Craig Johnson On CPR

Uncommon Ground: The ‘Poverty of History’ in
Common Property Discourse
Craig Johnson
ABSTRACT
It would not be a great exaggeration to say that scholars of environmental

conservation and conflict have re-discovered the institutional foundations of
social and economic life. At the heart of this ‘renaissance’ is the belief that
property and property relations have a strong bearing on how people use,
manage and abuse natural resource systems, and that institutional arrangements
based on the creation and management of common property can have positive
impacts on resource use and conservation. Two bodies of thought compete for a
voice in this literature. One, which aims to resolve Hardin’s tragedy of the
commons, is primarily concerned with the problem of encouraging collective
action to conserve resources that are both depletable and unregulated. A second,
influenced by notions of moral economy and entitlement, deals with the problem
of creating and sustaining resource access for poor and vulnerable groups in
society. This article argues that the literature on common property has become
divided between a body of scholarship that uses deductive models of individual
decision-making and rational choice to explain the ways in which different types
of property rights arrangements emerge and change over time, and one whose
questions, aims and methods are more modest, and historically-specific. It then
aims to understand this evolution by situating the mainstream common prop-
erty discourse in the wider intellectual trend of positivism, methodological
individualism and formal modelling that has come to dominate social science
in the United States. In so doing, it attempts to unravel the political and
ideological foundations of what has come to be a dominant mode of under-
standing environmental problems, and solutions to these problems.
INTRODUCTION
Rejecting and in many cases disproving Hardin’s famous parable (1968),

‘commons scholars’ have documented, tested, and explained literally thou-
sands of cases in which people have been able to organize what Schlager
and Ostrom (1992) have usefully classified as rules of access, withdrawal,
An earlier version of this article was presented at the Regional Conference on Sustainable
Development at Chiang Mai University, Thailand in June 2003. The author would like to thank
Peter Vandergeest, Jesse Ribot, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Ashwini Chhatre, Tim Forsyth, Michael
Goldman, Benedikt Korf and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. None of
course should be implicated in the text that follows.
Development and Change 35(3): 407–433 (2004). # Institute of Social Studies 2004. Published
by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St.,
Malden, MA 02148, USA
408 Craig Johnson
management, exclusion and alienation, thereby creating and /or maintaining

common property regimes. The methodologies employed in these studies
vary widely from case study research to cross sectional analysis, controlled
experimentation, and comparative historical analysis. Likewise, the explana-
tory models that underlie these very different techniques include models
of rational choice, game theory, organizational theory, and what some
analysts have called ‘historical institutionalism’ (for example, Campbell
and Pedersen, 2001; Hall and Taylor, 1996; Immergut, 1998).
At the centre of this scholarship is a worldview which embraces the idea that
property and property relations impact on the ways in which people use,
manage and abuse natural resource systems, and that institutional arrange-
ments — grounded in the creation and management of common property —
can positively influence resource use, resource access and conservation. Such
insights are largely dependent on a seminal literature (including Acheson,
1988; Dahlman, 1980; McCay and Acheson, 1987; Netting, 1981; Ostrom,
1990), which emerged in the early 1980s, and which established that many of
the commons that Hardin (1968) and others had understood to be open access
were in fact governed by rules of common property. A critical distinction here
was the notion that common property regimes had rules regulating the ways in
which individuals obtain access to natural resources, thereby eliminating the
open access dilemma (Bromley et al., 1992: 4–12; Libecap, 1995: 162–3;
Ostrom, 1990: 30; Wade, 1988: 183–4, 200). Such insights led to a flood of
work on the institutional characteristics of natural resource management
and environmental change (well represented in Baland and Platteau, 1996;
Bromley et al., 1992; Dietz et al., 2002).
However, the literature that is now beginning to crystallize on the connec-
tions among property rights, property relations and the commons is not with-
out dispute. Two bodies of thought compete for a voice in this literature. One,
responding to Hardin’s tragedy of the commons, is primarily concerned with
the problem of achieving collective action to conserve natural resources which
are both depletable and unregulated. A second, influenced by notions of moral
economy (such as Scott, 1976; Thompson, 1971) and entitlement (Sen, 1981),
deals with the problem of creating and sustaining resource access for poor and
vulnerable groups in society (Beck, 1994; Jodha, 2001; cf. Mosse, 1997:
468–9).1 The two schools converge in the sense that they both use rules to
analyse and describe the dilemma of managing and obtaining access to natural
resource systems. They differ, however, in the normative value they ascribe to
common property regimes and those whose livelihoods are dependent on the
resources it provides. Whereas ‘collective action scholars’ analyse the rules and
1. Mosse (1997) classifies these two schools in terms of ‘economic-institutional’ and

