Political ecology III

I Introduction

The ‘commons’ have figured prominently in the intellectual history of political ecology as an approach. Early political ecologists seriously questioned the simplified, rational-choice treatments of society inherent in ‘tragedy of the commons’ formulations. Arguably, the ‘solutions’ to the tragedy offered by tragedy analysts – government control and privatization – have served as major foils for political ecological analysis. Enclosures of all sorts including national parks, land titling, and assorted land grabs by private capital have figured prominently in animating the social justice outrage surrounding conservation and development programs that fueled and continue to fuel political ecological analysis. Reflecting this, self-described political ecologists have played active roles in the International Association for the Study of the Commons. Still, political ecology’s theoretical commitments have always sat awkwardly with those of institutionalist approaches that dominate the interdisciplinary commons literature. While these approaches are not inherently incompatible, their emphases do differ markedly – with political ecology focusing on differences in material interest and power and the institutionalists’ concern with the collective action problem surrounding the benefits derived from a commonly-held good. ¹

Building from the same rational-choice premises as Harden, Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom played an instrumental role in demonstrating that government control and privatization were not the only solutions for what Harden eventually retitled ‘the tragedy of the mismanaged commons’. Ostrom and others demonstrated that clearly-defined social groups do self-organize to effectively manage circumscribed sets of resources. Clearly, there are other forms of property and social organization that could operate successfully outside of the binary of government control and private property. The commons literature has provided both intellectual argument and compelling case material to counter widespread arguments for land privatization and the expansion of state-controlled reserves and protected areas. This work has had a significant effect on environmental governance, contributing to the spread of community-based approaches to resource management and conservation worldwide.

Despite these successes, concerns have been raised about the ability of the common property framework to address the analytical and political challenges created by the proliferation of ‘neoliberal’ models of governance. Neoliberal environmental policy has not led to ubiquitous privatization but a proliferation of hybrid forms of property rights created by new enclosures of commonly-held resources without the elimination of more public rights and responsibilities. Strongly shaped by its reaction against ‘tragedy analyses’, commons literature has been dominated by studies that seek to demonstrate the existence, characteristics, and functioning of common pool property institutions while generally ignoring or downplaying cases of mixed institutional forms, ‘weak’ or nonexisting (e.g. open access) property institutions. ² As a result, its analytical tools are less suited for understanding mixed public-private forms or considering situations where formal property institutions of any kind may not be warranted or effective.

In this report, I seek to bring together a number of strands within political ecology scholarship that speak, in different ways, to the diversification of property regimes that deviate from the tripartite divisions of national, common, and private properties. The premise of this report is that their synergies are often under-appreciated or, at the very least, not openly recognized, thus leading to a missed opportunity for the development of a common set of arguments. In exploring these synergies, I necessarily will engage with bodies of scholarship that remain somewhat separate circles of scholarship within political ecology: work that focuses on communities and the politics that surround their commonly-held resources and work concerned with questions of state governance and privatization. ³ In reviewing the interface between these stands, I will argue that political ecology’s historical engagement with the complexity of the phrase ‘access to resources’ provides a strong analytical framework for addressing some of the deficiencies of dominant institutionalist frameworks for understanding mixed property forms. I conclude by relating political ecology to the expanding literature and activism of ‘commoning’. In so doing, I hope to plant some seeds (Robbins, 2004) for constructive engagement by political ecologists in the (re)making of environmental governance and property relations. Given the limits of space, my citations within these literatures are necessarily incomplete and eclectic.

II Properties: Common and otherwise

Scholars or activists seeking to support or create common property institutions in the industrialized world have expressed frustration with the dominance of cases in the commons literature from rural developing world settings (e.g. Bresnihan and Byrne, 2015). Their frustration stems from the seeming lack of correspondence between cases of what are seen as closed societies of villages and clans organized around commonly-held pastures, forests, or fisheries portrayed within the commons literature with the realities that they are facing with socially-porous groups organizing/negotiating around multiple sets of resources governed by multi-layered rights and institutions.

As an Africanist, I would argue that cases of ‘pure’ common property – meeting the requirements laid out by Ostrom (1990: 90) – are actually much rarer in developing countries than is often thought. Empirical work has shown that systems of common property governance often include overlapping systems of rights – some held by sovereigns on behalf of the community, some shared by members of the community, and some held by individuals. From multiple perspectives, such ‘confused’ systems of property rights are seen as ‘primitive’ with economic development both demanding and leading to their demise (Demsetz, 1967; Glassman, 2006). These rights are strongly relational – with rights not solely private or solely communal, and the relative strength of property claims of a person or community depending on who is making a competing claim (Bakker, 2013). This is consistent with work on property as a social institution, one best thought of as the control over a stream of benefits against the claims of others. Popular notions of the physical parcel of land as property in the West are historically unique – shaped by what Blomley (2015) describes as the territorialization of property. While more likely ignored in the West, property is inherently relational and thus deeply political.

