[governance] Parminder's exchange with Bertrand

[SAMUELS,Carlton A]

Um, I make no claim to being a historian but the assertion that "No individual, no private, profit-maximizing corporation, could ever produce anything like WW 2 and its national and ethnic carnage" represents the most astounding revisionism we could ever experience on this list.

Do please say it was a mistype.....

Carlton

-----Original Message-----
From: Milton L Mueller [mailto:mueller at syr.edu]
Sent: Thursday, February 25, 2010 7:06 PM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; massit follea; Bertrand de La Chapelle
Subject: RE: [governance] Parminder's exchange with Bertrand


I forgot to highlight one of the most important observations here wrt to Ostrom and collective governance, which is this:
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> 1. Clearly defined boundaries (effective exclusion of external unentitled parties);

In other words, even if you are dealing with something governed as a "commons," in almost all cases there must be boundaries and effective exclusion for that governance form to work. A simple example: there are "common beaches" in the shore areas of New Jersey in the U.S., but those beaches are commons ONLY for people who are citizens of the towns and villages abutting them. This is so for obvious reasons - if you are not a member of that community you have no right to access the beach, and protecting the quality and viability of the shore is the responsibility of the community that owns it, for open access would allow people with little stake in the beaches to despoil them and crowd out the people who live there.

A true "open access commons" in which there is no exclusion whatsoever is quite rare, although it does exist and is quite relevant to information resources in the public domain. But information of course is non rival in consumption and therefore not what Ostrom defines as a common pool resource.

People who romanticize commons governance, especially by counterposing it to private property, typically ignore the fact that both forms of governance require "clearly defined boundaries and effective exclusion." The only difference is that in one case the unit of ownership and decision making is the individual household, person or firm, and in the other case it is a larger collectivity. Those who say that either form of governance is inherently superior to the other are anti-empirical; both have advantages, and either can operate better in certain circumstances.

To tie this back to Parminder, based on his latest post I can see where we part ways as well as agree. Parminder has decided that people acting as political collectivities are inherently superior to people acting as private market actors or businesses. Probably he is operating under the delusion that political/democratic processes are inherently guided by a public interest logic whereas private market action is driven by private interest which is inherently opposed to public interest. I disagree. Politicians and political parties have self-interest and can exploit. Competitive market processes can promote the public interest. I think people are people, and they need both political processes and economic maximizing processes to survive, and both serve as appropriate checks on each other. To me, democracy without liberalism is just mob rule, just as capitalism without law, rights and democracy is lousy. So while we agree strongly on extending democratic governance modes into the global arena we probably have radically different ideas about  how to do it. If you designate "neo-liberalism" as the main enemy I don't think you understand very well the real challenges of global governance.

However, getting back to Ostrom and collective governance, even if you extend democracy beyond the nation-state you still have to decide what is the relevant community for governance decisions. The people who are always yammering about how good and noble it is to be group-oriented or collective oriented, and ridiculing those of us who talk about the individual, always seem to forget that communities have boundaries, and some of the world's worst crimes come not from individuals attacking or exploiting each other, but from groups - states, ethnicities, religions, etc. - defining other groups as excluded and "the other." No individual, no private, profit-maximizing corporation, could ever produce anything like WW 2 and its national and ethnic carnage.

--MM
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