Читать книгу Environment and Society - Paul Robbins - Страница 71

To understand how “the commons” actually works, institutional thinkers have stressed certain rules or principles that tend to lead to sustainable outcomes. In any real-world commons, the central challenge of managing the resource sustainably focuses on a number of discrete grounded problems, each of which poses difficult questions. Consider, for example, the problems of managing a fishery. Here is a resource that is largely invisible, highly mobile, depletable (if overfished), and impossible to enclose. For institutionalists, the central challenge becomes: How do fishers avoid a “free-for-all” where each mounts increasing efforts to compete for dwindling resources, removing fish faster than the rate at which the fish population can reproduce? The broad challenge now defined, we are immediately confronted with a slew of other questions:

 How do fishers keep the number of fishing boats to a reasonable level?

 How do fishers compensate individuals for time or effort expended in managing the fishery?

 How does the group reach decisions about what rules are fair?

 How do they know if rules are being followed, given that fish populations are hard to track and count?

 What do they do to rule breakers who over-harvest fish at times the group have decided to be restricted?

 How do they solve conflicts over rights?

 What keeps any locally crafted system from being nullified by a higher authority from the central state or “federal” level?

As most commons management challenges share similar sets of issues, general design principles for management of such resources have been developed. Following Ostrom (1992), successful commons management must include the following.