‘sociological-historical’ explanations. Goldman (1998) refers to ‘tragedy’ and ‘anti-
tragedy’ scholars, and separates the latter into ‘human ecologists’, ‘development experts’
and ‘global resource managers’.
The ‘Poverty of History’ in Common Property Discourse 409
sanctions that encourage individuals to conserve the commons, ‘entitlement

scholars’ emphasize the historical struggles that determine resource access and
entitlement, and the ways in which formal and informal rules create and
reinforce unequal access to the commons. There is thus a normative tension
within the literature.
There is also a methodological tension. Although the lines are by no means
neatly drawn, entitlement scholarship on the commons tends to favour a
‘sociological-historical’ method (Mosse, 1997: 468–70), in which transform-
ations of property rights regimes are explained principally in terms of historical
narrative and context. In contrast, collective action scholars (such as Baland
and Platteau, 1996; Ostrom, 1990; Wade, 1988) have embraced a deductive
model of individual decision-making and rational choice to explain the ways
in which different types of property rights arrangements emerge and change
over time (Ostrom, 1990) and space (Wade, 1988). To the extent that the past
is used to inform these inferences, the collective action school adopts a
historical method. However, the historiography that underlies this approach
adopts a view of the past which subsumes the peculiarities of history to the
construction of general theories and the evaluation of these theories in the
field. In other words, the process is one in which historical ‘facts’ are selected
and interpreted to inform theory on which future behaviour can be based.
In contrast, the historiography and historical methods that underlie the
entitlement school are centrally concerned with past and contextually-
specific questions, changes and events. To paraphrase Geertz (1973: 5),
the entitlement school is ‘not an experimental science in search of law, but
an interpretive one in search of meaning’. In defence of their method,
‘entitlement scholars’ have criticized the collective action literature for its
instrumental and historically de-contextualized understanding of common
property relations, calling for a more historical understanding of the eco-
logical and socio-economic factors that affect the myriad relations on which
property, common property and other forms of resource entitlement are
based (see, especially, Campbell et al., 2001; Cleaver, 2000; Goldman, 1998;
Mosse, 1997; Prakash, 1998). Others (such as Scoones, 1999) have argued
for a deeper understanding of the complexity, uncertainty and dynamics
that underlie ecological processes and environmental change.
In this article, I argue that although demands of this kind are certainly
justifiable, their appeals are unlikely to have a significant effect on the
intellectual mainstream of commons scholarship. At the heart of this
mainstream is a wider trend of positivism, methodological individualism
and formal modelling that has come to dominate American political
science (a discipline that is home to leading figures in the field, including
Elinor Ostrom, Arun Agrawal and Robert Wade). By tracing the roots of
‘new institutional’ approaches to the study of the commons, I argue that
the voice of critical commons scholars has been muted by two ‘structural’
factors: first, the entitlement and collective action scholarships are largely
operating in isolation from one another; second, the collective action
410 Craig Johnson
school aims to contribute to an empirically-grounded theory of social

