A museum of things people own together
You were taught the tragedy of the commons. You were never taught the ones that worked — and the ones that worked were not lucky. They were governed, in ways specific enough to write down.
So we have written them down. Every arrangement here is set out in the same seven rows, in the same order, so that you can hold two of them side by side: what is held, who is in, who decides, how the rules are made, how cheating is caught, what the sanctions are, and what happens in a bad year.
The test we hold ourselves to: that you leave able to describe, from memory, how one specific commons punishes a cheat.
The ground
- EnduringStill governed by the people who hold it.
- CollapsedThe arrangement ended. The page says how.
- ContestedLive argument, not settled history.
* placed by convention — this arrangement has no single location
The twelve — oldest first
- Bali subak
A thousand-year water-temple system that schedules who plants when across a whole watershed. Told to plant continuously in the 1970s, it produced pests and shortages — and the schedule turned out to have been the point.
- English open-field commons
The arrangement most people are unknowingly picturing when they say "the tragedy of the commons" — and it was not destroyed by overgrazing. It was dismantled by about five thousand acts of Parliament.
- Tribunal de las Aguas
A water court in Valencia that has met on Thursdays at noon, outdoors, at a cathedral door, for as long as anyone can document — hearing cases aloud, keeping no written record, and allowing no appeal.
- Mongolian pastures
Herders moved between seasonal pastures for centuries by coordinating who went where and when. After 1991 the coordination was privatised away, and the first bad winters killed roughly a third of the national herd.
- Törbel alpine grazing
A Swiss village where the number of cattle you may send to the summer alp is capped at the number you can feed through your own winter — a rule that cannot be cheated without the neighbours seeing the hay.
- Newfoundland cod
Five centuries of fishing, then a moratorium in 1992 that put tens of thousands out of work in one announcement. It did not fail under open access. It failed under a quota.
- Acequias of the Rio Grande
Community ditches in New Mexico, still run by an elected mayordomo, that cut every member's water by the same fraction in a drought instead of letting senior rights take it all.
- Iriai forest commons
Village mountain forest in Japan, held by households rather than people, where the last rung of the sanction ladder is not a fine but being cut out of the village's mutual obligations.
- Maine lobster harbour territories
Stretches of sea floor claimed by the fishermen of a particular harbour, with no map, no statute and no office — and a sanction ladder whose middle rungs are things done quietly to other people's gear.
- Community energy co-ops
Turbines and solar arrays owned by the people who live beside them, on one member one vote. The shortest sanction ladder in this gallery — because the thing that actually kills them is not a member, it is a tariff.
- Open-source infrastructure
The software everything else is built on, maintained by people who are usually not paid for it. Apply the seven rows and six of them fit — the seventh is where the frame breaks, and that is the finding.
- Dudley Street community land trust
A Boston neighbourhood that took its own vacant land into a trust and kept it there — separating the house, which can be sold, from the ground under it, which cannot.