TheCommons--Spaces-Thoughts-Economics

In The Household, he [Robert Ellickson] now turns his attention to the ways in which we informally manage the cooking, cleaning, finances and other tasks needed to operate a household. I like the name that Ellickson gives for this universe of norms - "homeways."

book on the history of internet commons by David Bollier

All the talk about rights-based fishing and IFQs is a red herring that throws all of us off the track of what is important. IFQs do not work because they are rights, or because they are property rights…. IFQs work because they involve an assigned catch, as opposed to having catch be determined competitively. (Vermont Law Review, Spring 2004, p. 659) It is apparently irresistible for people, even trained scientists, to misunderstand ITQs as a triumph of the market and privatization. ITQs play into the grand narrative that private property rights promote good stewardship of a resource. Remember the so-called "tragedy of the commons" story? That parable holds that if you give people private property rights in the commons - if only your privatize the collective resource! - people won't over-exploit it. "Tragedy" can be averted. The mythology insists that the commons can be responsibly managed only if it is duly privatized.

The Silent Revolution: The Emergence of Commons, Guilds and Other Forms of Corporate Collective Action in Western Europe from the Late Middle Ages Onwards

The Political Economy of Institutional Change: A Historical Perspective on Land Tenure in Western Europe

This paper focuses on a quite different situation: the role of common forests in an industrialized country. The Swedish common forests have survived for more than one hundred years; no deforestation has been observed and the total amount of biomass is increasing.