Common Property Resource Digest:46 (Jul/Oct 1998)9-11.

Of the thousands of studies on common pool or common property resources (CPRs) since Gordon's 1954 article, the overwhelming focus has been on the management of natural resources, both local and global -- fisheries, water resources, forests, irrigation systems and so forth. In the past ten years, however, more and more other types of CPRs have been identified and studied. These include roads and transport systems, parking services, budgets, genetic resources, homeowners' associations, air slots, the Internet, and intellectual resources.

The value of expanding the focus of CPR analysis to new and man-made resources is considerable: It provides a better understanding of the community of users, property rights, institutional structures, and rules-in-use of evolving resources and, hopefully, leads toward successful and sustainable management of these resources. These "nontraditional" or new commons also illustrate the robust and dynamic character of CPRs, which should extinguish once and for all the erroneous and limited notion of the commons, following Lloyd (1977) and Hardin (1968), as antiquated or medieval pastoral systems.

Boal's essay presents us with a challenging combination of nontraditional CPRs, but at the same time falls into the trap of "romancing the commons." His is an urgent call for collective action to resist the enclosure of the academic commons. He is alarmed at the rapid institutional change in academia brought on by the market forces of higher education and information technology -- their virtualization and commercialization. But, beyond that, I wished that Boal would more precisely identify the "commons" he is lamenting. His academic commons seems to include: the university library, which, in the case of the University of California-Berkeley, has been "enclosed" to the outside community; academic information, which is now often digitized and is available only with appropriate computer technology and user fees; the classroom, access to which is being sold, through distance education, to a wider geographical mix (turning modern universities, in the words of his colleague David Noble, into "digital diploma mills"); academic research, which, through the forced electronic publishing on the Web of teaching syllabi and other materials by university administration is usurping private intellectual property rights; and the Internet, which is causing a type of enclosure by the privatization of information.

Personally, I think some of the above resources are commons and are legitimate and serious concerns worthy of extended analysis -- certainly libraries, the Internet, and intellectual resources can be profitably studied as having characteristics of common pool resources. Unfortunately, Boal is unfamiliar with the analytic concepts and frameworks needed for the study of CPRs. His notion of a commons is very impressionistic and seems limited to a simple dictionary definition such as "the share to which each member of the company is entitled." (OED) He confuses CPRs with open access and unmanaged regimes. The resources he mentions fall under public, private, and toll goods as well as common pools. The property rights of these resources are variously state, private, and communally owned. These shortcomings fail to heed the point made at the 1986 NRC conference and reiterated by Feeny, Berkes, McCay and Acheson in 1990: namely, that "it is important to delineate between the resource and the property-rights in which the resource is held."(p. 3) Indeed, a description of the physical characteristics and the boundaries of the resources is a requisite beginning to the study of a CPR, and is lacking in Boal's brief essay.

Boal's disdain of technology and "technology utopianism" deserves discussion. In his book, Resisting the Virtual Life, Boal clearly aligns himself with the neo-luddite movement. He begins the present essay pointing out that techno-enthusiasm and belief in the panacean quality of the global community linked through technology is not at all new. He refers to Michael Garvey's 1852 book The Silent Revolution:

"It is not too much to anticipate a future period, when a perfect net-work of electric filaments will overspread every civilised land in the world;--when a man in London shall be able to transmit the same message in the same instant of time to friends in St. Petersburgh and Adelaide, New York and Calcutta, and receive their answers spontaneously in another instant from the very opposite sides of the globe..." p.103

Garvey was talking about the growing international telegraph system and, indeed, was enraptured with the possibilities of such global communication upon human civilization and believed that "the good will greatly predominate over the evil." (p.104) And true, this is not unlike the enthusiasm of the developers and leading spokesperson of the Internet, Vint Cerf, who wrote in 1993:

"The extraordinary freedom of expression and accessibility of information on the Internet suggests that it may well represent a whole new revolution in human communications. (p.xix)

Neither Garvey nor Cerf are presenting reasoned arguments in these passages, but rather hyperbolic expressions of the excitement of the new. Similarly, Boal's essay is not a well-reasoned argument but expresses, one might say, the excitement of the old. In this way he equates luddism both with the resistance to forced intervention of new technology as well as with resistance to the enclosure or privatization of the commons.