Within the development literature, recognition of the limitations of institutionalist perspectives to address this complexity has grown with terms such as ‘institutional bricolage’ and ‘critical institutionalism’ increasingly invoked (Hall et al., 2014). As an approach, political ecology has long embraced the relational underpinnings of property. This view of property rights as being socially-mediated, over-lapping and contested, and necessarily embedded within people’s livelihoods, has been further developed and articulated by political ecologists and others since (e.g. Leach et al., 1999; Ribot and Peluso, 2003). The view of a singular resource managed by a closed social group using a single set of rules reflects more the framings of common property scholarship than the reality of commonly-held resources in the developing world. ⁴ While institutional contexts differ, the complexity and multiplicity of commonly-held property in the Global South and North are similar (Blomley, 2008).

III Analysis and management of the commons

A range of scholars have critiqued development and conservation efforts to improve common property management, as intentionally or unintentionally working to advance market principles to the detriment of the public good (Goldman, 1997). ⁵ The concern is not about rule-making per se ⁶ but the common tendency to seek to improve the management of resources by formalizing rules of access and clearly circumscribing commonly-held resources and the social groups using them. Formalization and circumscription by local communities can occur both in consort with and in resistance to territorialization programs of the state (Peluso, 2005). This process has been described as ‘proxy privatization’ by Osborne (2015), since both formalization and circumscription can contribute directly to privatization and individualization (Mansfield, 2004) – two of six key elements of commodification as described by Castree (2003). In addition, other work has shown that these elements may contribute over time to changing views of land and other commonly-held resources themselves – contributing to ideas that they could be seen as alienable with rights to them bought and sold (e.g. Li, 2007; Osborne, 2015; Green and Baird, 2016).

IV New forms of governance and the commons

Over the past 25 years there has been an embrace of smaller government, privatization, liberalization of markets, and increased reliance on market mechanisms for regulation. This complex, contradictory, and conflicted set of processes has loosely been assigned the umbrella label of neoliberalism. Associated with these trends, there has been an emphasis on the privatization of government services and renewed efforts to formalize property rights. At the same time there are reports of a large expansion of government-controlled protected areas with variable access rights accorded to individuals and groups (Deguignet et al., 2014) as well as the growth of government-recognized common property areas (Agrawal, 2007). These trends alone suggest that the neoliberalism has not resulted in ubiquitous ‘full’ privatization.

It is important to recognize that the expansion of mixed forms of property with neoliberalism due to the uneven and incomplete expansion of private rights is not surprising. Unfettered private property and commodification, despite the rhetoric, do not serve society or capital interests. This reflects not only Polanyi’s double movement but the demands of capital for government-provided services that are critical for accumulation (Robertson, 2006; Robbins et al., 2012). In short, the proliferation of commons-like institutions is not necessarily anti-capitalist but actually can be seen as an attempt to sustain the functioning of capitalism (Caffentzis, 2010).

These points are illustrated by the case of the ‘global land grab’ that most typically refers to the loss of often commonly-held lands in the Global South (Baird, 2014). This phenomenon, which suggests large-scale privatization of land, has led to a revisitation of the concept of primitive accumulation. New treatments of primitive accumulation as well as the concept of accumulation by dispossession emphasize that enclosure is not a development stage of capitalism but an ongoing process of privatization and proletarianization (Harvey, 2003; Glassman, 2006). Moreover, state actions lie at the heart of extra-economic mechanisms of dispossession of commonly and privately-held land, with the resulting forms of privatization depending on the invocations of national interest if not types of nationalized property (Baird, 2011). Political ecologists have contributed significantly to our understanding of: the complex politics underlying these dispossessions (McCarthy, 2004; Hart, 2006; Baird, 2011; Hall, 2012); the importance of the characteristics of the resource being dispossessed (Sneddon, 2007; Perreault, 2012); and how dispossessions can lead to a mix of property rights held by different actors (Green and Baird, 2016). If we see de-commoning (enclosure) as an ongoing contested process that just as often produces property claims of mixed rather than pure form, we can see the process of communing, which will be turned to later in this report, as a similarly contested process that seeks to expand shared rights and responsibilities within mixed property forms.

V The proliferation of mixed property relations

Recent research has shown a proliferation of property forms in which the state, private individuals and various social groups of civil society hold rights and responsibilities over different benefits/services provided by a biophysical feature or process (e.g. Brown, 2007; Holder and Flessas, 2008; Bakker, 2010). Moreover, situations of overlapping rights of different forms held by different individuals and groups are not new to the world but have been simplified or ignored by standard common property analyses. At a basic level, we can think of the production of mixed institutional forms under capitalism as resulting from barriers to full privatization (including lack of privatization interest) and the incomplete layering of more private claims onto public goods and services.

