The Ostroms’ Commons Revisited

Abstract

Elinor and Vincent Ostrom spent their careers working in fields outside third-sector studies, yet a significant body of their work has important implications for nonprofit organizations and the wider third sector. From their academic base at the Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, they built a large body of research and theory on a broad range of topics that bear on nonprofit and voluntary action theory, including self-governance, collaboration, coproduction, polycentrism, federalism, and numerous others. This article examines and critiques selected aspects of their role in the vast international network of commons studies and projects, including a body of my own work stretching back several decades on the commons theory of voluntary action (CTVA). Recent work on new commons, information commons, and knowledge commons points toward a convergence of the Ostrom’s work on commons with commons research and theory in our field.

Keywords

commons theory Tocqueville voluntary action

Introduction

In this commentary, I discuss aspects of the theoretical lifework of two important scholars and their implications at present and in the near future for the field of third-sector studies, focusing particularly on the concept of the commons.¹ Neither Vincent nor Elinor Ostrom² was active in the Association of Voluntary Action Scholars (AVAS), the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA), the International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR), Independent Sector, or any of the other national or regional research associations that have collectively defined contemporary third-sector studies as far as I am aware. Yet, they have contributed a great deal to our collective project, a good deal of it indirectly through other third parties. For purposes of this discussion, third-sector studies can be defined operationally to include topics that have been discussed in papers at ARNOVA conferences and articles published in this journal. Although, according to their colleagues and students, the Ostroms’ lifework was a collaborative effort, if only because of the nature of standards of citation, most of the discussion that follows will concentrate on Elinor Ostrom’s work on the commons, much of it done with coauthors. The fact that there are only a few references to the work of Vincent Ostrom should not be read as an effort to diminish or downplay his role.

I approach this topic as a sympathetic critic who has done independent work on commons theory that was initially quite distinct from the Ostroms’ approach. I have only recently began to explore more systematically certain similarities and differences among the Ostroms’ approach to the commons (OC), the Hardin “tragedy of the commons” model, and my own work on the commons theory of voluntary action (CTVA; Lohmann, 1989, 1992b, 2015).³ All of these approaches work with the commons as an ideal type for summarizing and characterizing the flows and effects of common pool resources (CPRs).⁴ They have often done so, however, in quite different ways and beginning at quite different places.

There are both similarities and important differences in the Ostroms’ approach to commons and my own. For example, both the OC and CTVA approaches to the commons are multidisciplinary and explicitly refute the Hardin tragic model of the strict dichotomy of public and private choice and action, opening instead the possibilities of a third approach, way or “sector.” The Ostrom model is more formal, general, rationalist, individualist, and naturalist, and has been applied to a far wider range of property, information, and other commons than the CTVA, which has been purposely limited to organized, collective voluntary action in associations and assemblies.⁵ Commons studied by the Ostroms and their associates in venues such as the International Association for the Study of the Commons and the International Journal of the Commons include not only irrigation associations and fishing grounds and other settings where humans assemble, decide, and act but also physical topics such as the electromagnetic spectrum, Antarctica, and fungus colonies. All of this occurs within the constraints of a rule-based rational choice model of institutions that the Ostroms first formulated and others have embraced (cf. Aligica & Boettke, 2009; McGinnis & Walker, 2010). From the start, the CTVA approach has sought to replace the economic, rational choice approach to the commons with a more pragmatic, interactional, and communications-based view of commons as social spaces for collective effort and the shared construction of social action (Lohmann, 1992a, 1992b).

To further explore this comparison, I will focus on four principal topics: the respective presenting problems, or “problematics” of the Hardin, Ostrom, and CTVA approaches; differing definitions of commons; differing approaches to institutions. This commentary will conclude by noting certain apparent convergences between the Ostrom and CTVA approaches in the recent concepts of new commons and knowledge commons.

The Commons Problem

There is a single point of origin to all modern work on commons theory and perhaps even the nature of rational collective action; an issue—and a connection—that came into focus with an influential essay by Garrett Hardin titled The Tragedy of the Commons, published in Science in 1968. Earlier, in the 19th century, scholarly interest in commons was historical and legal in nature, focused exclusively on English and European agricultural commons (Maine, 1876; Scrutton, 1887; Shaw-Lefevre, 1894). It is contemporary with, but shares no obvious connection with, the German legal association studies of Otto Von Gierke first published between 1884 and 1886 (Von Gierke & Black, 1990; Von Gierke & Helman, 1977).