The introduction of new technology is neither salvation nor curse. Technology is actually a characteristic of any CPR, closely linked to the physical attributes of the resource, which influences the appropriation and use of the CPR. (Oakerson, 1992; Ostrom, Gardner & Walker, 1994) What new technology can do is alter the constraints under which a resource is appropriated and used. For example, libraries and their collections traditionally have been constrained by time and space. Even when the UC-Berkeley library was an open access public good its use was restricted to those in the geographical vicinity, who had the time, means, and knowledge to use the resource. Information technology changes the boundaries of a library resource. On the one hand access is restricted to those with access (through private or institutional ownership) to the appropriate technological infrastructure. But on the other hand, technology can expand access to the resource to a wider and more geographically dispersed user community.

The broadened boundaries of virtual information and distance education are not substitutes for library buildings and classrooms. Information technology is an ongoing experiment which addresses the dilemmas of population growth, decreasing budgets, the proliferation of academic publications, rising book and journal prices, the demand for life-long learning, and the need for international information access at the local level. Like it or not, the crucial needs of "intellectuals in the third world" may best be remedied by the benefits of electronic information and information technology. CD-Rom, computer databases, FTP, e-mail, and the Internet are the cheapest, fastest, and most equitable way at this moment in time of building quality library and information resources.

To me, the task is (as usual) to better understand the new, shared resources we are creating. What are the boundaries? Who are the decision-makers? What are the rules? What are the transaction costs? Who is the user community? Who benefits? At the same time, we need to better understand what elements within our rapidly changing libraries we want to sustain. Traditionally and ubiquitously, the decisions about the content, storage, budgets, and future direction of university libraries have been made by administrators, pretty much independently of the user community. Ironically, in the context of Boal's essay, we are now at a crossroads where library collections can be shaped by the user community, becoming more localized, more unique, and (in a moment of rapture) more reflective of the intellectual record of civilization.

With this said, Boal's essay provides some valuable insights. His energy, emotion, and cynicism toward the role of technology in higher education may counter-balance the over-enthusiastic embrace of information technology that we sometimes encounter in this period of rapid institutional change. He sounds a bugle call for active and informed participation in the decision-making processes of managing our educational and intellectual resources. This caution is especially relevant in developing countries, such as those in Africa that are trying to dig their way clear of non-indigenous, colonialist universities and library systems. Strong African voices are calling for a re-examination of current trends in higher education and urging the development of appropriate new intellectual resources, ones that do incorporate new technology but are also based on local needs and local input. (Alemna, pf. 87; Kuntze, p.15) As was observed by another participant in the debate over information technology and higher education:

"New technologies create a wider range of institutional possibilities, but precisely for that reason they also force us to articulate more deeply the nature and purpose of our work. (Agre, p.30)

Boal reminds us that this is a tough assignment.

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References:

Agre, P. 1998. "Meet Me at the Crux." Educom Review 33,3:28-30.

Alemna, A. A. 1996. Issues in African Librarianship. Accra, Ghana: Type Co.

Brook, J. and I. A, Boal. 1995. Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information. San Francisco: City Lights.

Cerf, V. 1993. "Forward." In The Internet Navigator, P. Gilster, pp. xix-xx. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Garvey, Michael A. 1852. The Silent Revolution, Or the Future Effects of Steam and Electricity upon the Condition of Mankind. London: William and Frederick G. Cash.

Gordon, H. S. 1954. "The Economic Theory of a Common Property Resource: The Fishery." Journal of Political Economy 62:124-42.

Feeny, D., F. Berkes, B. McCay and J. Acheson. 1990. "The Tragedy of the Commons: Twenty-Two Years Later." Human Ecology 18,1: 1-19.

Hardin, G. 1968. "The Tragedy of the Commons." Science 162:1243-8.

Kuntze, M. 1996. "The Internet in Africa: Political Implications of New Information Technology." London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Lloyd, W. F. 1977. "On Checks to Population." In Managing the Commons, eds. G. Hardin and J. Baden, pp. 8-15. San Francisco: Freeman.

Oakerson, R. 1992. "Analyzing the Commons: A Framework." In Making the Commons Work, ed. D. Bromley, pp.41-59. San Francisco: ICS Press.

Ostrom, E. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Ostrom, E., R. Gardner, & J. Walker. 1994. Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.