons’, a concept developed by Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess, I will argue that universities and academia are best managed as a commons, as this is the only way the production and distribution of knowledge can be organised in an efficient, sustainable and equal way.
This thesis
In what follows, I will construct the argument that the commons paradigm is a viable fourth way solution to problems of knowledge provision. It is also desirable, as it takes the internal norms guiding production and distribution of knowledge as a starting point for its management.
The first chapter starts with a short exploration of state, market and Third Way provision of shared resources. Positing the commons framework as a possible fourth way, this chapter also describes what characterises a commons. The second chapter applies this to our subject: academia. Building on extensive literature on the knowledge commons, I look at the key resource, knowledge, and argue for its character as a common resource. As knowledge is a so-called nested resource, which means that its production and distribution happens at various levels, I argue that to understand it as a common resource requires regarding both academia and universities. The last chapter analyses implications for the management of universities and academia, and provides a first impression of what this would look like in the university.
6 Hess, C. & Ostrom, E., 2007. Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice. 1st red.
6
2. Return of the Commons
The last decades have seen the gradual return of the commons, both in and outside the world of academia. In scholarly debate, the term almost disappeared after Garret Hardin depicted the commons as a disastrous alternative to either state or market ownership of shared resources.7 Much to the credit of
Vincent and Elinor Ostrom, who spent half a century compiling a large body of empirical evidence on various types of commons as well as developing a framework for understanding and managing common resources, the concept is now regarded as a powerful alternative for both state and market provision of common goods. Nowadays, the phrase “some goods are best managed as a commons” could have been uttered by a range of varied actor, from scholars of various disciplines, public policy experts, environmentalists to activists. This chapter defines what is meant by ‘the commons’, by looking at the difference between classic public goods and common goods (usually referred to as common-pool resources), and explores whether the commons can be regarded as a ‘fourth way’ to provide and distribute resources, overcoming the state/market dichotomy as well as so-called ‘third-way’ solutions.
2.1 Public goods provision: States, markets and beyond
This section describes the growth of the commons paradigm, in response to failing state and market provision of public goods, and the framework’s potential to provide an alternative for both.
Public goods and private goods
Since Paul Samuelson’s classic essay, traditional economics divides goods into two categories, public goods and private goods.8 This classification is based on the dimension of excludability: can access to the
resource be restricted, excluding people from using it? Excludable goods are classified as private goods, while non-excludable good are referred to as public goods. A public good, then, is a good that is available to all, and where excluding others from using it is very costly or difficult. Common examples of public goods are the air we breathe, public security or even the weather forecast. The dimension of exclusion is what makes these kinds of goods vulnerable to problems stemming from the logic of collective action, so-called collective action problems, that occur in situations where all would benefit from collective action, but only when acting simultaneously. One prominent dilemma that is often associated with public goods is the free-rider problem, in which people not contributing to the provision of a certain good continue to access it, resulting in overuse and degradation of the good.9 This leaves public goods vulnerable to pollution,
congestion and difficulties of provision. The underlying assumption that people are calculating, self-interested rational actors, led to solutions for these problems being sought outside of the individual, usually in the form of either competitive markets or state regulations.
7 Hardin full
8 Samuelson, P., 1954, ‘The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure’, Review of Economics and Statistics 36: 387–389 9 Ostrom, 1990, p.32
7
States versus Markets
Theories about the management of shared resources usually move in one of two directions. The first is the necessity of a centralized state, controlling and regulating the resource. Proponents of the second and opposite view state that the only and optimal solution for the problems around public good is privatization, through the creation of an extensive system of private property rights. Both centralization and privatization advocates take it as a given that institutional change must come from outside the individual, and that is should be imposed with the backing of force or punishment.10
Theories of the state: centralization
Advocates of centralization claim foremost that a Hobbesian Leviathan is necessary to tackle problems of collective action and free riding, since it would not be rational for individuals to act in accordance with a ‘public good’ without it. This central and external authority must take responsibility for monitoring not only the resource, but also the individuals under its authority. Without a central authority, individuals have no incentive for cooperation, as actions that are not in the benefit of the collective will go unsanctioned.11
Advocates of this theory go even further: a central authority is the sine qua non for the existence of public goods.