The particular research problem that Hardin (1968) framed was the apparent inability of modern societies to deal with environmental problems and the necessity of collective action of some sort. His preferred solution of public action was framed as one of only two possible alternatives (one workable, he argued, one not) in what we might label a two-sector solution: Pollution of the environmental commons could be dealt with, he posited, either ineffectively through private market action or effectively through governmental or public action. For Hardin, dealing with the environmental commons was an all-or-nothing proposition characteristic of a good deal of Cold War era thinking: He left no room for national or regional variations in the environment or micro-climates and appears never to have considered that any third alternative, for example, voluntary action by independent self-governing bodies or philanthropy by individuals or groups was plausible. Private action for public good by groups such as the Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense Fund, Greenpeace, or other environmental groups was, like private market action, theoretically doomed to failure. Through Hardin’s lens, the presumed “tragedy” of continued degradation of the environmental commons could only be reversed by public action.⁶ Just as importantly, contemporary readers of Hardin also interpreted this message as applying more broadly to a range of issues and problems beyond the environment.

If Hardin was right, sustained, stable collective action outside the state was a theoretical impossibility, and the long-term implications for third-sector studies would be little short of catastrophic. Volunteering, philanthropy, mutual aid, and self-help and advocacy by nonprofit organizations would, indeed, be “the province of simpletons, knaves and fools” too naïve or devious to recognize the ultimate futility of their own efforts (Lohmann, 1992a, p. 23).

As Elinor Ostrom (1990) noted, Hardin’s rather gloomy conclusion extended far beyond just environmental issues and seems to fit with and reinforce the view ventured a few years earlier by Mancur Olson that only small groups could effectively collaborate, and presumably only on small problems (Olson, 1965). “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all” was Hardin’s pessimistic conclusion; a view, she suggested, also reinforced by the nonzero sum game known as the Prisoners’ Dilemma (Ostrom, 1990). The Ostroms and I were undoubtedly among many scholars and practitioners at the time who, based on experience and practice wisdom, were skeptical or rejected Hardin’s “tragic” conclusion that efforts at voluntary collective action and cooperation by self-governing bodies pooling their resources were doomed to fail. The problems remained to explain why and develop a theory of practice. Thanks to Hardin, the specter of the potential futility of viable long-term voluntary collective action looms in the background of all commons studies—or, at least it did until the Ostroms demolished that shibboleth with a huge body of evidence of viable commons, some of them functioning successfully over hundreds of years.

Meanwhile, in a seemingly unrelated independent development, organized third-sector studies got underway 3 years after Hardin’s influential essay first appeared, with the founding of the Association of Voluntary Action Scholars in 1971 and the appearance of the Journal of Voluntary Action Research (predecessor to this journal) a year later. Was the reaction to Hardin’s “tragic” model associated in some roundabout way with the establishment of our field? It would be hard to reach such a conclusion. Based on the history of the original AVAS organizer David Horton Smith, it does not appear so (Smith, 1999); the sociologists, social workers, volunteer action coordinators, and voluntary action practitioners who formed the core of the initial membership of AVAS had at the time a seemingly unrelated agenda of interests and were working in an entirely different academic silo from that of Hardin, the Ostroms, and the economists and political theorists interested in collective choice problems.

It is more likely that some of those interested in collective choice in economics, political science and public administration, and management who formally joined third-sector studies after the ARNOVA reorganization of 1989 may have been influenced directly or indirectly by the Ostroms’ study of the commons. It is more certain that many were directly or indirectly influenced by the “new institutionalism” of the Ostroms but I was at the time not among them. Two years after the formation of AVAS, Vincent and Elinor Ostrom convened their own collective academic enterprise that became the Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, which served as their academic home for the rest of their lives. This was several years before the IU Center on Philanthropy was separately established by Robert Payton and others, and roughly two decades before Indiana University–Purdue University in Indianapolis (IUPUI) became the institutional home of ARNOVA.⁷

Despite all this contemporaneity and geographical proximity, I am unaware of evidence of significant interaction or influence between what appear to be these completely separate “academic silos.” If such evidence exists, those familiar with it must take this as a challenge to fill in the record.

