Making the Commons Work For Us

Individual ownership of land and natural resources is a largely Western and modern notion tied to assets being a determinant of status, and the belief that domination of natural resources is the crux of human progress. In many non-Western, indigenous or past societies, however, the prevailing system is not one of individual wealth and self-interest in agricultural land or other natural resources, but rather, shared ownership, responsibility and oversight over these common resources, and a collective right to benefit from the fruits of these commons.

For example, in medieval England, successive kings sought to block access to large swathes of forest land, grassland and other commonly held property by designating this to be royal forest, exclusive to the King. Thus, as an offshoot of the rebellion of the nobles that led to the signing of the Magna Carta, a second document was issued, called the Charter of the Forest. 

This was an early attempt at codifying people’s right to the commons, natural resources that were an integral part of everyone’s lives, which the king had tried to block off. It declared that any free person could benefit from the products of the forest in any way, provided that they did not infringe on anyone else’s right to do so. Thus, for example, you could fish in a stream so long as you didn’t pollute it, as this might disrupt its ecological balance so that others might not be able to fish in it. 

The regulatory capacity of the Charter, though progressively curtailed as people sought to take control over these natural resources, continued till the 1970s in some special courts. However, later laws to regulate woodlands and shared natural resources prioritised efforts to prevent their destruction, with substantially less protection of people’s rights to benefit from them in a way that was collective, internally regulated and sustainably managed. 

This led to a flawed system in which, for example, a tourism corporation could legally block off an area of shoreline for a resort so long as it didn’t impact the local environment too heavily, even though it would actually be impacting the rights of local fishing communities to benefit from it. Thus, not protecting and strengthening commons regulation could in turn deepen economic inequalities. In fact, Guy Standing argues in The Plunder of the Commons that if commons resources, whether land, minerals or information, were brought under a collective system of ownership, this would be an important step towards ensuring a universal basic income, as everyone in society could benefit from it. 

Such systems of unrestricted access and shared ownership and responsibility do still exist in many parts of the world, as surveyed by the Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom, among others. In a report for the IUCN, Harini Nagendra, Rucha Ghate and Jagdeesh Rao cite the example of the polluted lakes in Bangalore, some of which were revived with the help of people living around them, rather than through bureaucratic measures. 

A 2012 study of people in semi-arid regions of seven states in India showed that activities associated with commons resources accounted for an average of 25% of household income, increasing to 31% in the case of landless labourers. Many such systems also have intrinsic mechanisms to prevent misuse or exploitation. The IUCN also cites the example of the hiza’ti or woodland enclosures of the Eritrean highlands, which are reserved exclusively for oxen to graze, and from which humans can only take as much firewood or grass as they need for household consumption, not for sale or storage. 

While these systems are interesting, they may seem quaint or anachronistic, and not exactly suitable for modern capitalist society. After all, developed economies around the world are arguably driven more by information than ever before, and not necessarily by the question of who owns natural resources. Information by its very nature can be widely disseminated, reproduced and reworked, and the Internet has proven to be the key driver of this easy spread of information and data, potentially creating the scope for an information commons. 

Its basic architecture of IP (Internet Protocol) packet switching is so egalitarian that, according to its pioneer Vint Cerf, “the Internet packet does not care how it is being carried, whether it is by an optical fiber connection or a radio connection, and does not know or care what it is carrying,” thus opening up scope for any and all data to travel freely, without boundaries or restrictions placed by ownership norms. 

However, this has not led to a true information commons with unhindered access and collective ownership, as many parts of the Internet, such as magazines and academic research remain locked behind paywalls, country-based restrictions and other boundaries that prevent free access. Arguably, this may lead to misinformation or the creation of elitist spaces on the Internet, and may even go against the fundamentals on which the Internet was based. 

In the book The Future of Ideas, which was intentionally made freely available on the Internet, the law professor Lawrence Lessig wrote that “If the commons is the innovation commons that the protocols of the Net embrace [...] then the tragedy of that commons is the tendency of industry to add technologies to the network that undermine it.”

The Internet has, however, had an extremely powerful and egalitarian effect on the dissemination of information through the advent of open-source data, resources, books and software. Open source works are essentially those which can be used, modified and even commercially resold with no compensation whatsoever; they are libre, and hence different from free tools like Google, which allows you to use its products for free, or gratis, and extracts compensation in the form of data. 

The effect of open source on innovation and the development of new technologies and software cannot be underestimated. For example, the open-source GNU/Linux operating system kernel was first created in 1991 and has been modified and used in some of the most ubiquitous gadgets around today, from Android smartphones to Google’s Chromebook laptops, and from Mercedes-Benz cars to SpaceX’s Falcon-9 rockets. Arguably, its libre nature, which made it easy to access and benefit from, was the reason why it was so widely used - a hallmark of any commons resource in the physical or digital world. 

The open source movement is no longer confined to software. The Creative Commons, of which Lessig was a pioneer, is a repository of free multimedia, creative and academic works, which are accessible for free to everyone, with differing restrictions on their reproduction and modification, much like the restrictions that exist in the hiza’ti of Eritrea. Wikipedia is a commons resource where people can pool their collective knowledge and access to resources about various topics, and which also has its own open source media, books and other resources. 

Not only Wikipedia, but also reputed real-world university presses, such as those of Liverpool University, the University of Minnesota and various institutions in Scandinavia, have made textbooks and other content open access and free to use, a move that could significantly democratise access to university-level education and research. This is analogous to the effect that commons access could have in reducing economic and social stratification, as described by Standing - with one part of the cost of a university education made open-source and commonly available, this would increase the proportion of people who could afford higher education. 

Furthermore, unlike a physical commons, which has a relatively finite pool of resources from which stakeholders can draw, the digital commons is vast and ever expanding. Its very nature, as described by Cerf, does not restrict people from any region, culture or background from creating and disseminating information and content. While this has the obvious handicap of allowing through misinformation, something that several stakeholders and organisations are working to combat, it has the advantage of allowing a much larger variety of voices to be heard, voices which might otherwise be restricted by economic and cultural barriers.

A good example of this is the book Tales of Darkness and Light, an anthology by Soso Tham, the acknowledged poet laureate of the Khasi tribe of north-east India. This book is available online through various open-access publishers, a choice that its editor, Mark Turin, describes as deliberate: an attempt at “innovative and collaborative publishing partnerships involving Indigenous intellectuals that more traditional academic imprints have been less able to support,” while also introducing to a wider audience Tham’s writings on the political turmoil and the need to preserve the natural environment of his native hills in Meghalaya. This is a move that seems to have paid off. According to the publishers, people as far afield as Russia and Brazil have accessed the book. 

Thus, the idea of a commons, both physical and digital, is one that has important roles to play in bringing about economic equality, restoring the physical environment and repairing ecological damage, and ensuring that the digital world brings information to more people while allowing more voices and communities to benefit. The Commons is everywhere, from traditional agreements about land use and access, to the most cutting-edge smartphones and rockets; the question now boils down to how it can be legally framed and collectively managed in the best way for all. 

Image credits: "Miraikan Museum Tokyo 2005" by Sooo0 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0