However, many empirical examples show that leaving public resources in the hands of the state does not always deliver as promised.12 Actually, in many cases nationalization has resulted in creating
open-access regimes, where well-regulated commons had previously existed.13 Not only is a central
authority not always capable of monitoring the resource because of for instance large distances between the monitoring authority and the resource, as is the case in the Amazon or sub-Saharan graze lands in Africa’s that leave endangered animals vulnerable to poachers, often they are also very under equipped, mostly in terms of budget or trained personnel. Central authorities suffer from a ‘knowledge problem’, or as Ostrom calls it, insufficient time-and-place information.14
State provision of public goods came under scrutiny especially in the latter half of the 20th
century, when governments faced increasing demands and exploding costs, while economic prosperity declined. State bureaucracies were perceived as slow, inefficient and over-centralized, failing to provide public goods in an efficient manner.15
Theories of the firm: privatization
Advocates of privatization argue that ownership of shared resources should be divided among various private parties, allowing “individuals to pursue their own self-interests within a set of well-defined
10 Ostrom, 1990, p.14 11 Idem., p.10, 17 12 Dietz et al., 2002, p.7
13 See Ostrom’s Goveerning the Commons, p.23 for examples. 14 Idem, p.17
8 property rights.”16 Ownership-rights can then be traded on a competitive market, when actors see an
opportunity to maximize their own benefit. In this way, following Adam Smith’s logic, “an individual who ‘intends only his own gain,’ is, as it were, ‘led by an invisible hand to promote (…) the public interest’”.17
Market theory has been criticized for its postulation that privatization (assigning private property rights) and commodification (the accreditation of a price to the resource) is the only way to create wealth or development. According to its critics, the privatization of shared resources and narrative of self-interested individuals that underpins it can not only lead to depletion of the resource, but more generally serves as a mechanism of alienating users from their resources. As David Bollier puts it: “economists tend to regard market activity and growth as inherently good, when in fact it is often a force for eroding valuable nonmarket resources such as family time, social life and ecosystems.”18
Private property-rights alone cannot prevent a resource from overuse or exploitation.19 For
instance because owners have the incentive to extract as much from the resource as possible, and no incentive to avoid pollution. To soften or prevent these negative externalitiesactors could hire a private extractor to enforce rules for sustainable use, de facto establishing shared ownership of the resource. This however, just as a competitive market reaching equilibrium, is in itself a public good, that can only be achieved by individuals designing and acting in accordance with collective rules, such as banning monopolies or manipulation, or regulating subtraction.20
Another criticism against market logic and privatization is that it creates large inequalities: “In competitive markets, inequalities in the lifetime expectations of different citizens arise from differences in their inherited resources, their native endowments, their individual tastes and values and their good and bad fortune.”21
Indeed, this type of market failure results in unequal access to public goods, demonstrated in the restricted access to health care lower and middle-class groups are experiencing as a result of privatization in many Western countries. As producing systematic inequalities, such as access to and distribution of public goods, is regarded as inherent to market mechanisms, it is regarded as a negative externality that will not be solved by market logic itself, but should be mitigated with proper state regulations.22
Both state and market solutions have thus been criticized for inadequate management of public resources. Both, albeit in a different way, propose one-size-fits-all solutions to very different and context-specific cases, disregarding and replacing existing practices. The dichotomy between pure state and pure market solutions does not seem particularly helpful, “nor does it adequately deal with the wide diversity of 16 Bollier, 2007, p.14 17 Hardin, 1968, p.1244 18 Bollier, 2007, p.29 19 Feeny, et al., 1990, p.6 20 Ostrom, 1990, p.17
21 Cohen and Rogers, 1992, p. 399 22 Anderson, 1995, p. 197
9 institutional arrangements that humans craft to govern, provide, and manage public goods and common-pool resources”.23 As Ostrom explains, the state-market dichotomy assumes that the rules of the game are
fixed. When people find themselves in a negative-sum game, as is often the case with shared resources, they do not need to be rescued by a Leviathan or private property regimes, but often find ways to change the game.
Third-way solutions
Partly in response to the failure of states and markets to guarantee sustainable management of shared resources, a substantive amount of literature has developed around new solutions. One of the more influential of these, if only because of the amount of world leaders adhering to it, is the ‘Third Way’. The ‘Third Way’ is a pragmatic, or ‘neo-progressivist’ approach, usually linked to the UK’s New Labour Party under Blair, and most notably developed by Anthony Giddens.24 Third Way proponents
claim that the classical division between private provision of private goods and public provision of public goods is outdated and inefficient, as are pure market and state solutions. Instead, they often opt for public-private-partnerships (PPPs):
“The PPP strategy is presented as a ‘Third Way’ alternative to the ‘dogma of the Right’ that ‘insisted that the private sector should be the owner and provider of public services’ and the ‘dogma of the Left’ that insisted the State must be the sole provider. ‘The modern approach to public services contends, to the contrary, that ‘the best way forward is through new partnerships between the public and the private sectors’.”25
With its strong focus on economic globalisation and laissez-faire markets, combined with state interventions guaranteeing some form of social safety net, advocates of Third Way solutions argue for public commissioning, but private provision of public goods. This is one of many similarities between Third Way proposals and New Public Management (NPM), a general term that prescribes the expansion of private sector mechanisms to public sector institutions, in order to optimize efficiency.26 Both NPM
and PPPs exemplify Third Way solutions, aimed at modernising public services by implementing private sector techniques and securing private sector investments. The Third Way then, results in de facto privatised public goods and the formation of semi-public institutions.
It may not come as a surprise then, that Third Way solutions have often been called covert neoliberalisation. Paul Cammack, for example, argues that there are not many differences between the policies proposed by Blair and Giddens on the on hand, and those recommended by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.27 While leaving the state-market dichotomy untouched, Third Way
23 Ostrom, 2010, p.642
24 Giddens, A. (1998). The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy. Oxford: Polity Press 25 Shaw, 2004, p.64-65
26 Hood, C. (1991). A Public Management for all Seasons? Public Administration, 69(1), 3-19; Shaw, 2004, p.74 27 Cammack, P. (2004). Giddens's way with words. In S. Hale, W. Leggett, & L. Martell (Red.), The Third Way and
10 solutions basically reshuffle tasks assigned to both, offering more privatization and market logic.