The commons as a theoretical term in ARNOVA, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, and third-sector studies initially bore no direct relation to the Ostroms, their Workshop, or the international association for commons studies. First mention of the term in our field was in my paper, And Lettuce is Nonanimal at the 1987 AVAS conference in Kansas City, later published in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (NVSQ) (Lohmann, 1992a). This paper was followed by “A Multidisciplinary Approach to Nonprofit Organizations, Voluntary Action and Philanthropy” (Lohmann, 1992b) and by the book, The Commons: New Perspectives on Nonprofit Organization, Voluntary Action and Philanthropy (1992a) and a series of subsequent conference papers listed fully in Chapter 1 of Voluntary Action in New Commons (2015).

The approach to the commons in my various publications was conditioned only by Hardin and by my practice experience in community organizations, human services, neighborhood associations, and local United Ways. Early on, I was largely unfamiliar with the Ostroms’ work in this area (the assumption of incomplete information has always been fundamental in my work and was on display here!). I understand now how I may have been indirectly influenced by the zeitgeist that the Ostroms’ commons theory and its underlying institutionalism had created, but at the time, I had little or no awareness of this increasingly powerful set of influences.⁸

Likewise, there seems to be little evidence from this period of any intent by the Ostroms to elaborate a distinct view of nonprofit organizations or links to third-sector studies in their increasingly large body of work, although Vincent Ostrom’s theorizing, in particular, is informed by a general Tocquevillian perspective on associations, as noted below. In contrast to their approach, my initial interest in the commons concept was simply as a metaphor for voluntary action, and my theoretical objects were limited to matters of substantive theory: to bring key features of the increasingly diverse approaches to voluntary associations, nonprofit organizations, and philanthropy together under a single conceptual umbrella, and to highlight the theoretical centrality of voluntary action over nonprofit organization in efforts to define a third sector. It was only later that I gradually became aware of the implications for this third sector of the Ostroms’ general, rule-based theoretical concern for a formal theory of institutions and collective choice.

Definitions

The indirect contributions of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom to third-sector studies can be further understood through closer examination of various definitions of and approaches to the commons. According to David Bollier (2007), a contemporary commons theorist,

What makes the term commons useful . . . is its ability to help us identify problems that affect both types of commons (e.g., congestion, overharvesting, pollution, inequalities, other degradation) and to propose effective alternatives (e.g., social rules, appropriate property rights and management structures). (p. 28)

By “both types of commons,” Bollier appears to limit CPRs to either property or information commons; two categories of CPR of great interest to previous investigators. Like a more recent Bollier quote cited in the conclusion below, I prefer to believe that these are only two of many types of commons. Bollier’s formulation of rules, rights, and structures will be familiar to most third-sector scholars.

In contrast to the ownership model of nonprofit organizations (Billis, 2013), the Ostrom model of commons seeks to categorize by outputs or products. One of the earliest and most important contributions of the Ostrom model of commons (Ostrom & Ostrom, 1977) was a refinement that is still too much neglected in third-sector studies of the classic dichotomy of public and private goods (see Figure 1). Hess (2010) characterized it as a “groundbreaking contribution to the study of the commons,” and I would concur although in the note to Figure 1 and elsewhere I have proposed some modifications of the labels used. In their 1977 article, the Ostroms outlined a new typology of four types of goods disaggregating the dichotomy of public and private through the use of a 2 × 2 table leveraging the economic definition of public goods as non-exclusive and non-rivalrous. It locates not one but two different intermediate domains for what (Lohmann, 1992a) termed common goods (see Figure 1). This distinction has since given rise to a variety of terms for the two intermediate types, including what I would call club goods that are easy to exclude and non-rivalrous (within the club or association), and community goods that are difficult to exclude (within the community) but rivalrous (e.g., between communities like neighborhoods and networks; Lohmann, 2015).

Figure 1.

Types of goods.

