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Next to last in our series on "The Tragedy of the Commons at 50"  (the previous post, on Carol Rose's article, is here ) is Giacomo Bonan's piece, "Confronting Hardin: Trends and Approaches to the Commons in Historiography" . The abstract: This Article analyses both the role of historiography in Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons (1968) and his paper’s impact on historiographical debates of the last five decades. Concerning the role of historiography in Hardin’s argument, the ‘tragedy of the commons’ itself derived from a pamphlet written by a nineteenth century supporter of English enclosures, who proposed a variant of Malthus’ theory. If Hardin inevitably dealt with previous historical interpretations of the commons, the reverberations aroused by his paper have strongly influenced subsequent historical research on this subject. It is possible to group the historiographical production of the last decades concerning the commons into three main lines of rese...

Construction crane at Norris Dam (TVA) ( Currents of Change ) Yesterday's New York Times  had a piece by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway on the need for government help in making the technological transformations necessary to avert disastrous climate change - in particular, phasing out fossil fuels by the year 2050. They write: None of the major technological transformations of the 19th and 20th centuries were the product of the private sector acting alone and responding only to the market. Railroads, radio, telegraph, telephone, electricity and the internet were all the result of public-private partnerships. None was delivered by the “invisible hand” of the marketplace. All involved significant interventions by the visible hand of government. What does this mean for us? Right now, government is widely seen as inefficient and ineffective, and our needs are thought to be best addressed by the private sector, through entrepreneurship, venture capital and Silicon Valley-style “disrupt...

The early-modern Netherlands continue to inspire interesting historical scholarship on environmental regulation (see, e.g. here ). Last year's Environment and History had an article by Milja van Tielhof, "Regional Planning in a Decentralised State: How Administrative Practices contributed to Consensus-Building in Sixteenth-Century Holland" . The abstract: This article examines how a regional drainage system in the northern part of Holland in the Late Middle Ages could emerge despite the fact that the weak central state was hardly able to provide the necessary coordination nor prevent free-riding. Institutions, defined as rules and norms, including practices, procedures and techniques, play a key role in the argument. Four traditional administrative practices are identified as essential to the emergence of regional water control: a broad consultation process, by which opponents of new plans were also heard; landowners giving their explicit consent to plans and their costs;...

Irrigation canal in Provence Continuing the series of posts on "The Tragedy at 50 " (the first one is here ), here's the abstract of an article with a new, historical perspective on commons debates: Alice Ingold's "Commons and Environmental Regulation in History: The Water Commons Beyond Property and Sovereignty" : Do commons outline a different way of considering historical forms of environmental regulation? Might they represent a sort of alternative, apart from the usual model of environmental law which rests on public authorities and forms of restrictions of private rights? In order to grasp the complex relationship between environmental law and history, it is essential to pay attention to the state’s radical transformation in the nineteenth century, especially the separation (and separate definition) of administration and the judiciary. This article aims to historicize the commons, but also the state in order to escape the projected shadow of public adm...

Title page of Jan Kochanowski’s Satyr albo dziki mąż (1564), a political satire in verse that criticized forest exploitation. (National Digital Library Polona, from the article) Forest law continues to provide grist for scholarship. October's Environmental History published, alongside an article on early Chinese forest law , Mateusz Falkowski's "Fear and Abundance: Reshaping of Royal Forests in Sixteenth-Century Poland and Lithuania" . The abstract: This article analyzes new restrictive forest legislation announced by king Sigismund Augustus (d. 1572) in Poland and Lithuania. In the sixteenth century, eastern Europe remained the most densely forested region on the continent; Poland and Lithuania, however, were blessed not only with resources but also with an unusual combination of plains, forests, rivers, and seaports that facilitated the development of large-scale forest industries. Drawing on a combination of royal documents, domain surveys, correspondence, customs ...

The latest Environmental History has an article by Ian Matthew Miller, "Forestry and the Politics of Sustainability in Early China" , with some fascinating discussion of arguments for and against regulation in Chinese philosophy. The abstract: Between the sixth and second centuries BCE, Chinese states developed offices to oversee the sustainable use of forest resources. This era, often cited as a period of rampant environmental degradation, also saw the emergence of a discourse of sustainability. The early philosopher texts criticized the environmental and moral degradation of their era in order to promote specific policy interventions. In response to the deforestation they depicted, moralist and pragmatist philosophers alike argued for regulations on land use as the basis of a sustainable political order. Early states used these ideas to justify state forestry, culminating in extensive forest bureaucracies under the Qin and Han empires in the second and third centuries. Thes...

(Continuing the series on water rights :) The empirical work of Ostrom ( 1990 ; Ostrom and Gardner, 1993 ) and others on institutions for governing commons resources has shown that, in practice, common property can be highly successful in managing water resources, depending on the structure and functioning of the institutions involved. She and her collaborators summed up their conclusions ( Ostrom et al., 2010 ): Elinor Ostrom Researchers usually distinguish four basic types of governance systems, defined in terms of who controls access to resources: private property, government property, common property, and open access (i.e., no one's property). Research has consistently shown the inefficient outcomes of open access since open access almost always leads to destruction of any resource that is in great demand. This is the problem identified in Hardin's famous essay, although he called open access "commons," which led to substantial subsequent confusion. The other thre...

New Book Network recently posted an interview with Eric Ash about his new book, The Draining of the Fens:  Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England   (JHU Press, 2016). NBN writes: Today “The Fens” is largely a misnomer, as the area of eastern England is now largely flat, dry farmland. Until the early modern era, however, it was a region of wetland marshes. Eric Ash‘s book... describes how The Fens was transformed into the environment we know it as today. As Ash explains, the marshes supported a population that took advantage of the lush grasses produced by the regular flooding to engage in animal husbandry, with flood control managed locally through appointed commissions of sewers. In the late 16th century, however, a combination of environmental change and political shifts led the royal government to support proposals for large-scale drainage projects that would turn the wetlands into farmlands. Though the plans’ advocates argued that drainag...

Water filtration plant at Lake Montebello, Maryland, 1915 This Day in Water History recently posted a Municipal Journal and Engineer  article from 1909 , "Stream Pollution in America", which surveys some of the state-level regulation of water pollution going on at the time. The blogger notes that "we know from other sources that these laws were seldom enforced or had penalties that were too lenient, so they were ignored", but I'm not sure the situation today is so different . Some excerpts from the 1909 article: At a Conference of State and Provincial Boards of Health of North America, held in Washington last June, the Committee on the Pollution of Streams appointed last year presented a report in which it gave some data concerning the extent to which the pollution of streams was being regulated by the various States. Ohio, New Jersey and Kansas have, according to this report, passed laws during the last few years which ”are especially worthy of note as indicati...