Managing resources as commons could reduce concentrations of wealth and power, without losing economic efficiency
elvish, like something from the pages of Tolkien. In fact, the Charter of the Forest is one of Britain’s founding political documents, dating from the same period as Magna Carta, the “Great Charter”, as the Charter of Liberties was known to distinguish it from its sylvan partner.
Many economists see the spread of property rights as essential to kindling modern economic growth. Between the 16th century and the 19th most common land in England and Wales was enclosed and deeded to private owners. Economic historians long reckoned that enclosure, though unjust and brutal, spurred progress and laid the groundwork for industrialisation. Large tracts could be farmed more productively, freeing labourers to work in urban factories while also providing food to support them.
But such orthodoxies are being revisited. Privatising shared resources, it turns out, does not always lead to a productivity boom. More recent research suggests that enclosure may not have been such a boon for British agriculture or industry. Research by Robert Allen, an economic historian at New York University Abu Dhabi, concludes that the big, capitalist estates which resulted from enclosure were not much more productive than common land farmed by the yeomanry.
If privatising land raises productivity less than might have been expected, that could be because commons are not as doomed as used to be thought. In fact, many were well cared for. Elinor Ostrom, a Nobel prizewinner in economics, studied how rural villages around the world manage shared resources such as land or irrigation systems. The Swiss commune of Törbel, for instance, has successfully shared irrigation resources for more than half a millennium.
A world rich in healthy commons would of necessity be one full of distributed, overlapping institutions of community governance. Cultivating these would be less politically rewarding than privatisation, which allows governments to trade responsibility for cash. But empowering commoners could mend rents in the civic fabric and alleviate frustration with out-of-touch elites.
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