This and other formulations of commons by the Ostroms and in the Workshop were formal and rational in character and fit readily within the limits of economic theory and more generally rational choice theory and utilitarian philosophy. As such, they also fit well with the (still) largely economic character of much nonprofit theory. A commons is, simply and formally, a CPR governed by agents responsible for its allocation (Ostrom, 1990). This definition would seem to extend not only to such CPRs as foundations and United Ways allocated by boards of governors. It also extends far beyond to property commons like village irrigation systems, ocean fishing grounds like the Grand Banks, international cooperation on Antarctica, and international copyright law. This includes the amazing successful information commons of Lessig’s initiative for Creative Commons licensing of publications that has grown into an international copyright regime (creativecommons.org).

In the OC conception, the formulation of rules for allocation and distribution of resources is fundamental to understanding the structuring of human social institutions. Vincent Ostrom offered this assessment of their approach:

Our distinctive contribution is best indicated by how a science of association would contribute to an understanding of human institutions . . . My conclusion is that institutional analysis and design, in light of both recent and earlier intellectual developments is an appropriate subject for focused inquiry by a rather highly disciplined sort, which is also strongly multidisciplinary in character. (Quoted in Hess, 2010)

The reference to “institutional analysis and development” is a pointer to the distinctive Institutional Analysis and Design (IAD) research protocol developed by the Workshop. The phrase “science of association” is undoubtedly a pointer to the use of that phrase by Alexis de Tocqueville, one of Vincent Ostrom’s fundamental intellectual guide stars. In a 2005 article, Michael McGinnis wrote, “In his most recent book, V. Ostrom (1997, pp. 102-114) has begun articulating an alternative to Hobbesian individualism and Durkheimian holism that he originally called methodological communalism but now prefers to label Tocquevillian analytics” (McGinnis, 2005, p. 170). This link to Tocqueville is one of the shared parameters of the OC and CTVA approaches and requires further elaboration in the third-sector literature.

In contrast to the Ostrom approach, Lohmann (2015) defined the commons as a sector of formal and informal associations and assemblies characterized by voluntary participation (association), shared (common pool) resources, and shared purposes (missions), with predictable emergent characteristics of philia (also termed mutuality or social capital) and moeurs (or moral capital and practices).⁹ In its origins, this definition is explicitly humanistic rather than rational or formalistic. The five dimensions cited are grounded in the reconstruction by Moses Finley, an ancient historian, of the ancient Greek concept of koinonia politike (Finley, 1999). It is thus, like philanthropy (McCully, 2008), a very old (2,500-year) idea with very modern connotations for which the English-language term commons serves as a useful index. In the CTVA like the OC, there is also an emphasis on theoretical inference from empirical examples, as in the design principles (Ostrom, 1990) rather than simple (and timeless) theoretical deduction as in Figure 1.

Although coming from two very different theoretical traditions, there are important convergences in the OC and CTVA approaches. First, as noted above both are explicitly multidisciplinary, and, as Vincent Ostrom’s comment quoted above indicates, both emphasize association and voluntary action. This comment was no fluke. In The Meaning of Democracy and The Vulnerability of Democracies, Vincent Ostrom (1997) situated federalism within an open public realm of voluntary action that allows people to “constitute themselves into mutually respectful and productive working relationships” (p. 168; emphasis added). Is there a more concise statement anywhere of what people engaging in organizing voluntary associations and membership organizations aspire to? In associations, people do not just fit into organizations, in the process they constitute themselves! This phrase also points to a potential OC conception of the universal importance of self-governance: The self-governing associations of the third sector are part of a broader configuration of self-governing civil societies that also includes democratic, self-governing states and free, open markets as extensions of a universal human capacity for self-governance.

Vincent Ostrom’s language of constitution, mutuality, and respect is an accurate reflection of relations in local, urban, and metropolitan communities in both local governmental and third sectors. Thus, although the Ostroms and the Workshop may not have spelled out a third-sector conception in a meaningful structural sense, the processes they identify of actual mutual and respectful constitution of productive working relationships in associations are present and articulate well with much of the other themes present in their work.

Thus, surface differences in levels of generality, abstraction, and historical contingency go along with numerous similarities in the OC and CTVA approaches to commons.