Third Way solutions thus bring us back to state and market solutions, which were exactly what we were trying to overcome, in light of the problems discussed above. Proponents of Third Way solutions claim that ‘what counts is what works’. But in fact they are deeply committed to the standard (economic) narrative of “how things work”, that they fail to recognise that there are different interpretations of what works, that their mechanisms do not always work, or that something else might work better.28
The commons as fourth way
Beyond market, state and third way solutions, a new paradigm is developing. The narrative of the commons, used either as strategy against privatization of public institutions, or in scholarly fashion as a more efficient institutional approach for the management of shared resources than states or markets, may prove a viable ‘fourth way’ solution. This fourth way not only rejects pure market or pure state solutions, but point towards new solutions as well. Commons solutions differ from third way solutions in many ways, as will be illustrated later, but one contrast is worth singling out. While advocates of state, market and third way theories already know what the solution will be before examining the challenge at hand, proponents of the commons framework argue that there is not one solution that works in all cases. They are much more optimistic about the abilities of communities to come together and develop mechanisms well-tuned to their specific situation. The commons paradigm looks at the nature of a certain resource, the characteristics of the community of users and producers, and the social norms according to which they interact with each other. David Bollier, a fervent advocate of the commons solution, summarises the commons approach like this: “to talk about the commons is to assume a more holistic vantage point for assessing how a resource may be best managed.”29
2.2 The Commons
When people think about the commons, most of them think about Garret Hardin. Hardin’s ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ still functions as the definitive argument used to illustrate that individuals cannot come together to jointly manage a shared resource, leaving resources such as water, fisheries or even knowledge in the hands of a centralized authority or private parties. Beyond Hardin, however, commons literature flourishes.
Hardin’s Tragedy
For a long time Garret Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons (1968) seemed to have closed the case on the commons: “freedom in a commons brings ruin to all”.30 In this essay, Hardin argues that resources held
28 Bollier , 2007, p.27 29 Idem., p.28
11 in common are subject to inevitable degradation. He illustrates this with his famous example of a common pasture open to all, where every herdsman, calculating his individual utility, will keep adding cattle to the pasture, exploiting the resource far beyond its carrying capacity. This inevitably results in tragedy: “each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited”.31 Overuse and pollution are the expected outcome. As the cost is only a fraction of
the benefit of polluting, any ‘rational man’ lacks the incentive to keep the common clean, and instead acts only out of short-term self-interest. The problem Hardin illustrates is known as the problem of collective action: while all users would benefit from sustainable use of the good (restraining from polluting or overusing the pasture in Hardin’s example), they only benefit when doing this collectively and experience a high cost by acting alone.
To restrain from acting in his or her narrow self-interest and exploiting the common resource, actors need coercive incentives, Hardin continues. ‘Ethical directives’ or a ‘bad conscience’ cannot do the job, as we cannot expect someone to act in an irrational manner, or feel guilty about not doing so. This is the famous problem of free-riding: “whenever one person cannot be excluded from the benefits that others will provide, each person is motivated not to contribute to the joint effort, but to free-ride on the efforts of others”.32The only way to ensure responsible behaviour in the commons, Hardin concludes, is
by instituting social arrangements that create mutually agreed upon coercion. As these arrangements cannot be effected in a commons (that would be “too horrifying to contemplate”33), the only way to
sustainably manage our common resources is to subject them to government ownership, or a regime of private property rights.
Hardin’s article has been challenged many times for its conceptual underpinnings, empirical validity, theoretical adequacy and generalizability to cases with different conditions. First, Hardin’s concept of a ‘commons’ describes a resource with an open access regime, without any rules regulating entry and use, in which everything is free for the taking without constraint.34 Well-regulated, a common
resource might not fall prey to the same kind of over-exploitation. Second, there have been many examples of commonly managed resources where the tragedy was averted, and where users had developed various ways of sustaining the common resource.35 Third, Hardin’s model has often been
challenged by game theorists for its theoretical adequacy. Hardin’s prisoner dilemma, where an irrational collective outcome results from rational behaviour on the side of the individual, presumes non-cooperation and complete information. Altering these conditions, it is claimed,36 changes the outcome.
Last, Hardin’s theory has been criticized for its generalizability, by anthropologists and human ecologists
31 Hardin, 1968, p.1244 32 Ostrom, 1990, p.6 33 Hardin, 1968, p.1247
34 Dietz, et al., 2002, p.7-8; Bollier, 2014, p.3
35 For examples of working commons, see for instance Elinor Ostroms extensively documented empirical fieldwork:
Ostrom, E., 1990. Governing the Commons. 17th red. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, or Feeny, D., Berkes, F., McCay, B. & Acheson, J., 1990. The Tragedy of the Commons: Twenty-two Years Later. Human Ecology, 18(1).
12 arguing that without incorporating context and local conditions, the outcome of Hardin’s model is unpredictable.37
Even though Hardin’s depiction of the commons has been criticized and differs fundamentally from most understandings of what constitutes a common, it is still widely influential. It is not strange, then, that speaking of common resource management does not immediately rouse enthusiasm. A proper understanding of the commons narrative might change this.