action, in which historical laws of motion are rejected in favour of a
scientific frame which is capable of testing falsifiable propositions about
human behaviour.
The ‘poverty of history’ to which I refer in the title highlights two themes
that underlie this article. The first refers to the gap between a literature that
uses the past to develop general and predictable theories about what makes
for durable common property regimes, and one for whom the central
questions and mechanisms of change are far more contextually-specific.2
The second represents a wordplay on Popper’s (1957/1997) classic assault
on ‘historicist’ thinking within the social sciences. Drawing upon the ideas
developed in this thesis, I aim to explain the appeal of the scientific method
on which mainstream common property theorists now make their most
assertive claims, and the constraints that therefore prevent them from
adopting a more historical mode of analysis.
First, however, I clarify what I mean by ‘mainstream’ common property
theory, and distinguish it from what I am calling the ‘entitlement school’. In
the following section, I argue that a preoccupation with efficiency and the
management of tragedy of the commons scenarios constitutes the main-
stream of social science literature on common property. The subsequent
section then explores the tension that exists between scientific and historical
explanation, and makes the case that ‘scientific approaches’ to the study of
the commons are strongly influenced by — and deeply embedded in —
a positivist social science, which has become particularly influential in
American political science and the ‘new institutional economics’. Finally,
the conclusion makes some general observations about the implications
such tensions pose for the study of common property.
EFFICIENCY, EQUITY AND THE ‘COMMONS DILEMMA’
As McCay and Jentoft (1998) have pointed out, scholarship on the com-
mons underwent an important transformation after Hardin articulated his
original thesis in 1968. Prior to Hardin, ‘commons dilemmas’ were under-
stood either in terms of Malthusian explanations of overpopulation and
resource degradation (McCay and Jentoft, 1998) or in terms of an agrarian
transition to capitalism rooted in the enclosure of the English commons and
2. To be clear, I am not making the case that historical approaches do not exist in the
commons literature. Indeed, a search on Indiana University’s comprehensive CPR search
engine (http://www.indiana.edu/~iascp/Iforms/searchcpr.html) produced more than fifty
titles relating to ‘history and the commons’ (accessed 7 May 2003). Classic historical
treatments of the commons would include Netting (1981), Dahlman (1980) and Acheson
(1988).
the creation of an incipient working class (Thompson, 1963: 237–58).

Although Hardin’s article did little to dispel Malthusian biases, it invoked
a new body of scholarship which called into question the notion that the
commons will always be open access, thereby dismantling the deterministic
idea that individuals will always degrade the commons.3 As McCay and
Jentoft have argued, the central focus of this new scholarship shifted from
one of poverty and overpopulation to one of efficiency and environmental
conservation: ‘The model that Hardin revived was taken up by students of
institutional and natural resource economics and the evolution of property
rights. The question changed from why so many poor people to why natural
and economic resources were wasted and depleted’ McCay and Jentoft
(1998: 21).
As the ‘grand theories’ of development studies and political science
began to lose their appeal (Gore, 2000; Schuurman, 1993), the new
scholarship on the commons also embraced a new methodology, which
encouraged an empirical investigation of the conditions under which
individuals could co-operate to govern the commons. Three assumptions
were central to this model. One was the notion that social outcomes can
be explained in terms of the calculations that individuals make about the
perceived costs and benefits of future actions (methodological individu-
alism). In Ostrom’s words (1991: 243), the assumption is that ‘indi-
viduals compare expected benefits and costs of actions prior to
adopting strategies for action’. Another was the notion that individuals
are ‘rule-governed’ in this process (see below). A third and critical
component was a substantive re-conceptualization of the commons,
which had the important effect of challenging Hardin’s thesis and
enabling a new empiricism in common property research. Seminal
works in this literature would include Baland and Platteau (1996),
Bromley (1992), Ostrom (1990), Wade (1988), Uphoff et al. (1990), as
well as the collection of essays in Bromley et al. (1992), McCay and
Acheson (1987), and more recently, Dietz et al. (2002).
At the heart of this new conceptualization was a distinction between
common property and open access. In critical response to Hardin (1968),
common property theorists (particularly Baland and Platteau, 1996;
Ostrom, 1990; Wade, 1988) argued that Hardin had underplayed the possi-
bility that what he was calling open access could in fact be governed as
common property. Drawing upon historical material and their own field
research, they argued that common property regimes were qualitatively
different from open access situations in the sense that they had rules
3. In so doing, commons scholars (such as Ostrom, 1990, and the collections of essays in
Bromley et al., 1992, and McCay and Acheson, 1987) provided an important critique to
Hardin’s assertion that only state intervention or private property would resolve the
tragedy of the commons, which at the time had become extremely influential. I am
grateful to an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this point.
412 Craig Johnson
regulating the ways in which individuals obtain access to a ‘natural’ flow of

