The Liberal Commons

Following the Civil War, black Americans began acquiring land in earnest; by 1920 almost one million black families owned farms. Since then, black rural landownership has dropped by more than 98% and continues in rapid decline – there are now fewer than 19,000 black-operated farms left in America. By contrast, white-operated farms dropped only by half, from about 5.5 million to 2.4 million. Commentators have offered as partial explanations the consolidation of inefficient small farms and intense racial discrimination in farm lending. However, even absent these factors, the unintended effects of old-fashioned American property law might have led to the same outcome. Because black farmers often did not make wills, their heirs took the land as co-owners. Over generations, co-owners multiplied, the farms became unmanageable, and the land was partitioned and sold, a seemingly inevitable tragedy of the commons in which too many owners waste a common resource. Black rural landownership may seem a dusty topic, peopled with hardscrabble tales of property past. Consider, though, the daunting possibility that property future – think biomedical research, post-apartheid restitution, hybrid residential associations, perhaps cyberspace – may have the same analytic structure, be subject to a similar punishing legal regime, and face the same fate as the black rural landowner. Overcoming the tragic fate of commons property should not be so hard. Until now, however, legal theorists have often worked within a framework that makes happier solutions difficult to imagine. Typically, theorists have relied on a thin utilitarian language yoked to a narrow conceptual map of property. One school, worrying that rational owners will overconsume commons resources, has embraced the so-called Biackstonian image of private property with sole and despotic dominion at the core. Another school, after showing how small, close-knit groups can successfully conserve commons resources if they sharply restrict exit, has advocated a version of commons property. For both schools, the image of tragic outcomes proves an ideal foil, one that implicitly points theorists toward their preferred normative solutions. Privatization seems inevitable for utilitarians with a liberal bent, because they believe that locking people together violates a fundamental concern for individual autonomy. By contrast, illiberal communitarian solutions seem relatively attractive to those who are ready to sacrifice individual autonomy for collective goals. While these underlying normative commitments drive the familiar debate over tragic outcomes, they never surface as the focus for analysis of commons resource management

Community cooperation and social solidarity: a case study of community initiated strategic planning

This research explored the process of creating a shared future and the evolution of cooperative collective endeavours in a regional rural community through a bottom-up planning process that involved professionals, public leadership and residents of a rural region in Israel. Using the MT rural region in Israel as a case study, the research was an interpretive exploration of how this community changed the way it collectively functions to achieve individual and shared aspirations. It examined how the community restructured its patterns of interaction, changing the social dynamics – which people interacted with each other, how they interacted with each other, and who felt committed to whom. The motivation for this inquiry stemmed from my desire as a practitioner to better understand the processes by which communities learn to function cooperatively. What are the elements that contributed to enabling a community to create the conditions for collectively utilizing and sustaining common resources rather than dividing them up for private consumption and exploitative narrow interests? What type of cooperative mechanisms enabled people to accomplish together what they cannot accomplish alone? Specifically, there are three research questions: how the change process was initiated in MT, what was significant in the nature of participation in the planning process, and how the mechanisms for regional community cooperation evolved. It was a case study of the planning and development process that I facilitated in MT from 1994-1999 (prior to my intention to undertake research) and is based mainly upon recent interviews of the participants (in that process), their recollections, and retrospective interpretations of that experience. The case has been explored from the theoretical perspective of viewing society in general, and community life in particular, as processes of constructing shared social realities that produce certain collective behaviours of cooperation or non-cooperation (Berger and Luckmann, 1967). This research was about understanding the process of making social rules that incorporate shared meanings and sanctions (Giddens, 1986) for undertaking joint endeavours (Ostrom, 1990, 1992, Wenger, 1998). Specifically two primary insights have come out of this case analysis: 1. In the MT case there was a mutually reinforcing three-way interplay between the strengthening of commitments to mutual care on the regional level, the instrumental benefits from cooperative/joint endeavours, and the envisioning of a shared future. 2. The community development process was owned by the community (not by outside agencies) and they (the community members) set the rules for community involvement. They structured the social interactions which formed the basis for creating shared understandings as a collective to achieve their common future. These insights shed light on how a community's structuring of its interactions and development interventions influenced its ability to act in a collectively optimal manner. By looking at the interrelation between trust as a function of social esteem (Honneth, 1995) and risk taking linked to instrumental benefits of cooperation (Lewis, 2002; Taylor, 1976; White, 2003) we can better understand what contributes to the way some communities continue to miss opportunities (Ostrom 1992), while others are able to promote their collective development and mutual wellbeing. By examining the process of designing (not only the design itself) community development programmes (Block, 2009) and by observing participation not as technique but as an inherent part of the way a community begins structuring its social interactions with their tacit (Polanyi, 1966) and explicit meanings, we can better understand the role of practitioners. And finally, perhaps the elements of chance and opportunity that bring certain combinations of people together in a given time and space may need to be given more weight in what remains a very unpredictable non-linear field of professional practice