The commons paradigm
The commons narrative38 is used by activists and academic scholars, albeit not always in connection to
each other. While calls for commons by activists, like Naomi Klein, can be best understood as a reaction to privatization of natural and human made public goods, the scholarly literature tries to deal with issues such as defining membership-rights of the community, developing mechanisms for monitoring access of the common resource and developing an analytical framework for governance of common resources. What non-academic and academic calls for commons have in common though is an “assertion of collective ownership and rights against privatization and commodification”.39 Commons scholars have
been challenging the perspective that “self-interest is the only motivator and that social mechanisms to control self-interest, such as communication, trust, and the ability to make binding agreements, are lacking or ineffective”,40 as well as the idea that change must come from outside the individual. Significant
for the commons tradition however, is not just the rejection of market-solutions, but also a dismissive attitude towards the state. This marks a shift from late 20th century criticism of neoliberalism, which saw
an expansion of the role of the state as a remedy for the failures of self-regulating markets.41 Turning to
communities for collective management of common resources is a possible answer, either replacing or complementing state and market regulation. The commons framework is underpinned by normative considerations of efficient and proper approach of public resources and is backed by decades of empirical research showing successfully managed commons are far from unrealistic.42
Scholarly literature of the commons developed in the domain of ecologists and environmentalists at first, as a holistic framework that made it possible to link different ecological challenges and understand common causes. James Boyle, for instance, used the commons narrative to demonstrate that synthetic chemicals, dwindling bird populations and polluted waterways might not be isolated phenomena, but connected and even conceptually related.43 Literature on the commons increased steadily, especially since
37 Dietz et. al., 2002, p.9
38 For an excellent overview of the history of the commons as a concept, see Ostrom, E., 1990. Governing the
Commons. 17th red. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press or Dietz, T. et al. red., 2002. The Drama of the Commons. Washington D.C.: National Academy Press
39 McCarthy, 2005, p.11 40 Dietz, 2002, p.2
41 McCarthy, J. (2005). Commons as Counterhegemonic Projects. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 16(1), 9-24 42 For examples of working commons, see Feeny et al., 1990; Ostrom, 1990; Dietz et al., 2002, and Bollier, 2014 43 Bollier, 2007, p.30
13 the publication of Elinor Ostrom’s landmark Governing the Commons in 1990. This development was stimulated through research centres as the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis in Indiana and the Digital Library on the Commons and it archives of the International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP).44
The commons tradition can be characterized as a new institutionalist approach, an approach that claims that formal and informal rules, structures and norms constrain and shape individual behaviour. Institutional details matter: “the particular options available, the sequencing of those options, the information provided, and the relative rewards and punishments assigned to different sequences of moves can all change the pattern of outcomes achieved”.45 This view also holds that there is not one single
solution to all manage resources; various situations require various solutions. Proponents of the commons approach, most notably Elinor Ostrom, argue that individuals have the capacity to develop institutional arrangements that enable them to “achieve productive outcomes in situations where temptations to free-ride and shirk are ever present”.46 Finding the correct mix of institutions is difficult and depends on a
myriad of factors, such as the nature of the good, the culture of the community and the availability of local and technical knowledge.
2.3 Defining the Commons
The term ‘commons’ has been used in various ways and with reference to all kinds of resources or institutions that involve some kind of joint ownership or management. This is partly due to the fact that commons can indeed be very different: “each commons has distinctive dynamics based on its participants, history, cultural values, the nature of the resource, and so forth.”47 Partly it is because the
term refers to divergent analytical concepts: a resource or resource system, a property-rights scheme of ownership, or a new discourse that refers to the economic, political, cultural and the social dimensions of shared resources in a holistic way. Underpinning these differences is the assumption that when we talk about a common, we refer to a resource that is shared and collectively managed by its users. Therefore, we may define the commons as a resource shared by a group of people that is subject to social dilemmas.48
To properly understand what constitutes a common, “one needs to know the nature of the resource, the whole array of decision-making arrangements, including the property-rights regime, and the nature of the interactions among users and regulators.”49 The following sections explore each of these in turn.
Common-pool resources
A common is a shared resource. This can either say something about the nature of the resource, or about the way it is used. For Elinor Ostrom, the question of what constitutes a common is answered by
44 Bollier, 2007, p.31; Hess and Ostrom, 2007, p.42 45 Ostrom, 1990, p.23
46 Idem., p.15 47 Bollier, 2007, p.28 48 Hess, 2012, p.14
14 understanding the nature of the resource. When we refer to a common as a resource (instead of, for instance, common property), we use the term common-pool resource (CPR). A short elaboration on what distinguishes a common-pool resource from the more traditional public good sheds light on this shared dimension.
To be able to distinguish between public goods and CPRs Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom introduced a two-fold classification of goods, based not only on the possibility of exclusion but also on the a good’s subtractability.50 The attribute of subtractability, or rivalry, describes whether use of the good
by one person subtracts from the amount left for other users. One person’s use of public security, for instance, does not reduce the amount of security left for others. Things are different when we look at fisheries or clean water, resources that are limited and depletable if consumption outpaces replenishment. This kind of good is not only subject to problems of provision, such as free-riding, but also to problems of appropriation, or use, that have traditionally been associated with private goods rather than public goods. Goods that are both excludable and subtractable are vulnerable to crowding effects (congestion) and overuse. Since every user is “capable of subtracting from the welfare of other users”, it is often credited as the source of the divergence between individual and collective rationality.51
A good that comes with high costs of exclusion, such as public goods, and with a high degree of subtractability, unlike public goods, is properly called a common-pool resource. We can define a CPR as “a valued natural or human made resource or facility that is available to more than one person and subject to degradation as a result of overuse”.52 Managing a CPR is subject to social dilemmas. Because it is difficult
to exclude others from using the good and capturing economic returns once the good is produced, CPRs, like public goods, may suffer from problems of provision, most notably from underproduction. Unlike public goods however, CPRs also face problems of appropriation, because of their subtractable and rival character. In managing these goods, regulation will not only have to make sure actors have enough incentives to produce the good, but more stringently, that there are incentives to appropriate in a sustainable way from the resource. If there are no rules concerning the use and distribution of the good, depletion and degradation lurk. The figure below shows the different types of goods, based on the Ostroms’ twofold classification.53
50 Ostrom, V., & Ostrom, E. (1977). Public Goods and Public Choices. In E. Savas (Red.), Alternatives for Delivering
Public Services (pp. 7-49). Boulder: Westview Press
51 Feeny et. al., 1990 52 Dietz et al., 2002, p.13 53 Hess and Ostrom, 2007, p.9
15 A common-pool resource might be small (Ostrom uses the example of a family refrigerator), community-level (roads, parks, libraries), national or even global (oceans, knowledge, the ozone). The resource might have clear boundaries, like a park or library, or not, as in the case of knowledge. It might also be transboundary, like a river or fisheries.54 A common-pool resource might be natural, or man-made. While
Ostrom initially dealt with natural CPR’s, her 21st century work focused more on man-made commons,
culminating in “Unfolding the Knowledge Commons: From Theory to Practice”, a bundle she edited together with Charlotte Hess that featured contributions from many leading commons-scholars such as David Bollier, James Boyle and others.