benefits (Bromley et al., 1992: 4–12; Libecap, 1995: 162–3; Ostrom, 1990: 30;
Wade, 1988: 183–4, 200).4 Another important distinction was made between
common pool resources and common property regimes (Ostrom et al.,
1994a; Ostrom, 2000). The former referred to resource systems whose size,
mobility and complexity make it difficult — although not impossible — to
prevent individuals from using them and whose use can deplete the number
and quality of benefits the resource can provide. The latter were the systems
of rules, rights and duties that govern the ways in which group members
relate to the commons and to one another (Ostrom, 2000).
Whether common pool resources would in fact fall prey to the tragedy of
the commons was therefore not a matter of faith as Hardin (1968) would lead
us to believe, but an empirical question, dependent on the existence of
institutions governing access, utilization, management, exclusion, ownership
and transfer of ownership (Schlager and Ostrom, 1992), and on the ways in
which individuals respond to these structural incentives. The logic of the
argument is that individuals will be more likely to conserve a resource when
they believe they will reap the long-term benefits of conservation and
restraint. Common property, it is argued, provides this assurance by restrict-
ing otherwise open-access resources to a group that agrees to abide by rules
regulating membership and resource utilization (Baland and Platteau, 1996;
Bromley et al., 1992; Ostrom, 1990; Uphoff et al., 1990; Wade, 1988).
At the centre of the new scholarship was also a new research agenda,
which had its roots in the rejection of behaviouralism (Immergut, 1998) and
the development of a hypothetico-deductive model based upon assumptions
about individual decision-making and rational choice. Drawing upon the-
ories of public goods and the distribution of social cost (Olson, 1965), this
agenda was centrally concerned with the problem of understanding and
developing principles which would encourage collective action to conserve
common pool resources. Framed in this way, environmental problems
were understood as a dilemma of collective action, in which individuals
deplete resources because they lack: (1) information about the resource
system; (2) information about those with whom they share the resource;
and (3) rules that would regulate the ways in which they use the resource.
4. Where Hardin (1968) differed from his critics, most notably Ostrom (1990) and Wade
(1988), was on the nature of the commons dilemma (Hardin assumed the commons was
open-access), the extent to which individuals would internalize the costs of resource
conservation and, by extension, whether they would extricate themselves from the
tragedy of the commons. However, the logic and theoretical assumptions that underlie
Hardin’s tragedy are in fact very consistent with those of many post-Hardin critics (see
below). A critical distinction of course relates to the ways in which different types of
property rights regime affect incentives to manage and conserve natural resources
(Bromley, 1992: 4–11). Hardin (1968) felt that private property rights would provide the
most effective means of preventing individuals from depleting the commons. Failing this,
he argued for a relatively autocratic (yet essential) role for the central state.
To borrow an analogy from Polanyi (1957), mainstream scholarship on the

commons became deeply ‘embedded’ in a wider intellectual climate in which
positivism, methodological individualism and formal modelling have become
standard modes of professional practice.5 In the following sections, I argue
that the collective action literature on the commons is principally concerned
with governing and restricting access to resources whose attributes lend them-
selves to public goods dilemmas. Uniting this literature is a model of individual
behaviour and rational choice (methodological individualism), a ‘scientific’
understanding of historical change and a normative interest in efficiency.6
COLLECTIVE ACTION AND THE COMMONS DILEMMA
Starting from the position that information (about resources and resource
users) is costly, collective action theorists contend that rules matter because
they reduce the uncertainty that stems from the unpredictable behaviour of
others and resource systems. As Ostrom (1990) argues,
In all cases in which individuals have organized themselves to solve CPR problems, rules
have been established by the appropriators that have severely constrained the authorized
actions available to them. Such rules specify, for example, how many resource units an
individual can appropriate, when, where, and how they can be appropriated, and the
amounts of labor, materials, or money that must be contributed to various provisioning
activities. If everyone, or almost everyone, follows these rules, resource units will be allocated
more predictably and efficiently, conflict levels will be reduced, and the resource system itself
will be maintained over time. (Ostrom, 1990: 43; emphasis added)
Collective action scholarship on the commons is thus principally interested