Institutions

Perhaps the largest differences between the Ostroms’ approach to commons and the CTVA, initially at least, are found in the underlying interdisciplinary conception of institutions. Particularly in the early years, the Ostroms commons as an institution was an abstract figure of political and economic rationality in which CPRs are formed, gathered, and applied within “institutions” characterized abstractly as complexes of distributive and allocative rules. This approach is evident, for example, in the break-through publication Governing the Commons (Ostrom, 1990) where Elinor Ostrom traces a convergence of three distinct perspectives to CPRs: Hardin’s (1968) “tragic” model; Mancur Olson’s (1965) small-group model of collective choice; and Albert Tucker’s “prisoner’s dilemma” game (Poundstone, 1992). By contrast, institutions in the voluntary action tradition as a whole are seen as less rigorous, rationalist, abstract, formalistic, and more sociological, anthropological, and behavioral or “active”—associations, assemblies, and “organizations” with their own peculiar norms, histories, and cultures. This difference may be intrinsic to the worldviews of political theory, economics, and the management sciences on one hand, and the social and behavioral sciences on the other. One index of the underlying differences might be between those who concur with Vincent Ostrom’s quest for another solution to the disparities of Hobbesian individualism and Durkheimian collectivism and those who are content with any of the multitude of such solutions already in place.

Recently, and particularly as the Ostroms’ approach to commons has moved into analysis of information and knowledge commons, it may have begun to bridge these differences, albeit not always in the ways Vincent Ostrom envisioned. In what should be seen as a major move away from institutional formalism that is also a move toward third-sector studies, Elinor Ostrom (2005), for example, says that institutions are “the prescriptions humans use to organize all forms of repetitive and structured interactions including those within families, neighborhoods, markets, firms, sports leagues, churches, private associations and governments at all scales” (p. 3). This statement may potentially go a long way toward bridging the differences noted above, or that may, simply, be reading too much into it. The term prescriptions seems to soften and concretize the earlier abstract rationalistic emphasis on “rules.” It may be only a small step from this definition to the Ostrom’s view of commons as pools of resources collectively held, controlled, and allocated by groups of explicitly human and not always completely rational “agents.”

There should be no doubt that renewed focus on institutions and institutional analysis is one of the most important contributions of the OC approach (Aligica & Boettke, 2009; Boettke & Coyne, 2005). Charlotte Hess (2010) quoted Vincent Ostrom’s assessment of their contribution as follows:

Our distinctive contribution is best indicated by how a science of association would contribute to an understanding of human institutions. . . [I]nstitutional analysis and design, in light of both recent and earlier intellectual developments in an appropriate subject for focused inquiry by a rather highly disciplined sort, which is also strongly multidisciplinary in character.

The DiMaggio and Powell (1983) article on “institutional isomorphism” is almost certainly an attempt to cross this same theoretical frontier from a different direction.

The renewed attention to institutions provoked by the Ostrom’s work may even have been responsible in some indirect ways for the initial development of third-sector studies in ARNOVA and beyond, although as noted above, that currently appears to have been initially a prior and independent development. However, it seems quite probable that the growing interest in the third sector between the 1980s and the present among economists, political scientists, public administrators, and management scholars as well as the redefinition and expansion of the field associated with the creation of ARNOVA in 1989 was influenced by the Ostroms’ “new institutionalism.” (This statement, like others offered here, is not meant to be taken as a finding or conclusion, but rather as speculation; hypotheses deserving of further investigation.)

Together with their colleagues and students, the Ostroms achieved nothing less than introducing a new institutionalism into political and economic science revitalizing and renewing the shopworn earlier institutional perspectives of figures such as Woodrow Wilson, Mary Parker Follett, Thorsten Veblen, John R. Commons, and other institutionalists. The shift from decisions to rules is a major piece of this, and in some respects, the commons is Exhibit A for this shift. Commons, in both the OC and CTVA approaches, are a broad (and still somewhat indeterminate) category of social, political, economic, and cultural institutions sharing certain key characteristics.