Understanding the shared nature of a resource and classifying it as a common-pool resource, however, does not tell us anything about the way it is used and the incentives that guide users in their behaviour and interactions with each other. A common-pool resource could still be in the hands of a private company aimed at maximizing profit (fisheries, or nowadays even water). A common-pool resource could also be managed under state authority, that, lacking proper funds or knowledge, leaves the resource unregulated resulting in an open access regime. The forests of Nepal may illustrate an example. In 1957 the Nepalese government nationalized communal forests, to protect them from deforestation. After recognizing that this had resulted in de facto open access regimes where deforestation accelerated, ten years later the government tried to re-create the previously existing forms of communal property.55 That
is why some emphasize the property-rights regime a resource is subject to.
Common property
A common is a resource that is best held and managed collectively. Classifying a good as a common-pool resource, does not always imply this. The resource could still be administered as an open access regime, without any regulations on the use of the resource, as in the case of the Nepalese forests discussed above. This is one of the reasons people often think of a property-rights regime when someone mentions the commons. As a common-pool resource can be held under different property regimes, let us consider these briefly.
54 Hess and Ostrom, 2007, p.5 55 Feeny et. al., 1990, p.8
16 Feeny et. al. distinguish four basic property-rights regimes.56 First, an open access regime, where
access and use is unregulated and open to everyone. Second, a private property regime, where one actor holds the rights of exclusion and regulation. This can be an individual, or group of individuals, such as a corporation. Enforcement of rights of exclusion and appropriation usually depends on a set of legal mechanisms. Third, a communal property regime, when the resource is owned by an ‘identifiable community of interdependent users’ that may exclude others and regulate the communities’ use of the common. Fourth, a common can be held under a state property regime, where the government holds the exclusive right to regulate access to and use of the common resource and enforce this with coercive power.
While it seems fitting that common-pool resources should be held as common property, it is not essential. A CPR could be collectively managed by its users, and help as state property. A narrow focus on property rights can distract from what is at stake, which is not only who has the right to capture profits, but also according to what norms a resource should be managed. Without a focus on the social context of a common resource, the commons framework risks being co-opted into the economic rationale of previously discussed third way solutions.57 To understand the outcome of any property-rights regime, on
must understand the nature of the interactions among its users and producers as well.
The social context of commons management
Public goods, like common-pool resources, are subject to various social dilemmas, such as free-riding, pollution, congestion and degradation. Like the resource, the dilemmas are shared and can be solved by collective action, guided by both formal and informal rules. The informal rules, or social norms, often constrain the behaviour of individuals concerning appropriation and use of a resource. These norms mediate “competing and complementary individual and social interests” in the production and distribution of a resource.58 As Bollier explains, “while people are surely self-interested and competitive in
many aspects of their lives, they also exhibit deep concern for fairness, participation, social connection and peer approval”.59
Understanding the social relations that guide production and distribution of a particular resource may also tell us a lot about the nature of a good, as they often embody the way a good is valued and the shared ideals that underlie these interactions. The political theorist Elizabeth Anderson, for instance, argues that different types of goods require different social norms. While private goods are properly valued as commodities, emphasizing impersonal, instrumental and ‘use’ values, shared goods are best guided by social norms such as personal connection, peer production or cooperation and inclusion.
56 Feeny, Berkes, McCay and Acheson, 1990, p.4
57 Goldman, M. (1997). "Customs in common": The epistemic world of the commons scholars. Theory and Society,
26(1), 1-37
58 Madison, Frischmann and Strandberg, 2009, p.373 59 Bollier, 2014 p.3
17
As a commons refers to a community of shared interest and its collective management of resources, it is best managed according to social norms emphasizing community needs and personal and social relationship.60
Successful commons management
We are concerned here with the ‘best’ way to manage common resources. There are, of course, different ways to evaluate successful management. In talking about possible superiority of the commons paradigm, many resort to ethical or social arguments. David Bollier, for instance, argues that the commons “appeals to a fundamental social ethic that is morally binding to everyone”.61 For him, the word ‘best’ in the phrase
‘some resources are best managed as a commons’, is a normative claim about alienability of some resources. He argues that inherited elements of nature, such as seed lines, genetic information, wildlife or animal species, belong to all of humanity as a whole and should therefore, from an ethical perspective, be regarded as commons.
While arguments such as this one are perfectly viable, the argument developed here is a different one. I argue that managing some resources as a commons is in the best interest of the users, not just of the resource. This is not to say that I reject claims similar to those made by Bollier, but I do not think they are necessary to demonstrate that certain goods are best managed as a commons. Developing the argument like I do, makes it possible to answer neoliberal arguments about the supposed superiority of market mechanisms and private property rights on their own terms. While social norms definitely play an important part, I argue that this is instrumental towards more effective resource management, not that they are inherently ‘better’ or more valuable.
Following Ostrom, the evaluative criteria I use for successful commons management are equity (“equal appropriation from, and contribution to, the maintenance of the resource”), efficiency (“optimal production, management, and use of the resource”) and sustainability (“outcomes over the long term”).62
The criterion of sustainability incorporates future generations as well, by looking at whether the resource “has been used without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.63
A successful approach does not necessarily exclude roles for states or markets, but it does hand us a fuller toolbox for managing common resources. Property rights can be helpful in solving conservation or pollution dilemmas, while states can help by establishing guidelines for equal appropriation. Both states and markets, however, are only complementary and secondary to the framework developed by the relevant community.