in the ways in which individual incentives and social institutions combine to
5. Indeed, one of the formative influences on post-Hardin commons scholarship was the
‘new’ institutional economics (NIE); see, especially, Bates (1995); Harriss et al. (1995);
Hodgson (1993); for treatments in political science, see Hall and Taylor (1996); Immergut
(1998); and more recently, the collection of essays in Campbell and Pedersen (2001).
Central to the NIE perspective is the assumption that market exchange entails
particular costs, which affect an individual’s capacity to transact. Included here are
costs related to searching out economic opportunities, obtaining information, and
ensuring that other parties meet their end of the bargain. NIE theory also assumes that
the rationality of individuals is bounded by a finite capacity to obtain, synthesize and
utilize information. Setting the parameters for social exchange, social institutions create
stability and order, enabling fallible learners to act rationally and collectively in the face of
uncertainty. Property rights, labour contracts, firms, prices and insurance (formal and
informal) all play an important role in reducing the costs of searching for, synthesizing
and monitoring relevant actors and events, enabling market actors to get on with the
business of doing business.
6. Like Agrawal (2002: 44) I argue that Baland and Platteau (1996), Ostrom (1990) and
Wade (1988) constitute three of the most comprehensive ‘book-length’ efforts to ‘produce
theoretically informed generalizations about the conditions under which groups of self-
organized users are successful in managing their commons dilemmas’.
414 Craig Johnson
affect social outcomes. Such outcomes are explained both in terms of

individual calculations and structured incentives. An important point
made by scholars like Ostrom, Wade, and Baland and Platteau is that
structure, group attributes, resource attributes and ecological pressures
affect the ways in which individuals understand and respond to different
social dilemmas (see, especially, Agrawal, 2001; also see below). However, at
the core of the collective action school is a model of individual decision-
making and rational choice.
Although Baland and Platteau (1996), Ostrom (1990) and Wade (1988) all
use historical material to construct their assertions, their use of history —
and the historiography that underlies their epistemology — is very different
from the historical institutionalist approach that tends to be favoured
among entitlement scholars (see below). A key point of difference is the
notion that past events can be used to test and explain formalized models of
individual behaviour. Ostrom (1990), for instance, makes the case that rules
are more likely to be followed and collective action achieved when individ-
uals enjoy, and ideally institutionalize, a legacy of successful co-operation
(cf. Putnam, 1993). The logic here is twofold. First, it is argued, reciprocity
creates an expectation (transmitted directly or through reputation) that
individuals will be willing to co-operate again. Second, prior commitments
provide a cumulative resource through which eligible ‘participants’ can
forge more ambitious (and potentially beneficial) arrangements (cf. Putnam,
1993; Ostrom et al., 1994b: 327). As Ostrom argues:
The investment in institutional change was not made in a single step. Rather, the process of
institutional change in all basins involved many small steps that had low initial costs. Rarely
was it necessary for participants to move simultaneously without knowing what others were
doing. Because the process was incremental and sequential and early successes were achieved,
intermediate benefits from the initial investments were realized before anyone needed to make
larger investments. Each institutional change transformed the structure of incentives within
which future strategic decisions would be made. (Ostrom, 1990: 137; emphasis added)
Framed in this way, past decisions, co-operation and institutional arrange-

ments constitute forms of ‘social capital’ through which members can generate
and obtain goods that would be difficult or impossible to obtain in isolation,
or without this particular legacy. Similar historiographical approaches can be
found in the behavioural studies of collective action in simulated commons
dilemmas (such as Blomquist et al., 1994; Ostrom, 1998; Ostrom et al., 1994b).
Although rooted in models of individual decision-making and rational
choice, Wade’s epistemology (1988) is more generally dependent on sys-
tematic variations in ecological variability and risk. At the heart of his
assertion is the notion that rules emerge or evolve when the existing institu-
tional arrangement is unable to cope with the relative weight of ecology,
population, preferences and technology — or the lack thereof (cf. Baland
and Platteau, 1996: Chs 11–13). Drawing upon cross-sectional data, Wade
(1988: 169–76) makes the case that rules regulating grazing and common
irrigation were more likely when population and other ecological pressures
created a situation in which the probability of losses, resulting from malfea-

