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The Ostromian Approach to the Knowledge Commons

Elinor Ostrom was the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics, in 2009, for her analysis of the economic governance of the original institutional forms of common land resources. We pointed out in the introduction that this work, which began in the 1960s at UCLA and continued until her death in 2012, focused almost exclusively on the governance of certain types of natural resources (fisheries, forests, pastures, etc.). When James Boyle invited her to the Duke symposium in 2003, she was given the opportunity to extend her reflection to the field of intangible resources (information, culture, knowledge). Two major publications followed, both written in collaboration with Charlotte Hess1 (Hess and Ostrom 2003, 2007).

These various writings do not constitute a finalized and completed theory on the knowledge commons. Rather, they consecrate the creation of a research program on this theme that they consider fundamental. In this perspective, they lay down some essential milestones, at a theoretical and methodological level, to apprehend, from an empirical point of view, the study of the knowledge commons in specific contexts. This notion has much broader outlines than that of the cultural commons, which is only one of their manifestations. In the book on the knowledge commons that they have edited, Hess and Ostrom (2007) devote a significant part of their reflections to the question of open archives as a possible illustration of knowledge commons in the digital ecosystem that could act as a barrier to the different forms of enclosures that are manifested in the digital editorial ecosystem. Representatives and advocates of open access (OA), such as the philosopher Peter Suber and Nancy Kranich, former president of the Association of American Library Associations, participated in this book. By strategically linking the OA movement with the commons movement, this book opens up a new avenue for the possibility of rethinking the current reconfigurations of the scientific editorial ecosystem under the prism of the institutional approach of the commons. This is the door opened by Hess and Ostrom that we propose to open wide by tracing some directions to follow not only to reveal the specific nature of open archive2 platforms as potential scientific commons, but also by studying the conditions of their cohabitation with the platforms proposed by traditional scientific publishers.

This approach reveals in the background of these divergent editorial logics the question of the platforming of the dynamics of production, distribution and circulation of knowledge and the foundations of the knowledge economy more generally. It is a question that runs through a whole other contemporary research program that is interested in the different manifestations of this return of the commons in the digital ecosystem, as a continuation of Ostrom’s work. We mention here the work initiated in France by the economist Benjamin Coriat within the framework of several successive research programs on the knowledge commons. Several intellectual figures revolving around the question of the economics of collaborative platforms are associated with this work. While some of them, such as Michel Bauwens, are known for belonging to the militant sphere of the commons, others belong to the community of researchers working in the field of social and solidarity economy, at university level as well as in the field itself. Beyond an initial work of identification of collaborative platforms that could be considered as commons, it is also a question of studying the conditions of their deployment and their sustainability in a universe dominated by platforms that rely on opposite modes of value exploitation and forms of governance. We have named them social commons because of their claimed proximity to the foundations of the social and solidarity economy. Even if the platforms studied in these various works are primarily service economy platforms, some illustrations are also examined in the field of culture.

2.1. Ostrom’s original theory of the land commons

2.1.1. An institutional definition of the commons

In her lecture at the Nobel Prize in Economics3, Elinor Ostrom recalled that her research on the problems of collective action faced by individuals when using common resources began with her doctoral work in the early 1960s, when she worked on water management in Southern California. She later continued her reflection with her husband and fellow academic colleague Vincent Ostrom at Bloomington University in Indiana. In the 1970s, they jointly created an interdisciplinary workshop entitled Political Theory and Policy Analysis, which proposed to evaluate, based on multiple empirical studies, the institutional arrangements that regulated natural resources in different ecological and socio-economic contexts.

Their work took on an unprecedented scale in the 1980s when they were associated with the program launched by the National Research Council (NRC). This enabled them to bring together all the work done worldwide on this issue by different groups of researchers, anthropologists, historians, sociologists, politicians, etc. For Benjamin Coriat (2013), the Annapolis conference (1985), during which all the empirical and theoretical advances initiated by the NRC program were presented, constitutes the moment when the program on commons took on a new impetus and what he called “the great return of the commons”. During this period, at the international level, the World Bank initiated so-called “structural adjustment” programs in line with the doctrine advocated by the Washington Consensus, which legitimized liberal policies at the economic level. Thus, all support policies in developing countries had to be based on an incentive to privatize resources so that a supposedly efficient logic of market mechanisms could be put in place. However, there was strong concern among some key development actors about the failures of aid policies aimed at promoting agricultural productivity in various countries in the tropics.

On the research side, the results of Elinor Ostrom and her team revealed that many natural resources were managed neither by the State nor by the market but by self-managed communities of individuals. This proved, in the long term, to be perfectly efficient in ensuring the survival of the populations that live off them and for the preservation of the resource itself. Such an observation thus counterbalanced the liberal ideology that made the market the only efficient institution for the management of rare resources. However, Elinor Ostrom never defined this governance commonly as a model to be applied everywhere and for any common resource. First of all, situations of failure in such modes of governance have also been observed. Secondly, this form of institutional governance only applies to certain types of common resources and in certain contexts. The common is not thought of as an alternative to the market. Rather, the research program it created aims to provide a better understanding of the relationship between the resources studied (land, pasture, forests, water resources, etc.) and the associated ownership regimes. The institution of the commons cannot be interpreted as a general principle for reorganization of socio-economic order. It is necessary in certain situations, for certain specific goods, but does not call into question the efficiency of markets and the State as forms of governance. As Dardot and Laval point out, “Elinor Ostrom is not anti-capitalist, nor is she anti-state. She is liberal. Favorable to institutional diversity, she trusts in the freedom of individuals to invent for themselves, outside of any governmental constraint, the contractual agreements that benefit them” (Dardot and Laval 2014, p. 155, author’s translation). The unanswered question that Ostrom did not answer herself is how these resources governed under a commons mode can endure and develop in the dominant organizational modes of the market and the State.

2.1.2. A questioning of the “tragedy of the commons”

For a very long time, the principle of shared ownership has been strongly criticized, as Guibet Lafaye (2014) points out. This “economic disqualification of the commons”, which dates back to Aristotle, finds ardent defenders in the contemporary era. The theory of a “tragedy of the commons” put forward by the biologist Garett Hardin (1968) symbolizes the environmental degradation to be expected when several individuals share a limited resource. Each individual, driven by his or her personal interest, will be encouraged to overexploit the resource, which runs counter to its preservation over time. This theory was also defended by the economist Mancur Olson in his 1965 book The Logic of Collective Action, as Elinor Ostrom recalls: “Olson challenged the presumption that the possibility of a benefit for a group would be sufficient to generate collection action to achieve that benefit” (Ostrom 1990, p. 6). It was taken up a few years later by the neo-institutionalist economists Demsetz and Alchian (1973). For the latter, the communal property regime associated with common resources is based on a “first come, first served” principle that inevitably leads to situations of social dilemma preventing the emergence of a cooperative solution. In turn, arguments in terms of cost (costs of negotiation to agree on the exclusion of those who do not respect the rules, for example) and efficiency (problem of individual incentive to...