Well defined, then, the commons paradigm can provide a framework for successful management
60 Bollier, D. (2003) “Preserving the Academic Commons”. Keynote remarks at the American
Association of University Professors 89th Annual Meeting, p.5
61 Bollier, 2007, p.33
62 Hess and Ostrom, 2007, p.6 63 Feeny et. al., 1990, p.5
18 of common-pool resources, enabling us to understand the social dilemmas people face in the management of those goods in a more holistic way, with optimal results.
19
3. The Knowledge Commons
While research on the commons traditionally succeeded in demonstrating that some natural resources, especially common-pool resources, are best managed as a commons, commons scholars rarely discussed intangible resources. This changed around the turn of the millennium, when “people started to notice behaviours and conditions on the web –congestion, free riding, conflict, overuse and pollution– that had long been identified with other types of commons.”64 The traditional way of regarding these goods as
either strictly private or public resources was not sufficient to understand these behaviours and conditions. The commodification and privatization of knowledge, for instance, led scholars to notice that analysing knowledge from a commons perspective made it easier to understand how different problems were related. However, it has been argued that it is simply not feasible to resist the commodification of knowledge and related marketization of academia and universities. Building on Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess’ landmark study about the knowledge commons, this chapter argues that if we understand the goods of academia and universities as common resources, there might be an answer available to these sceptics.
3.1 Introducing the Knowledge Commons
Research on the commons originally dealt with natural resources, most famously of course plots of land that were threatened with enclosure. More recently, however, attention shifted to artificial or man-made commons as well, such as art, software, literature and scientific information. Another major distinction is between physical resources and intangible resources, such as knowledge and ideas.65 Scholars usually refer
to those types of commons as cultural commons.66 Well-known examples are the Creative Commons-license,
open-source research and software, and Wikipedia; all can access it and all can contribute to it. More relevant for this paper is the introduction of the knowledge commons as an overarching concept for scientific information and research, as well as other types of digital information. We can define the knowledge commons as the joint use and management of knowledge.
The development of knowledge commons as a concept was the result of the joint efforts of Elinor Ostrom, with her extensive expertise of natural resource commons and institutional design, and Charlotte Hess, whose research focused more on knowledge and information. Together they, as Charlotte Hess described, “began to see ways in which study of the governance and management of common-pool resources might be helpful in analysing the intellectual public domain”.67 This resulted in the publication
of Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, a volume edited by Hess and Ostrom, with contributions of many
64 Hess and Ostrom, 2007, p.4 65 Bollier, 2003, p.5
66 See for example the work of David Bollier, The Commons as a Template for Transformation (2014) and Towards a
Commons Creating Peer Economy (2013) with Silke Helfrich.
20 commons-scholars such as David Bollier, Nancy Kranich, James Boyle and Donald Waters.68
Talking about knowledge as a commons, or common-pool resource, might strike one as odd, since knowledge has always been considered a textbook example of public goods: non-excludable and nonrivalrous. Why, then if at all, would it make sense to look at knowledge through the commons-lens? This chapter tries to answer that question, by analysing knowledge as academia’s key resource. In what follows, I argue that “the commons describes the very essence of academia, where openness, sharing and collaboration are fundamental to its success”,69 that of all types of goods, knowledge is most similar to
CPRs, and that recognizing this enables us to organise both academia and universities in the best feasible way.
3.2 The modern university
As the aim of this paper is to explore whether the commons framework is a viable alternative for market and/or state provision of the goods of academia, a very brief history of academia’s main institution, the university, might shed light on possible similarities with other common-pool resources.70
The production and transmission of knowledge is generally regarded as one of the main tasks of modern universities.71 This was not always the case. While universities have been around for over a
thousand years, the modern university as we know it is a 19th century creation, closely tied to Wilhelm von
Humboldt’s ideal of the university “not simply as the nurseries of future clerical or administrative functionaries, but as centres of ‘the higher learning’”.72 In earlier ages, the university, tightly connected to
churches, served mainly as locus for professional training for state functionaries. Production of knowledge was inherently linked to a religious concept of truth.73 It was only in the 19th century that
research, as the pursuit of knowledge itself, became a primary purpose of the university. It was also during this period that university libraries became accessible to students, not just faculty, and universities started publishing faculty scholarship as well.74 At the end of the 19th century,
“the modern university had acquired the rudiments of its contemporary identity as a shared home for (…) the transmission and distribution of knowledge through teaching, but also for unconstrained, disinterested inquire by both students and faculty researchers,
68 Hess, C., & Ostrom, E. (2007). Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice (1st ed.). (C. Hess, & E.
Ostrom, Red.) Cambridge: MIT press
69 Hess and Ostrom, 2007; Bollier, 2003, p.5
70 For a more in depth overview of universities and the changing role of knowledge, see for instance Stephan
Collini’s What are Universities for?; or Michael Madison, Brett Frischmann and Katherine Strandburg’s The University as Constructed Cultural Commons.