sance or free riding, was unacceptably high. Thus, soils with relatively high
levels of water retention create good conditions for grazing which, in turn,
attract a (hypothetically) unsustainable number of herders, thereby necessi-
tating the creation of rules regulating access (ibid.). Once again, although
Wade certainly draws upon archival material, and gives a picture of historical
change in the villages, his assumptions, theory and methodology are primarily
dependent upon a historiography which discounts the importance of histor-
ical narrative (cf. Mosse, 1997) and uses past events to infer general and
predictive theories about the conditions under which collective action will
occur. This predilection stems in large part from the ahistorical way in which
he frames his interest in the conditions under which: ‘some peasant villagers
in one part of India act collectively to provide goods and services which they
all need and cannot provide for themselves individually’ (Wade, 1988: 1).
Along very similar lines is Ostrom’s (1990: 14) agenda:
Instead of basing policy on the presumption that the individuals involved are helpless, I wish
to learn more from the experience of individuals in field settings. Why have some efforts to
solve commons problems failed, while others have succeeded? What can we learn from
experience that will help stimulate the development and use of a better theory of collective
action – one that will identify the key variables that can enhance or detract from the
capabilities of individuals to solve problems?
Primarily a review of evidence and argument, the assertions made by Baland

and Platteau (1996) are largely consistent with this agenda.
To summarize thus far, the works here described as collective action
interpretations of the commons share an approach to a ‘commons
dilemma’, which stems from imperfect information and the inefficient dis-
tribution of cost; and solutions to this problem (rules that would govern
access and encourage collective action to conserve). Moreover, their method-
ology and epistemology tend to be informed by a historiography that uses
the past to infer general and predictive propositions about social behaviour.
Entitlement scholars differ from collective action scholars in three important
ways. First socio-economic equality and poverty reduction, as opposed to
efficiency and the health of the commons, constitute major normative con-
cerns. Second, rules are important in so far as they enhance, not restrict, access
to the commons. Finally, the entitlement literature tends to favour a structural-
historical approach, in which property rights and relations are contingent upon
contextually-specific forces of social change. Table 1 sets out these differences.
In contrast to the collective action school, the entitlement literature is centrally
concerned with the problem of inequality, and with the ways in which formal and
informal rules create and reinforce unequal access to common pool resources.
Implicit (and often explicit) in the entitlement literature is the normative assertion
that socio-economic equality or, at least, a reduction in poverty, is desirable.
Characterized in this way, common pool resources with ‘unstable and low
production levels’ (Scoones, 1996: 3), tend to be extremely important to marginal
416 Craig Johnson
Table 1. Collective Action and Entitlement Scholarship on the Commons7

Collective Action Entitlement
Problematic Conservation and management Inequality and access

