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Collective Action and the Urban Commons

2011; Columbia University; Volume: 87; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

0745-3515

Sheila R. Foster,

Property Rights and Legal Doctrine

Urban residents share access to a number of local resources in which they have a common stake. These resources range from local streets and parks to public spaces, to a variety of shared neighborhood amenities. Collectively shared resources suffer from the same rivalry and free-riding problems that Garrett Hardin described in his Tragedy of the Commons tale. Scholars have not yet worked up a theory about how this unfolds in the context, particularly in light of existing government regulation and control of common resources. This Article argues that the tragedy of the unfolds during periods of slippage--when the level of local government oversight and management of the resource significantly declines, leaving the resource vulnerable to expanded access by competing users and uses. Overuse or unrestrained competition in the use of these resources can quickly lead to congestion, rivalry, and resource degradation. Tales abound in cities across the country of streets, parks, and vacant land that were once thriving spaces but have become overrun, dirty, prone to criminal activity, and virtually abandoned by most users. Proposed solutions to the rivalry, congestion, and degradation that afflict common resources typically track the traditional public-private dichotomy of governance approaches. These solutions propose either a more assertive central government role or privatization of the resource. Neither of these proposed solutions has taken root, I argue, because of the potential costs that each carry--costs to the local government during times of fiscal strain, costs to communities where the majority of residents are non-property owners, and costs to internal community governance. What has taken root, however, are various forms of cooperative management regimes by groups of users. Despite the robust literature on self-organized management of natural resources, scholars have largely ignored collective action in the context. In fact, many scholars have assumed that collective action is unlikely in communities where social disorder exists. This Article highlights the ways in which common resources are being managed by groups of users in the absence of government coercion or management and without transferring ownership into private hands. This collective action occurs in the shadow of continued state and local government ownership and oversight of the resources. Formally, although the state continues to hold the regulatory reigns, in practice we see the public role shifting away from a centralized governmental role to what I call an one in which state and local governments provide incentives and lend support to private actors who are able to overcome free-riding and coordination problems to manage collective resources. This Article develops this enabling role, marks its contours and limits, and raises three normative concerns that have gone unattended by policymakers. INTRODUCTION Urban residents share access to a number of local tangible and intangible resources in which they have a common stake. These resources range from local streets and parks to public spaces to a variety of shared neighborhood amenities. These collectively shared resources--what I call urban commons--are subject to the same rivalry and free-rider problems that Garrett Hardin wrote about in his Tragedy of the Commons tale. In this classic tale, Hardin warned of the depletion of open-access natural resources where it is difficult to exclude potential users who lack incentives to conserve or sustainably use the resource. (1) Many collectively shared, open-access resources have much in common with Hardin's conception of the pasture open to all prone to overuse or misuse if improperly managed or regulated. (2) The commons generally shares with traditional public goods both a lack of rivalry in consumption (nonrivalrous) and lack of excludability in access to and enjoyment of their benefits (nonexcludable). …