The quote above and the reference to “Tocquevillian analytics” are two indications that late in their careers the Ostroms may have been moving in the general direction of greater accommodation of their collective choice perspective with communication-based, interactivist, and constructivist perspectives.¹⁰ At any rate, the term “new commons” was coined by Charlotte Hess and the late Elinor Ostrom, they reported in the last of Ostrom publication to be cited here (Hess & Ostrom, 2007), to refer to “various types of shared resources that have recently evolved or have been recognized as commons . . . without pre-existing rules or clear institutional arrangements” (Hess, 2008, p. 1, emphasis added). Such recognition of a broad range of CPRs—and new types of poolable resources—is in part an acknowledgment of the sweeping breadth of contemporary commons studies already noted by Bollier above. It is also entirely consistent with a broad range of Vincent Ostrom’s favored terms, including “constitutionalism.” In brief, new commons are notable, in part, by consciousness of their “constituted”, or constructed, character. They are not merely creatures of preexisting or out-of-frame rules; we are entirely aware of their making, construction, or constitution.

Practice Philosoph(ies)?

Elinor Ostrom could easily have been defining a third sector of nonprofit organization and voluntary action as well as seeking to characterize the nature of their contribution when she wrote more than two decades ago:

“Although the theory of the firm and the theory of the state can resolve these problems [of collective choice and action], no equivalently well developed and generally accepted theory provides a coherent account of how a set of principals, faced with a collective action problem can solve (1) the problem of creating a new set of institutions; (2) the problem of making credible commitments and (3) the problem of mutual monitoring” of resources. (Ostrom, 1990, p. 42, emphasis added)

Thanks in considerable part to the Ostroms, commons theory is well on the way to doing just that today.

The Ostroms’ institutional “design principles” may represent the high water mark of their efforts to elaborate a practice philosophy of the commons. They offer an inductive set of rules to guide commons practice extracted from case studies of existing successful commons (cf. McGinnis & Ostrom, 1996). That the design principles are meant to have major implications for guiding the practice of the commons should be clear from the quotation cited in the previous paragraph. I have tried several times in ARNOVA conference papers and other settings to spell out elements of a comparable pragmatic practice philosophy of voluntary action but that effort is still a work in progress for some of the reasons noted below.

Since Hardin first wrote on it, the practice of the commons has grown into an enormous multifaceted international theoretical literature and practice community with literally hundreds of virtual and real organizations, websites, and social movements vying for attention and extolling their own principles of action. Many of these—notably various open software and operating systems such as Linux and Apache and Creative Commons licensing—are fundamental to the contemporary information infrastructure. Some are mere pipedreams. But it is undoubtedly the case that the appeal of the commons as a metaphor guiding practice has made a profound imprint that reaches far beyond the modest theorizing of the OC and CTVA. It is far less clear the extent to which the sum of these efforts are guided by anything that might be termed a single, coherent practice philosophy.

New and Knowledge Commons

Recent formulations of commons theory and concepts by Boyle (2003, 2008); Bollier (2007, 2014); Benkler (2002, 2006); Hess and Ostrom (2007); Hess (2008, 2010, 2012); Frischmann, Madison, and Strandburg (2014); Lohmann (2015); and others have focused on the practice of new commons, information commons, and knowledge commons.¹¹ Boyle (2003) associates intellectual property commons with recent trends in information technology and law that he terms the “second enclosure movement”; something that much of the modern commons movement might be seen as a reaction to.

New types of commons still constitute somewhat overlapping categories that do not always fit well with design principles based on studies of old (property) commons. “New commons” is itself a bewilderingly complex rubric. As David Bollier noted, in the contemporary world “[t]he commons has too many variations to be captured in a fixed, universal set of principles. Each commons has distinctive dynamics based on its participants, history, cultural values, the nature of the resource, and so forth . . .” Even so, he went on, “Many different sorts of commons operating in American life today . . . illustrate how, despite significant differences, they embody certain general principles” (Bollier, 2007).