of common pool resources in common property regimes
Conditions of change Shifts in costs and benefits Exogenous changes in population,
(Ostrom, 1990), and in relative markets and technology; structural
distribution of risk (Wade, 1998) change; state-enclosure
Mechanisms of change Interest-based struggle, conflict, Interest-based struggle, conflict
bargaining, negotiation among and privatization of commons
groups and individuals
Epistemology and Hypothetic-deductive search for Inductive and deductive search
methodology general theory; methodological for historically specific explanation
individualism or theory; structural historical
groups, such as women, ethnic minorities, the landless and the poor.8 Seminal
contributions in this literature would include Beck (1994); Blaikie (1989); Blaikie
and Brookfield (1987); Blair (1996); Cleaver (2000); Goldman (1998); the work
of N. S. Jodha (summarized in Jodha, 2001); Leach et al. (1999); Mearns (1996);
Mosse (1997); Prakash (1998); Ribot (1998); Scoones (1996) and Swift (1994).
Although the benefits of risk minimization and the provision of public
goods (such as common irrigation) are certainly valued within this more
critical literature, the assumption that these benefits would necessarily ‘trickle
down’ to the rural poor is a matter of some debate.9 Taking the case of India (a
country with large numbers of common pool resources, poor people and,
unsurprisingly, studies of common pool resources and poverty), field studies
have shown that common pool resources play an important role in sustaining
the livelihoods of the rural poor. Beck and Nesmith (2000: 119), for instance,
estimate that ‘(CPRs) currently contribute some US$ 5 billion a year to the
incomes of poor rural households in India, or about 12% to household income
of poor rural households’.
7. The categorization for this table is drawn from the very useful review (of a different
literature) in Campbell and Pedersen (2001).
8. Wade’s explicit treatment of poverty and inequality may lead one to conclude that he has
more in common with what I am calling the entitlement school than he does with theorists
of collective action. In response to this, I would argue that although he does explore the
extent to which common property institutions (namely common irrigation and field
guarding) provide tangible benefits to the rural poor (see, especially, Wade, 1988:
Ch. 6), he is principally concerned with the conditions under which ‘some peasant villagers
in one part of India act collectively to provide goods and services which they all need
and cannot provide for themselves individually’ (Wade, 1988: 1). Moreover, and as this
quotation suggests, his explanatory framework is firmly grounded in a tradition of
methodological individualism and rational choice, which is very consistent with that
employed by other collective action scholars, such as Ostrom and Baland and Platteau.
9. Indeed, the positions taken within this debate have much in common with those of the
‘growth versus inequality’ debates, which questioned the trickle down effect of a ‘rising
tide’, of the 1990s.
These calculations are extrapolated from Jodha’s four-year study of poverty

and common property in dryland India (summarized in Jodha, 2001). Con-
ducted between 1982 and 1986, Jodha’s field studies cover eighty-two villages ‘in
seven major states in the dry tropical zone of India’ (ibid.: 121). By measuring
the resources and incomes provided by various types of commons (including
community forests, irrigation reservoirs, and pasture ‘wasteland’), Jodha makes
a convincing case that the rural poor are disproportionately dependent on the
‘low pay off options’ offered by common pool resources (ibid.: 130). This, he
argues, is due to low levels of competition with more affluent households, whose
livelihoods are not dependent on local common pool resources. Such findings
are consistent with other studies of common pool resources, livelihoods and
poverty in India (such as Beck, 1994) and in other parts of the developing world,
which have demonstrated a vital link between local common pool resources and
the livelihoods of the rural poor (see especially, Beck and Nesmith, 2000).
Reviewing a comprehensive literature on poverty and the commons in India and
West Africa, Beck and Nesmith (2000) argue that common pool resources provide
substantial benefits to the rural poor, even when these systems are based on
unequal social relations (cf. Baland and Platteau, 1996). Like Jodha (2001), more-
over, they observe that the benefits being provided by local commons in both
regions have been undermined by the privatization of common property regimes,
the commodification of resources provided by these systems and the exclusion of
marginal groups, particularly women and children, whose labour is often highly
dependent on the ability to access local resources (Beck and Nesmith, 2000: 128–9).
Ethnographic studies of local commons and rural poverty have shown that
although common property regimes may help to reduce the risk of resource deple-
tion, assumptions that local institutions will be rooted in moral economies based
on equity, welfare and social security are by no means guaranteed (Li, 1996; Mosse,
1997; Wade, 1988). In his study of tank irrigation in South India, for instance,
Mosse (1997) demonstrates the ways in which common property institutions
were manipulated to serve primarily the interests of male, high-caste members:
while the social control over access to tank water does indeed serve a collective need to
manage risk and protect subsistence livelihoods, this does not mean that these systems are
sustained by a community moral ethic. Social controls on the water commons may just as
easily serve to establish relations of dominance and control. (Mosse, 1997: 481)10
In my own research, which documents the establishment and enforcement of

common property in Thailand’s inshore fisheries (Johnson, 2000, 2001), I found
that households at the lowest end of the socio-economic spectrum experienced
minimal improvement as a result of collective efforts to prevent trawlers and
push nets from entering and depleting a local fishery. For those with poor and
unproductive technologies, the returns that accrued from the resource (larger
and more numerous species of fish) were tempered by their weak capacity and
10. Note that Wade (1988: 112–3) reaches similar conclusions about the social composition of
the village councils in ‘Kottapalle’.
418 Craig Johnson
poor terms of trade. Even for the relatively well-endowed owner-operators,

