This year marks the 50th anniversary of Garrett Hardin's The Tragedy of the Commons. In one of the most cited articles of the 20th Century, Hardin provided a stylized and memorable cautionary tale of how self-interested actions can destroy common resources. However, even as Hardin's work gained traction with a broad array of scholars in many fields of study, it also garnered its fair share of criticism. Indeed, while Hardin popularized the notion of the commons, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for her rigorous research refuting the core tenets of Hardin's cautionary tale-- namely that open access resources ultimately end in collective failure, or tragedy, and that common resources should either be regulated by central authorities or privatized. Ostrom’s work successfully demonstrated that common natural resources—e.g. land, fisheries, forests, irrigation systems—are collectively managed by groups of users all over the world using “rich mixtures of public and private instrumentalities.”
The “commons” is now employed as a framework to understand and rethink the management and governance of many kinds of shared resources. These include natural resources such as those studied by Ostrom, digital resources and the Internet, housing and other urban infrastructure, among others. At the heart of the exploration of these “new” kinds of commons is the recognition that Hardin’s Tragedy is a groundbreaking, though ultimately incomplete, conceptualization of the challenges posed by shared resources and the kind of governance solutions available to address those challenges. In addition to concerns about overconsumption (Hardin’s primary focus), these new human-created commons (e.g., scholarly communities, urban resources, and open-source software) pose questions about robust participation in creating, sustaining, and expanding the commons.
To celebrate this now multifaceted, multidisciplinary field of study, scholars from many disciplines will gather to discuss solutions, lessons, and challenges facing the commons and commons scholarship. This gathering will recognize that commons are as diverse as the scholars who study them--ranging from rainforests to the Internet to the city—and that field is still developing in exciting ways. In a world as complex as ours, finding such interconnections across disciplines is extremely valuable.
The first day of the conference, October 5th, will draw on the expertise of scholars across disciplines, from within and beyond Georgetown University, to illustrate the breadth and richness of commons scholarly inquiry. The second day of the conference, October 6th, there will be a practitioner's lab co-led by Amanda Huron, associate professor at the University of the District of Columbia and author of the new book, "Carving out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington D.C.", and Paula Segal, senior staff attorney in the Equitable Neighborhoods Practice at the Community Development Project in New York City. The lab will focus on housing through the lens of the urban commons, with a particular focus on community land trusts. For more information, see the conference schedule.
This conference will be the kickoff and flagship event of “World Commons Week” activities around the world (www.worldcommonsweek.org), promoted and sponsored by the International Association for the Study of the Commons.