71 Buchbinder, 2014; Bollier, 2003; 72 Collini, 2012, p.24
73 Williams, 2014, p.75
74 Madison, M., Frischmann, B., & Strandburg, K. (2009). The University as Constructed Cultural Commons. Journal
21 for the perpetuation of created knowledge via publication to scholarly audiences, and for
the free exchange of knowledge between scholars and their students.”75
State provision
During the second half or the 20th century, universities also became increasingly accessible to the masses,
which resulted in an exponential growth of the student population. This happened during the creation of the Welfare State, in a time of relative economic prosperity. As higher education was regarded as not only a public good, but also as an important tool for social emancipation, national governments increasingly saw the support of universities as their responsibility, exemplified by the Land Grant act in the US and the Robbins Report in the UK.76 During this period, the modern university relied mostly on state support
for funding. In many countries, especially in continental Europe, university’s buildings were considered state property. Governments regarded universities as “places of learning and advancing knowledge” as a “counterbalance to the barbarism of the war”.77
State provision during the second half of the 21st century came with downsides too. First, it
established a link between public funding and ‘economic, intellectual or social returns for the nation’, resulting in the need to justify the goods of universities in external and instrumental terms.78 States began
to steer the direction of research and education, as to better suit their economic and social needs. Still, the goods were conceived of as to the benefit of the whole society, instead of benefitting only the individuals that actually attend universities. This changed during the last decade of the 20th century, when
the idea that universities should be almost exclusively funded by the state became untenable. Spurred by the growing demand for public services, budgetary crises and the belief that the large bureaucracies of the state’s public services were inefficient, governments felt the need to cut its budget.
Market provision
With state provision failing the move towards market solutions and ‘third way’ governance appeared as a natural solution, as was the case with other public goods. In the late 1970’s, market logic was introduced to universities, as well as hospitals and other public service institutions, under the prevalent assumption that market mechanisms were in many ways more efficient in the provision and distribution of resources. This expansion of private sector techniques to the public sector was later labelled New Public Management (NPM), a term coined by Christopher Hood in 1991. While its implementation varied, the managerial reform of universities occurred in most OECD countries.79 This marked a shift towards a
market-oriented university, which, under NPM, has become more centralised, standardised and subjected to severe budget cuts. The move towards the private sector accelerated in the 21st century, when under the
75 Idem., p.383
76 Williams, 2014, p.76 77 Ibid.
78 Ibid.
79 Chandler, J., Barry, J., & Clark, H. (2002). Stressing academe: The wear and tear of the New Public Management.
22 influence of the information society and globalization of capital, integration in the international economy became increasingly valued by universities and governments. Demands for reform of universities’ financial basis and governance structures were legitimated by the need to compete in the global ‘knowledge economy’.80 In accordance with third way prescriptions, the state came to regard its
responsibility as mainly guaranteeing a levelled playing field, by formulating mission statements and evaluating the results via output-oriented accountability mechanisms.
This economic rationale is now largely internalised by universities,81 which learned to rely more
on corporate funding and output-driven research:
“In general, university administrators have responded to this program of cumulative cutbacks by searching for ways to justify education that will motivate governments, and increasingly corporations, to provide more adequate financing. For some years now, without much critical notice, this justification of higher education has taken the form of a clearly non-educational rationale. To be precise, it has taken the form of justifying higher education as necessary to compete economically in the international marketplace.”82
This period also saw a move from collective to private benefits: “a focus on private economic gains for which students become investors in their own stock of human capital.” (Williams, 2014: 79). However, many academics are insisting that in this process something essential about the university is getting lost. Howard Buchbinder, for instance, argues that universities are caught it a ‘Catch 22’ paradox: if the university makes the shift towards the market and “if it does make the alliance it will, in its present form and function be annihilated.”83 Similarly, in his aptly titled book What are universities for?, Stefan Collini
argues that unlike is the case with a business, the university is not an instrumental institution. It cannot answer the question ‘what it is for’ in its own terms, because to one that does not see the inherent worth of knowledge production and distribution, no answer will be good enough.84
Even though claims that in this transformation of the university something essential is lost are not denied by many, they are met with scepticism. Sceptics accuse proponents of this view of naivety and idealized, utopian visions. As the context in which universities and academia are situated shall not make a left-turn anytime soon, the transformation of the university cannot be stopped, and should better be embraced as to find the ways best to deal with it: there is no alternative. In what follows, I argue that there is an alternative, and it can be found in the commons.
3.3 Defining universities and academia
The similarities between the recent history of universities and other public goods point alone are not
80 Olsen, J., & Maassen, P. (2006). European Debates on the Knowledge Institution: The Moderization of the University at the
European Level. University of Oslo: ARENA Centre for European Studies
81 Buchbinder, 1993; Collini, 2012, p.33 82 McMurty, 1991, p.36
83 Buchbinder, 2003, p.337
23 enough to make any claims about the viability of a commons approach to the goods of academia. Before turning to other similarities, the next section of this paper provides definitions for universities, academia and the relation between both.
University
The modern university is an institution of higher education offering tuition in mainly non-vocational subjects with the power to grant degrees. The term also refers to a population of faculty and students, as well as to physical objects, such as buildings, labs and libraries. In addition, many scholars emphasize the mission of the university. Madison, Frischmann and Strandberg, for example, define the university as a community with the mission of “the simultaneous construction and perpetuation of knowledge itself, in conceptual, physical or applied forms”.85 Similarly, Bollier defines the university as consisting of “little more than the
shared knowledge, personal relationships, and respected traditions of its members”.86 Oakeshott simply
defines the university as “a number of people engaged in (…) the pursuit of learning”, or as “a home of learning, where a tradition of learning is preserved and extended, and where the necessary apparatus for the pursuit of learning has been gathered together”.87 What these scholars point at, is that the university is
more than the sum of its buildings and statutory powers. It is a collection of material and intangible elements, held together by a shared mission. To be sure, this shared mission is in no way unanimous. Variations between universities and within universities are very common. A collective focus on knowledge production and transmission, however, remains at the core of the institution.