Firms and the Evolution of Culture and Cooperation

The first chapter, titled “The Evolution of Productive Organizations”, attempts to break new ground in our explanations of the nature of guilds, partnerships and other pre-modern firm-like organizations. I use the theory of Cultural Evolution to develop a foundation for the evolutionary origins of firms. In extant theory, a historically rooted explanation for the evolution of firms is largely absent. I argue that Cultural Evolution theory can address this challenge, putting knowledge, learning, and cooperation at center-stage. This theory, developed in Evolutionary Anthropology, studies culture as an evolutionary system. It specifies micro-foundational mechanisms for inheritance, selection and variation. Culture is defined as information that is acquired from other individuals via social learning mechanisms, such as imitation and teaching. Information includes beliefs, norms, knowledge, skills and artifacts/technology. In this second section, we develop a cultural evolution model that illuminates the evolution of pre-modern productive organizations, such as, partnerships and guilds. Specifically, we introduce productive organizations in a workhorse cultural evolution model, widely used to explore the conditions that make social learning fitness enhancing. If organizations are exclusive and facilitate social learning, they stop the negative externality generated by the replication of social learners. The basic insight provided by the model is that productive organizations evolved because they favoured the conditions that sustain the process of cumulative culture. Productive organizations make social learning –and therefore culture– useful to society, playing an important role on the adaptive success of the human species. Our model has predictions regarding the benefits of organizations for society that are at odds with standard models of firms in economics and management based on transaction costs. For example, while in transaction costs theories the firm-like organizations is more valuable when uncertainty is high, in our model the firm-like organization is more valuable when it is low. These differences allow for empirical comparison of the theories. We test our theory using data from the Ethnographic Atlas and the Standard Cross Cultural Sample. We measure the presence of technologies in pre-modern societies (e.g., weaving, metalworking, pottery) and whether they were used throughout the society or mainly by a small group of people, that is, within a productive organization. Across several tests and robustness checks, we find consistent evidence for the propositions and comparative statics of our model. The third section, titled “The evolution and Impact of Cooperation in Large Groups: Evidence from Administrative Data and a Field Experiment”, I zoom in on the informal structure of firms (or “culture”) by studying the drivers of cooperation in large groups. As groups grow large, it is increasingly hard for workers to accept to pay a cost in order to provide a benefit to colleagues or the group at large. There is a vast theoretical literature in the fields of evolutionary biology and evolutionary anthropology regarding the conditions and mechanisms that favour the evolution of cooperation in large populations (i.e., increase in frequency). For cooperation to evolve, a mechanism is required that allows favouring cooperators over defectors. This mechanism is an interaction structure that specifies who interacts with whom in the population (i.e., random v/s structured v/s flexible) and how the agents interact in order to receive payoffs (e.g., what is known by whom, degree of repetition, order of play, details of payoff functions, enforcement technology). On the former element of ‘how’, the main mechanisms are spatial/network selection and group selection; on the latter, direct reciprocity and indirect reciprocity. Using this theory, we collaborate with three organizations to study a workplace safety practice that is based on voluntary cooperation by workers. In this practice, an initial core of cooperators strives to expand cooperation within the implemented site (e.g., plant or store). The methodology leverages cooperation: training and counselling is costly to observers while the benefits of improved safety flow mostly to the observed workers. Moreover, the strive for expansion provides a unique setting to study the evolution of cooperation (i.e., its increase in frequency). Using a detailed administrative dataset, we first show that the methodology reduces accidents and improves culture, documenting the power of cooperation. However, the dataset also demonstrates that, in line with theories of cooperation breakdown in large groups, this positive impact decreases very quickly as the number of observers expands. Then, we examine the idea of interaction structures, by analysing the impact of direct reciprocity in two ways. First, using the administrative dataset, we document traces of the positive impact of direct reciprocity in the adoption and impact of the practice. Second, we executed a field experiment in four sites where we intervened the established safety methodology with a baseline “direct reciprocity” treatment, plus two additional interaction treatments, aimed at solving the breakdown problem. We show that: i) the effort of the additional observers is restored when the expansion of observers is structured around small groups (1st treatment – “Direct Reciprocity”), ii) lifting the anonymity of the observed workers is detrimental to observers’ effort, eliminating the benefits of direct reciprocity (2nd treatment – “Identity”), and iii) public display of effort is mute (3rd treatment – “Indirect Reciprocity”), but interacts with the ‘private enforcement’ –measured with administrative data– in subtle ways. Further, we find that these treatment effects on effort translate into the speed of diffusion (i.e., the likelihood of becoming observer) and into safety outcomes (i.e., safe behaviour and accidents of the workforce): both increase with treatment 1 but decrease with treatment 2. Overall, the third section provides unique field evidence of cooperation breakdown when groups grow large, as well as of “structured growth” (sustained by direct reciprocity) as a crucial mechanism that allows for its recovery and evolution

