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Citizen Infrastructure

The commons (and why it's not a tragedy)

A commons happens wherever people come together to manage some shared wealth — a fishery, a forest, a piece of code, a mutual-aid network — with fairness, participation, and an eye to the long term, and organise to defend it against being privatised or captured. David Bollier likes to stress that “commons” is really a verb: commoning, the ongoing practice of stewarding something together.

It’s easy to assume the commons is archaic — peasants and village pastures. In fact commons are entirely contemporary: urban spaces, digital commons, open-source software, community land trusts, time banks, mutual aid. A commons can happen almost anywhere people decide to manage collective wealth for collective benefit.

The “tragedy” was never about a commons

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In 1968 Garrett Hardin popularised the phrase “the tragedy of the commons” — the idea that any shared resource will inevitably be overused and destroyed, because each individual grabs as much as they can. It became conventional wisdom. It’s also a misreading.

What Hardin described — an open pasture anyone can wreck, with no rules and no community — isn’t a commons at all. A real commons has a bounded community, rules, and consequences for breaking them. What he actually described is closer to the tragedy of the market: an unmanaged free-for-all that invites people to behave like, in Bollier’s phrase, “libertarian jerks.” Elinor Ostrom later won a Nobel Prize for documenting how real commons, all over the world and across millennia, govern themselves perfectly well (see the Ostrom Workshop).

It’s a dimmer switch, not a template

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There’s no single blueprint. A commons varies with what’s being stewarded — land and water can be used up; digital code can be copied for free. And “commons” isn’t a yes/no label but a dimmer switch: more or less participation, more or less bottom-up legitimacy. (A mafia or a gang shares resources too, but top-down and coercively — so it’s at the dark end of the dial.) Bollier even prefers a different word for what’s being stewarded: not a “resource” but care-wealth — something a community tends for mutual benefit.

This is the foundation under the rest of the commons concepts here: enclosure (how commons get taken), the OntoShift (the mindset commoning requires), relational property, and the practical question of funding the commons. It also sits alongside the Commoning Standard’s view of self-governance as a learnable literacy.

Sources

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