As common property scholars have long argued, practical difficulties in enclosing certain resources can inhibit the full development of private rights. The oceans or atmosphere are often used as examples of common pool resources that, because of the difficulties (or high cost) of enclosure, may be better seen as public goods (despite the fact that their use subtracts from the use of others). With technological change, information and knowledge likewise have become increasingly difficult to enclose (Caffentzis, 2010; Hardt and Negri, 2011). Still, if a resource in question is of sufficient interest to capital, different services of even atmospheric or oceanic systems can be enclosed for private use through government regulation (e.g. Mansfield, 2004, 2006). Thus we may see the transformation but not elimination of the commons through privatization, due to barriers and the resistance of people – the commons that persist are not the simple portrayals of the pure commons but of hybrid form, what Eizenberg (2012) describes as the ‘actually existing commons’. It is most telling that it is generally resources of limited value to capital – unproductive drylands or vacant lots in economically-depressed neighborhoods – where privatization pressures are low and ‘commoning’ of the poor remains most visible (Blomley, 2008; Foster, 2011). This can also be seen in the case of the privatization of government services, with private firms only accepting those services and service areas that are profitable, shedding the unprofitable services and areas to governments or community groups (Bakker, 2013; Harris, 2013).

The growth of mixed or hybrid property forms cannot be explained by barriers to full enclosure or commodification alone. The growth of market-based environmental regulation has been associated with the layering of use rights to different characteristics of nonhuman nature. For instance, while the atmosphere cannot be ‘owned’, regulatory attempts have created tradeable carbon offset credits, such as the Clean Development Mechanism’s Certified Emission Reduction Credits, or tradeable rights to release SO₂ or CO₂ (emission permits). The vagaries of the atmosphere’s weather have also been capitalized on as another risk to be insured against in the form of catastrophe bonds or index-based insurance schemes (Johnson, 2013a, 2013b). Arguably, the creativity of efforts to create financial value reaches its most flamboyant extreme (at least currently) in the stacking of ecosystem service credits where spatially-overlapping credits for different ecosystem services (e.g. biodiversity, carbon, and water-quality) are bought/valued by various entities while being produced/maintained/owned by different social groups (Robertson et al., 2014). As Robertson and Wainwright (2013) argue, the proliferation of these new abstracted assets and commodities exposes the limited attention by political ecologists and others to longstanding debates over the question of value. Processes of valuation are important not only for the necessary quantification required for exchange but reflect who values, pays for, and owns the ‘services’ in question.

These new property systems deviate strongly from visions of the tripartite division of private, common and national property. They often have mixed or hybrid forms and thus are similar to the forms of customary tenure where multiple rights are held by different people to different streams of benefits from agricultural land, forests, or fisheries. They are thus neither novel nor necessarily unsuited for social and ecological realities. In fact, it could be argued that they better reflect the true relational nature of property where webs of social relations encircle contested resources with value. The violence associated with enclosure is mirrored by the analytical violence done by those institutionalists who overly simplify property systems and in so doing exclude the rights of individuals and communities in their portrayal of the collective action problem. One would hope that political ecology, whether First or Third World, brings to these situations a sensitivity to the micropolitics that surround these complex property systems.

VI Political ecology and commoning

The proliferation of ‘actually existing commons’ around the world illustrates how common property is a set of social institutions and interactions that not only allocate a stream of benefits but produce and maintain them. A recognition of the ‘commons’ as a set of social relations that are not fixed but changing has led some to argue that the term common(s) should also be seen as a verb: ‘to common’ (Frederici, 2010; Fournier, 2013; Bresnihan and Byrne, 2015; Noterman, 2016). Invocations of ‘commoning’ are most prevalent in the industrialized world. In contrast to a rule-based allocative commons, these efforts embrace a political and moral commons of production in resistance to the individualization and privatization inherent to capitalism (McCarthy, 2005; Blomley, 2008; St. Martin, 2009; Foster, 2011).

Given that the commons can be seen as being produced to support capitalism, there are clearly tensions with the new embrace of cooperatives, urban gardens, conservancies, and community-controlled resources. Some commentators distinguish actions that seek to defend or produce communal rights under capitalism as pro-capitalist in contrast to anti-capitalist commoning movements (Caffentzis, 2010). Moreover, rural indigenous groups defending their communal rights are seen as reactive (defending precapitalist claims) rather than proactive to capital (promoting alternatives). Unfortunately, to this reader, it is far from clear how the development of community-based urban agriculture in Detroit is any more anti-capitalist than struggles by West Africans to defend their ‘ancestral’ village lands against the dispossession by international concessionaires. Yes, the latter is reactive, but not through simply an invocation of tradition but through ever changing and creative ways.

Commoning activism and scholarship offer opportunities to political ecologists to work constructively with communities and activists in support of their attempts to develop conditions that support shared use, management, and production of needed resources. Such efforts would most likely be with ‘actually existing commons’ of mixed rather than pure property form. Therefore, it would allow political ecologists to grapple with illuminating how these mixed institutional forms work in practice as mediated by ideology and political power (see Noterman, 2016). One could point to a number of political ecologists that have been involved in such efforts but, as a field, political ecology can learn much from the new commoning literature and the theoretical understandings of property that underlie it. Political ecology as well has much to offer the commoning field – not only through its history of scholarship on the social mediation of resource access but through its success of working through differences and commonalities between the political ecologies of the South and North. This rich history provides political ecology with a depository of analyses and activism around the processes of de-commoning and commoning across a wide range of cultural and political-economic contexts.