Nevertheless, the most general category of commons studied today can be termed new commons, in the sense that they are common resource pooling associations formed by modern legal arrangements protecting pooled assets and constitutional protections of speech, association, and assembly (Lohmann, 2015). The intentionality, formal constitution and structure, legal protections, and the sheer diversity of new commons contrast with the traditional, customary, and informal (and sometimes extra-legal) nature of old (property) commons in primary industries such as agriculture, forestry, and fishing. Two prominent types of new commons, information commons and knowledge commons, are those in which intangibles characterized as information or knowledge serve as the key common resource pooled. Other types of commons, for example, the “backyard commons” movement, involve innovative new uses of association and legal treatment of property (Lohmann, 2015, pp. 104-109; http://sfbackyard.wordpress.com/tag/backyard-commons/; http://www.treehugger.com/culture/start-your-own-cul-de-sac-commune.html). In all of these cases, legally recognized associations or organizations function as key actors in the handling of common pooled resources in new commons.

Authors writing about new information and knowledge commons may not yet always have mastered a precise or even consistent theoretical language to fully capture the transition that is currently underway from economic understandings of commons composed of rational rule-makers to associations and organizations of interacting, communicating participants, but the movement of commons theory in this direction is unmistakable. Taken together, the sources cited above point toward a general movement away from the utilitarian rationalism of Hardin and the early Ostrom approach to the commons and toward more communication-, interaction-, language-, and information-based theoretical approaches of the sort apparent in Hess and Ostrom (2007) and Lohmann (2015) as well as in the cited works of Bollier, Benkler, and many others. McGinnis’ (2005, 2010, 2011) observations on Vincent Ostrom’s late-career search for a “Tocquevillian analytics” suggest key dimensions of this transition, but there are others.¹² For example, Lohmann (2015) highlighted the importance of emergent social capital and the Tocquevillian concept of moeurs for such an analytics, following the interpretation of that term by the Tocqueville scholar Alan S. Kahan (Tocqueville, Furet, & Mélone, 1998). Kahan argues that Tocqueville included practice and other dimensions as well as more conventional mores in this term.

A significant feature of the recent focus on new information and knowledge commons for third-sector studies is that the “search for common ground” that Krashinsky (1995) did not see in the (then) two quite different OC and CTVA approaches to the study of commons may, in fact, be converging at present as a broader range of different types of new commons come under increasing study and different groups of researchers take into account the insights of other perspectives.

In their 2007 publication, Elinor Ostrom and her coauthors first outlined the concept of the knowledge commons, in which shared knowledge constituted the primary pooled resource. This initiative has already produced additional work including an edited volume by Frischmann et al. (2014) and others, and a dedicated discussion list (kcommons@list.pitt.edu) as well as a good deal of conference and journal activity outside of, but paralleling, our domain of third-sector studies. While knowledge is sometimes treated as a simple public good existing in the amorphous metaphysical cloud of “the known,” recent treatments of the knowledge commons offer a way to anchor what is known empirically among the interactions of individuals, associations, and organizations who realize what they know and communicate with one another about it.

Conclusion

This discussion of similarities and differences could easily be extended much further, were it not for the inherent limitations of the journal article format. It is most fitting to end this commentary with an extended quotation from Vincent Ostrom (1991) that highlights the importance of self-governance and the legal grounding of voluntary action for both the Ostroms’ and the CTVA approaches to commons:

The constitution and operational autonomy of the institutions of civil society thus turn critically upon inalienable rights of persons and citizens, with correlative limits upon the authority of the instrumentalities of government as specified in a limited national constitution, state constitutions, and local charters. Many of the institutions of civil societies, including families, business firms, trade unions, and all voluntary associations, are organized through what amount to governable contracts. Such contracts provide for revision, resolving disputes, and penalties for breaching the rules of association that are enforceable either under the rules of civil procedure or by arbitration. Voluntary associations have an autonomous standing based upon the authority of individuals to contract with one another and to hold property as shares in the assets of that voluntary association. Religions institutions and the press have an autonomous standing based upon freedom of the press and the free exercise of religion. These institutions are also organized through rules of voluntary association. (pp. 208-209)

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Roger A. Lohmann is emeritus professor of social work at West Virginia University, editor emeritus of Nonprofit Management and Leadership, and author of The Commons: New Perspectives on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (1992), Voluntary Action in New Commons (2015) and Above The Bottom Line: Financial Management in Human Services (forthcoming).

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