Academia
The term academia refers to the international establishment of scholars and students, engaged in university life and research. It encompasses journals, workshops and conferences and certain traditions as wearing gowns and scarlets. It is structured into various disciplines, mostly based on medieval differentiations, which are reflected in various scientific journals. Academia differs from the university in scope: while universities are national, or even local, institutions, academia is global. Its subjects, or community, are also different from the university’s: academia refers to all academics, students and others who contribute to research, while the university is rooted in a particular society and its community much more bounded. Furthermore, academia is structured according to various ranks: from the bachelor’s and master’s degrees for undergraduates, to the doctorate and post-doctorate, to the professor.
The terms academia and universities are often carelessly used interchangeably. For my purposes however, exploring whether the commons framework provides a viable alternative to the organisation of academia, this will not do. Let me thus explain the relation between both concepts, as well as why both are under analysis in this paper. On reason for this is that I look at knowledge as the central resource of both academia and universities, a choice which shall be explained in the next section.
85 Madison, Frischmann and Strandberg, 2009, p.379 86 Bollier, 2003, p.6
24 The concept of the university refers to an institution of higher education, either in the abstract or in a particular form. Academia as a whole, refers to the establishment of scholars and students engaged in research and higher education worldwide. They are intertwined, but different. If academia refers to the global and the general, the university is the local dimension, or the personal. Both share the centrality of knowledge production and transmission as (one) raison d’être. For academia, this can be found in digital databases where information is stored and international journals. Looking at the this dimension through the commons-lens would demand openness. Literature on the knowledge commons also focuses much on academia, in forms of open access publications, global databases and transparency. But a focus on academia alone is not sufficient to organise knowledge as a commons. That requires organisation at the local level of university life as well, where the daily practice of knowledge production and transmission from faculty to students happens, and where social context plays a much bigger role. Prescriptions for the common university often seem to go in the opposite direction of those for academia. Constructing academia as a common implies constructing the university as a common as well, and vice versa. Hess and Ostrom in part also recognize that one cannot do without the other, when they state that universities “find themselves on both sides of the commons fence, increasing their numbers of patents and relying more and more on corporate funding of research, while at the same time encouraging open access and establishing digital repositories for their faculty’s research products”.88 A full examination of knowledge as
common resource will have to look at both dimensions. In this paper, unless explicitly stated, a reference to universities is usually also a reference to academia, and the other way around.
3.4 Knowledge
The goods of academia are multiple and diverse: knowledge, employable students, educated citizens that have learned democratic values, innovative techniques, and so on.89 Of all these, the production and
transmission of knowledge is usually regarded as the main task of universities.90 According to Elizabeth
Anderson, for instance, the production of objective knowledge is the ‘constitutive aim’ of the academy.91
In what follows, we regard knowledge as the key resource of universities, and the production, storage and transmission of knowledge their main task.
We define knowledge as “all useful ideas, information, and data in whatever form in which it is expressed or obtained”.92 It is a complex resource, consisting of facilities, artifacts and ideas.93 In terms of facilities, the knowledge resource consists of libraries, archives, journals, among other things. Artifacts are observable representations of ideas, in the form of books, articles or databases. Ideas, last, are coherent
88 Idem, p.10
89 Williams, 2014, p.73
90 McMurtry, 1991; Buchbinder, 1993; Madison, Frischmann and Strandberg, 2009 91 Anderson, 1995, p.218
92 Hess, 2012, p.14
25 thoughts, scientific principles and formulas, and other innovative information. Furthermore, knowledge as a resource can be conceptual or artificial:
“The knowledge resources of the university are partly conceptual: ideas, concepts, practices and information and knowledge-based works that inhabit the minds and guide the actions of the university’s faculty and students. They are partly artificial: the articles, books, works of art, and tools and scientific instruments that reside in the university’s libraries, archives and laboratories.”94
Knowledge is cumulative, as contributors draw on earlier work in a way that cannot be predicted during production. Because knowledge as a resource has to be passed from one individual to another if it is to have public value, it is called a ‘flow resource’.95 The more a certain knowledge claim has been exposed to
criticisms and other perspectives, the more it is valued.96 The value of knowledge, then, increases when
more people contribute to it.97 As the value depends on a shared understanding and norms, knowledge is
essentially a shared good.98
It is also a nested resource, meaning that the users, providers and managers usually operate at different levels. Knowledge is locally provided, but globally appropriated.99 Thus, an exploration of
managing knowledge should regard all these dimensions. This is why I have argued that an argument about the knowledge commons should incorporate both academia and universities.
The earlier discussed transformation towards a market-oriented university that occurred in the 20th and 21st centuries, meant changes in the form and role of knowledge as well. Knowledge is no longer
considered solely as an end in itself, but instrumental to serving the interests of the national and international economy. Buchbinder calls this the a change from social knowledge (“knowledge to work out questions or cognitive problems”) to market knowledge (“knowledge for profit, knowledge for sale”).100 Knowledge can now be owned in the economic sense and sold on a competitive market. In
short, with corporate investments came private interests, resulting in the possibility to privatise and commodify knowledge.
In what follows, I whether this change in the role of knowledge is a change in form too, and what this implies for questions of management. In doing so, I keep the evaluative criteria of equity, efficiency and sustainability in mind. But first, we need to understand what type of resource knowledge is.
94 Madison, Frischmann and Strandberg, 2009, p.387 95 Hess and Ostrom, 2007, p.53
96 Anderson, 1995, p.198 97 Bollier , 2007, p.34 98 Anderson, 1990, p.144 99 Hess and Ostrom, 2007, p.49 100 Idem., p.341
