6. Conclusion: The Democracy Movement of the Twenty-First Century
Commonwealth language has had particular power in the United States, where the concept of “commonwealth” has been widely used in democratic movements. But the commons, in fact, can be found in every society. Understanding of how common pool resources are sustained by citizen action and learning has advanced considerably through the theory-building of Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, for which Ostrom shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics (1990, 1999). Ostrom found that decentralized governance with high popular participation—what can be called productive activity that builds and takes care of the commonwealth—has key advantages in terms of efficiency, sustainability, and equity. These include the incorporation of local knowledge; greater involvement of those who are trustworthy and who respect principles of reciprocity; feedback on subtle changes in resources; better-adapted rules; lower enforcement costs; and redundancy, which decreases the likelihood of a system-wide failure. Ostrom argues persuasively for a mix of decentralized and general governance, what she calls “polycentric governance systems…where citizens are able to organize not just one but multiple governing authorities at different scales.” Such mixed systems may be messy, but in studies of local economies, “messy polycentric systems significantly outperformed metropolitan areas served by a limited number of large-scale, unified governments” (Ostrom 1999, 37, 38, 40).
In shared governance a change in identifications and identities takes place. As people take care of the commons, they partly become the commonwealth they care for. There are multiple examples of growing attention to diverse forms of commons, from our common pool of knowledge to water resources, from public spaces to forests and fisheries.2 The era of privatization requires a global movement to rebuild the commons, tied to skills, habits, and sensibilities of public work. Free spaces are the schools of such a movement. They are also the seedbeds of democratic hope.