In 1965, Mancur Olson published The Logic of Collective Action, whereby he described how difficult it was to organize individuals to achieve broad group objectives. Small homogenous groups were more likely to be successful than were larger ones where members were more varied in socio-economic characteristics and in their group objectives. In this case, organizations had to provide private benefits to members to lower the incentive to free ride. In 1968 Garrett Hardin followed with an article in Science “The Tragedy of the Commons” whereby he argued that the motives of private, self-maximizing individuals would inevitably lead to the over exploitation of resources and potentially, group disaster unless individual parties were willing to accept coercive state restrictions on their behavior. The lesson of both of these influential publications was that provision of public goods by groups was likely to be limited and required well-defined rules typically defined and enforced externally by the state. Cooperation was doomed in most cases because of inexorable incentives of individuals to defect from group efforts when trying to capture collective benefits without bearing private costs.
One reaction to these bleak assessments was to emphasize the importance of implementing secure property rights to avoid open access or common-pool losses and to provide individual incentives for investment and trade underlying general economic growth (Demsetz Reference Demsetz1967; North Reference North1990). Another reaction was to examine the existence of cooperation in the natural sciences and in laboratory settings (Axelrod Reference Axelrod1984) and to explore apparent enabling conditions for human group action to avoid common-pool losses (Ostrom Reference Ostrom1990). While the first literature stressed that individual behavior constrained by private property rights regimes and coordinated by markets could generate aggregate benefits, the objective of the second literature was to directly challenge Hardin's pessimistic predictions for collective provision of public goods. By exploring observed common-property institutions for natural resource management, Ostrom identified a series of factors that contributed to long-term sustainable outcomes. She found that effective commons institutions typically were local, bottom-up organizations that involved small homogeneous populations with reciprocal interactions and trust, exploitation rules, internal enforcement and arbitration procedures, clear resource boundaries, limits on entry by outsiders, and recognition by the state. Other researchers examined additional group self-management, and the results were summarized by Michael Cox, Gwen Arnold, and Sergio Villamayor Tomás (Reference Cox, Arnold and Tomás2010). Most analyses in this literature involve contemporary case studies in a development context. Historical cases are rarer, but can provide critical insights into when cooperation emerges, is sustained, or breaks down in the face of external shocks or internal pressures over a long term. Gathering a conclusive body of evidence for testing hypotheses about cooperation is hindered by a selection bias because only surviving collective management institutions can be analyzed, whereas the factors that led others to fail are generally not observed.
Tine De Moor's volume The Dilemma of the Commoners fits squarely into the common-property literature that is aimed at providing counter examples to Hardin's forecasts with an historical case study. She examines a self-governing, rural commons, Gemene and Loweiden near Bruges in Flanders during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to illustrate the potential for collective self-governance. The Introduction includes an overview of Hardin's argument and how it is inconsistent with the apparent longevity and wide spread presence of rural commons institutions and urban guilds in northwestern Europe from the Middle Ages onward. Indeed, she terms these regimes institutionalized collective action. A short literature summary on the commons and guilds is provided. She argues that in the mid-eighteenth century governments gradually infringed on these institutions, leading to their disappearance, a phenomenon she compares to twenty-first-century external efforts to privatize common properties in developing countries. A shortcoming of the volume is the imbalance between discussion of conceptual issues and strong claims of cooperation relative to the empirical evidence mustered to support them. For example, the assertion of broad collective action in northwestern Europe prior to the eighteenth century would have been strengthened with data on the number and location of commons and guilds, duration data (where they exist), and discussion of the public goods provided. Just why these self-governing institutions subsequently were so vulnerable to state action is not described. Were they not as productive as alternative arrangements when prices and opportunities changed with economic growth? Did they slow adoption of new technologies or methods of production? Were the pressures always external or were their origins internal in response to perhaps a “Tragedy of the Anti-commons” (Heller Reference Heller1998) whereby decision-making was paralyzed by group transaction costs? Were the shifts from common to private property inconsistent with economic or social welfare as De Moor implies? More information on why there are so few surviving historical commons would help assess whether Hardin's predictions were wrong over the long term. In the Epilogue of the volume De Moor suggests that there is a modern re-emergence of appreciation for bottom-up common property management, but without a theoretical framework or systematic evidence it is difficult to know how pervasive or consequential this phenomenon might be.
Chapter 1 begins with an overview of the book's main arguments. There also is a brief literature review of what De Moor describes as a silent revolution in self-governing institutions in the late Middle Ages with the emergence of merchant and craft guilds and agricultural commons. This could be a very useful insight in economic history on how cooperation promoted economic development and how institutions were assembled to promote it. The historical literature on guilds and commons is intertwined with the theoretical common-property literature in order to illustrate plausible relationships. The discussion is only suggestive, however, because underlying causal mechanisms are not identified, nor are hypotheses presented for assessing the evidence.
Chapters 2–4 provide more details from the Gemene and Loweiden commons historical case study, and this is the strongest part of the volume. Short discussions of the rules for use and maintenance of common land—waste, pasture, woodlands, and arable lands are provided along with a summary of the legal basis for common land management and its benefits. There also are overviews of commons boundaries, access rules for use, regulation, and monitoring that are drawn from the secondary historical literature. Chapter 2 ends with a summary of the attributes of common lands in Flanders and how they generally demonstrate Elinor Ostrom's (Reference Ostrom1990) conditions for successful collective action and underscore what De Moor terms the robustness of commons.
The first part of Chapter 3 returns to the case study of how commoners collectively managed the land. The second part of the chapter uses this information to motivate a more in-depth discussion of Ostrom's framework for effective common-pool resource (CPR) management. In Chapter 4, De Moor applies the framework to a broader discussion of self-governing commons as well as to the specific case of Gemene and Loweiden with empirical information drawn from her primary research. The motivation for commoner participation is described as well as gradual declines in participation rates among the population, suggesting a falloff in benefits of communal ownership by the mid-nineteenth century. This phenomenon is not explored in depth but there is indication of less cohesion among members and demands by some for breakup and privatization that De Moor suggests was inconsistent with sustainability. She concludes that overall, group members made resource decisions with long-term benefits in mind rather than short-term commercial considerations. Nevertheless, the common-property regime failed and analysis of why it did so (along with apparently so many other similar arrangements in northwestern Europe) would provide the reader with a much better sense of when group cooperation emerges, when it fails, what took its place, and what the general welfare effects of this process were.
Chapter 5 continues with the themes of conflicting commercial objectives and sustainability; inherent differences between private and common property; and Ostrom's design principles for successful collective action. The case of Gemene and Loweiden is found to generally illustrate those principles. Ostrom was most concerned about over exploitation of the common pool, but De Moor notes that there also was a problem of under exploitation of group resources. The magnitude of the problem, what generated it, and its role in generating discontent with common management, however, are not addressed sufficiently to understand the phenomenon.
Tine De Moor points out that historical case analyses are rare, yet because of their longitudinal nature, they offer the greatest potential for understanding the factors leading to the formation, operation, and decline of self-governing institutions. Despite her knowledge of the Gemene and Loweiden commons, there is too much emphasis on illustrating the potential for collective action to counter the predictions of Garrett Hardin and too little on positive analysis of the evidence. As a result, not enough information is provided for drawing conclusions about human cooperation and its long-term success or failure in governing natural resource use.
