The Commons
Concept note — collective ownership and governance as a distinct property regime. Primary source: Steven Stoll, “The Tragedy of Misunderstanding the Commons” (In These Times, 2023). Secondary: Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons; Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto; Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968).
What It Is
A commons is a resource owned and governed by its users to meet their specific needs. It is a distinct property regime — not private property, not state property, and not an unowned free-for-all. The thirteenth-century legal scholar Henry de Bracton defined it simply: “the word ‘common’ means ‘together with others.‘”
This distinction matters because the commons is routinely confused with two things it is not:
Not res nullius (owned by no one). Wild animals, the open ocean, unclaimed territory. No governance, no rules, first-come-first-served. This is what Hardin actually described in “The Tragedy of the Commons” — an ungoverned open-access resource — and then mislabeled as a commons.
Not res communis (owned by everyone). Antarctica, the Moon, “the global commons.” Owned in principle by all humanity, governed (if at all) by international treaty. Too abstract and too large for the users to actually govern.
A commons is owned and governed by its specific constituents. The users make the rules. The resource serves the community. The governance is local, practical, and ongoing.
The Historical Reality
Stoll’s article corrects two widespread misunderstandings. The first is Hardin’s: that commons are tragedies of inevitable depletion. Hardin’s 1968 parable of greedy shepherds destroying a shared meadow assumed commoners couldn’t organize themselves — an assumption lacking any historical, anthropological, or empirical support. Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for demonstrating, across hundreds of cases worldwide, that communities successfully govern commons when they have clear boundaries, proportional rules, collective decision-making, and graduated sanctions. See Elinor Ostrom — Governing the Commons.
The second misunderstanding is the left’s: that commons are ancient communism. They’re not. European commons were not collective farms. Each household tended its own fields and livestock. What was collective was governance — the village council decided where cattle should graze, which fields should lie fallow, and how shared resources should be managed. Private use within collective governance. This is remarkably close to what the CLT-LEHC Hybrid is building: individual households with private living space, governed by a cooperative structure that manages shared resources and keeps the land out of speculative markets.
The historical origins are specific: after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire (~500 CE), European peasants developed commons governance as a way to survive within structures of lordly domination. By the 12th–13th century, commonly managed fields and pasture had become the standard agricultural organization across western Europe. This persisted for centuries until Commons Enclosure dismantled it.
Commons Beyond Europe
The European commons is the best-documented example, but commons governance is not a European invention. Indigenous nations across North America hunted and gardened in spaces reserved for community use, often extending rights to other communities through diplomacy. By one estimate, three-quarters of Africa is owned and governed by communities today. Indian common rights exist over forests, grazing land, and water. Indonesian gotong royong (see Communal Labor) organized collective governance of village resources. The pattern is universal because the problem is universal: how do you manage shared resources without either privatizing them or leaving them ungoverned?
What the CLT-LEHC Model Inherits
The vault’s Community Land Trust entry defines the legal mechanism. This note defines the philosophical lineage. A CLT is a modern legal instantiation of the commons principle: land removed from the market, held in trust, governed by the people who use it. The Limited Equity Housing Cooperative adds the governance layer — residents collectively make decisions about shared resources while maintaining private living space.
Stoll points to the Agrarian Trust as a contemporary American example: buying farmland, placing it in tax-exempt trust, providing affordable leases so farmers can produce food without mortgage burdens. He notes it’s “not a commons in the sense of collective governance but in the anti-capitalist tradition: it aims to remove land from the market, permanently.” The CLT-LEHC hybrid goes further — it includes collective governance, making it closer to a true commons than most modern land trusts.
The structural parallel to Islamic waqf (see Waqf and the Permanence Problem) is also significant. Both commons and waqf remove resources from market circulation for communal benefit. The difference: waqf’s permanence is theologically grounded (property belongs to God); the commons’ permanence is socially grounded (the community governs and defends it). Both face the same vulnerability: they can be enclosed by more powerful actors.
The Cautionary Note
Stoll makes an important point the vault should hold: commons are not inherently just. The English peasants who founded New England had themselves fled enclosure — they arrived as communities practicing collective use, not as profit-maximizing individuals. But they also colonized Indigenous land. “Indigenous North American societies with their own customs of collective use came into conflict with European societies strikingly similar to them.” Commons governance can coexist with exclusion, domination, and violence against those defined as outside the community.
For Wellspring, this means the commons principle is necessary but not sufficient. The legal structure removes land from the market. The cooperative governance gives residents collective control. But the community also has to be outward-facing — connected to the broader Durham neighborhood, not a walled garden of commons governance that excludes everyone else. See Intentional Community Failure Modes on insularity.