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Abstract:
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"In Governing the Commons, Elinor Ostrom defines a Common Pool Resource, or CPR, as 'a natural or man-made resource system that is sufficiendy large as to make it costly (but not impossible) to exclude potential beneficiaries from obtaining benefits from its use' (30). Notice that Ostrom has not defined a CPR as a resource shared in common by several users. A CPR is shared in common because it is difficult or costly to use it in another way, where the familiar other ways are private property and state ownership. In particular a CPR is not used in common only because user demands are small in relation to resource capacity, so that, in John Locke's phrase, use leaves 'enough and as good,' for others. This means that we can equate the problem of defining a CPR with the problem of discovering what makes a resource apt for common property management.
"Notice also that Ostrom says it is difficult, but not impossible, to exclude others from the resource. The reason, I believe, is this: while it is possible to imagine some way of monopolizing the resource, when the physical features of the resource and the social or technological means available are considered, the cost of monopoly is high enough that common property management is preferable to available alternatives. By the term 'monopolizing' I mean to include the two options of (a) one individual monopolizing the whole resource, and (b) dividing the resource into portions over which different individuals have monopoly--i.e. private property rights.
"The purpose of my paper, then, is to identifying the features that make it difficult to avoid treating a resource as a commons, or, put the.other way, to identify the features that make it attractive to manage a resource as common property. I do not think that large size and a resulting difficulty of exclusion, is the right explanation. Ostrom herself must have realized this later, for her account in Rules. Games, and Common-Pool Resources is better, though I hope to improve on the latter account as well.
"The explanation I will give of the features that characterize a CPR will have this form: there is some feature or features of the resource that make it rational to manage the resource as common rather than private property when considered in combination with the outcomes desired by the individuals involved and the social and technological means
available to them."
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