The coevolution of renewable resources and institutions - implications for policy design

This PhD thesis studies how natural renewable resources and institutions governing those resources mutually influence each other. Theoretical models are developed in which members of a small community have joint access to a common pool resource. We analyze under which circumstances social norms of cooperation evolve that effectively regulate resource exploitation, but also when those social norms break down, identifying obstacles for community governance. Furthermore, in the light of biological and social complexity this thesis analyzes how governmental policy should be designed if self-governance is not sufficient to protect the resource stock. The insights obtained are applied to the case of Arcto-Norwegian cod. An optimal management plan is developed that can be adapted to several policy objectives concerning the utilization of the fleet. In addition, management advice is given for the case that harvesting may trigger an evolutionary response of the fish stock. </p

Designing Interstate Institutions: The Example of the SSUTA

This Article presents a case study in designing cooperative interstate institutions. It takes as its subject the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement (“SSUTA”), a recently-developed compact among the States now awaiting congressional ratification. The SSUTA’s primary goal is to bring uniformity to the field of state and local sales taxation, a regime in which multi-jurisdictional sellers now confront literally thousands of different sets of rules. I predict here that the SSUTA as currently designed is unlikely to accomplish that goal, and attempt to suggest possible amendments that could improve its expected performance. From these efforts I extract larger lessons about the workings of many similar cooperative ventures. My prognosis for the SSUTA turns largely on the political economy of state taxation. Extending Daniel Shaviro’s seminal work on state incentives for tax-law disuniformity, I examine how the institutional arrangements set out by the SSUTA respond to the pressures identified by Shaviro. I additionally weigh a number of factors omitted in his analysis. For example, I consider the possible public-regarding tendencies of bureaucratic ideology or sense of mission among either state-level tax administrators, state courts, or the governing body of the SSUTA. I also examine the possibility that ongoing intervention by Congress or a reviewing federal court might help either to check rent-seeking by, or instill a stronger sense of public regard in, the SSUTA Governing Board and state-level actors. I find none of these alternatives especially promising. For example, federal judicial review is often offered as a panacea by present critics of the SSUTA. However, it was precisely the relative incompetence of federal judges in balancing the goods of uniformity against the possible autonomy and experimental benefits of diversity that lead the Supreme Court to, in essence, punt the problem back to Congress. And the failure of local businesses to internalize the costs of national disuniformity likely distorts the decisions not only of state politicians and bureaucrats but also of state courts and Congress. Having made a more precise diagnosis of the problems that confront the SSUTA, I am able to suggest more precisely targeted solutions. Somewhat radically, I propose tying the deductibility of businesses’ federal deduction for state and local tax paid to federal administrative approval of the taxing state’s compliance with SSUTA, with approval subject in turn to federal judicial review. In this way, the businesses are made to internalize the costs they impose on others. And the most politically remote actors, federal judges, would have a reliable interpretive partner to supplement their own, ordinarily rather weak, fact finding and policy analysis. Finally, I claim that this analysis is generalizable. It helps to evidence the weakness of nationwide policy making that is dependent purely either on unmitigated “market” federalism, or on relatively rigid and uninformed judicial mandates. And it opens the possibility that conditional taxes, like conditional spending, can be a significant tool in coordinating our national policy goals