Returning to the Myanmar government's ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people, this chapter argues: how could Facebook not have known that its platform was being abused to promote genocide? The answer draws on longstanding scholarship across political science, urban studies, economics, and other fields relating to the problems that centralized governors have in drawing together knowledge from the peripheries of their territories. It is argued that the appropriate solution to problems of knowledge in the platform context is to design democratic and polycentric governance institutions permitting ordinary people to have influence over company decisions.

Elinor Ostrom pointed out significance of rule structures, and the need for institutional diversity in addressing commons problems.This is particularly true in relation to the governance of large-scale commons resources and one global commons that requires attention is the economic system.We share the institutional arrangements that generate economic benefits but neither the wealth generated by the system, nor the negative impacts, are shared equally.The result is an economic system focused on the privatisation of shared resources that generates inequalities around the globe. This paper explores the economic system as a ‘co-created’ commons.The paper brings together two broad strands of literature on commons: one arising from the public trust doctrine, and the other based on the economic characteristics of a good or service in terms of its access (‘excludability’) and consumption (‘subtractability’).The paper links these concepts with more recent work on ‘productive commons’, where shared resources are generated through collaborative activity, and ideas from evolutionary economics, which explore the economic system as a process and structure of rules, rather than as a series of transactions based on the allocation of property rights.Evidence is provided to support the argument that commons are an integral element of the economic system, and as a result account for some of its efficiencies and, where rule structures fail, for negative impacts on socio-economic and ecological systems.

The resource management complications posed by “Temporal Commons”– the common pool of time shared by present and future generations when making resource management decisions – are understudied in the literature. This chapter attempts to briefly describe their nature, before detailing how the typical solutions to the tragedy of the commons – private property, government regulation, and Elinor Ostrom’s successful collective action model – fail to adequately account for temporal commons. Next, the chapter explores some factors that distinguish temporal commons from traditionally studied commons, making them subject to a potentially more inevitable form of tragedy. The chapter concludes with initial thoughts on avenues for better addressing the dilemmas created by temporal commons.

Is a community land trust (CLT) a commons, metaphorically or in actuality?The CLT-Commons inquiry is indicated by the ubiquity of CLTs in fair development movements: reclaiming commons for the commoners in contexts of vacant disinvested housing held away from people needing it for housing by its private and State ‘stewards.’ Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are part of nearly every progressive response to today’s affordable housing crisis because they decommodify housing, taking it out of the speculative market, and securing land for permanently affordable housing.Although the CLT offers an intermediate form of land ownership and control between speculative market and the State, its distinct tenure and shared equity legal structure is not sufficient, alone, to merit a commons analysis. CLTs increasingly are promoted in housing policy circles as an economically efficient form of affordable housing. This suppresses the central features of classic-form CLT rooted in collective governance of the land by the economically marginalized and working-class people residing on the CLT land, in conjunction with non-resident CLT members, neighbors and supportive stakeholders who also participate in the governance of the CLT land to assure its transgenerational and multi-stakeholder purposes.

This chapter argues that race-based affirmative action in higher education is an intangible commons where the shared resource is diversity, the members are universities and students, and the individuals who seek to end affirmative action are agents of enclosure.The diversity commons provides insight into the conservation vulnerabilities of other commons resources. When affirmative action faces hostile litigation – universities (i.e., the protectors of the diversity commons) focus solely on diversity arguments.Universities’ interests diverge from minority students when they fail to offer equality based defenses (i.e., that admissions are racially discriminatory).While many members of the commons have overlapping interests, a commons is vulnerable to the extent that commons managers have divergent interests from other members. Conservationists must be aware of a party’s interest when considering who should have authority to defend the commons.In the diversity commons, a possible solution is to grant minority students intervenor status so they can advance equality arguments.This solution, if applied abstractly to other commons, would mean introducing gridlock as a conservation tool.One manifestation of gridlock could be to give all commons members with use rights the power to defend against development and enclosure.

Stakeholder participation is key for resilience governance and management. Participation is important for bottom-up approaches in adaptive governance, where self-organization and local knowledge are important factors. Different kinds of participation are also important for structural and monitoring issues in multi-level governance. Stakeholders, or NGOs, are in this sense important both in transferring knowledge and information in multidimensional governance structures and for bridging structural or institutional gaps. Emphasizing the role of stakeholder participation can be seen as a democratic and decentralized approach. Participation by the public is seen as an important feature for assuring transparency, legitimacy, and accountability, which have been established as important for governance structures in general. Trust building and effectiveness are also closely tied to issues of participation. Law generally includes pathways for participation at all levels. However, the purpose of participation in legal structures is somewhat different than the purpose of participation in resilience governance.

“A City for Pigs” portrays Plato as a systems modeler of a sustainable society. Plato’s argumentative methods, in the Republic especially, are favorably compared to techniques of computer simulation and to the heuristic objectives of game theory. Plato’s views about social cooperation in the use of common-pool resources, for example, are shown to be strikingly similar to conclusions reached via field studies by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom in Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990). Plato’s own homology, of city and soul, provides a compelling rationale for both individual and collective action vis-à-vis the environmental and social problems we still face today.

Chapter 2 constitutes the core theoretical chapter of the book. It serves two functions. First, it introduces the micro–institutional rational choice approach that is applied throughout the work. It explains why producers targeted by market-driven regulatory governance can be considered boundedly rational actors, what this characterization entails, and how institutional arrangements can help such actors to overcome collective action problems. It then shows how Kiser and Ostrom’s Three Worlds of Action can be leveraged to link institutional design choices to their outcomes. In a second step, Chapter 2 examines market-driven regulatory governance using this approach. It uncovers the institutional design dilemma that standards face as they scale up, and specifies a number of hypotheses on how these choices (e.g., between binding and flexible standard–setting; strict or flexible oversight mechanisms; and a focus on price premiums or on capacity building) will affect the implementation of standards by drawing on institutional rational choice theory as well as insights from the socio-legal literature.