however, the benefits that accrued from common property were barely keeping
pace with the escalating costs of coastal fishing and variable returns. Indeed, the
only households who appeared to be ‘getting ahead’ in the industry were those
with the capital, influence and contacts to command new or vital market niches,
such as contract processing and direct marketing.
Such findings echo Ribot’s conclusions (1998) about the relationship
between market power and market access in Senegal’s charcoal commodity
chain: ‘While local control may increase security, and perhaps the desire to
maintain the resource base, it may not provide the economic means needed to
do so’ (Ribot, 1998: 336). What this suggests is that membership in common
property regimes — and the rights and duties these entail — are not sufficient
determinants of livelihood outcomes. Equally important are the entitlements
through which individuals obtain access to common pool resources and,
crucially, the markets in which these commodities obtain value.
Such insights are important, not least because they force an assessment of the
factors, relations and processes that determine access to and control over natural
resources. Indeed, the literature is replete with cases of groups using the state
and other forms of authority to recognize and enforce their claim over natural
resources. Kurien (1992), for instance, describes the ways in which fishworker
unions in Kerala used fasting and roadblocks to pressure the state to legislate
against trawler companies. Similar descriptions are made about environmental
struggles in Amazonia (Diegues, 1998), ‘forest battles’ in Cameroon (Nguiffo,
1998), land rights in Namibia (Devereux, 1996), peasant politics in Mexico (Fox,
1996), and community rights in Central Sulawesi (Li, 1996). It is against this
backdrop of resource scarcity and competing forms of authority, entitlement
scholars argue, that collective action becomes important.11
In the collective action literature, privatization of the commons is often
presented as the result of misguided policy or rational choice, which individ-
uals or ‘decision-makers’ have chosen to implement. Baland and Platteau
(1996) and Ostrom (1990), for instance, mobilize strong arguments against
policies that would privatize the commons, or subject them to a system of
over-centralized bureaucratic control. Such assertions are generally based
on historical instances in which common property arrangements have been
selected as the most viable means of resolving collective problems of access
and restraint in common pool resources.12 Grounded within a choice
11. Conflict of course does play a role in the collective action literature, but it is most
commonly understood in terms of a bargaining scenario, in which individuals and
groups negotiate and pursue strategies that will best meet their individual and collective
interests. See, especially, Ostrom (1990); Ostrom et al. (1994a).
12. Such entitlements can of course be centrally dependent on rights of private property,
illustrating the important and overlapping relations that can exist among different forms
of property rights regime (such as private, common, state). I am grateful to an anonymous
reviewer for highlighting this important point.
theoretic, the implication here is that different property rights regimes

(common, private, or a combination of the two) are the result of a selection
process, in which ‘resource users’ and resource managers impose institutions
that best meet the needs of resource users and the resource base (Baland and
Platteau, 1996; Ostrom, 1990; Wade, 1988).
Alternative interpretations understand the privatization of rights over nat-
ural resources as a historical process in which ‘the state’ is one of many
interests whose power, autonomy and relationship with societal interests
determine the allocation and functioning of property rights regimes (Li, 1996;
Mosse, 1997; Vandergeest and Peluso, 1995). Framed in this way, the privat-
ization of access rights is not just a consequence of individual choice or
government policy on the commercialization of forest land (although the latter
was of course relevant), but also a result of struggles to obtain and legitimate
new forms of entitlement (cf. Johnson and Forsyth, 2002).
Challenging explanations that attribute excessive value to the calculations
of individuals (for instance, Ostrom, 1990) or to ecological structure (such
as Wade, 1988), Mosse (1997: 495–6) argues that very clear differences in
water management institutions in Tamil Nadu reflect both the ecological
characteristics and historical processes that gave rise to particular forms of
institutional arrangement. The reason historical processes undermined
water management institutions in the primarily clay soil lower catchment
villages and not in the sandy upper catchment villages that he studied was
not (only) because life was inherently more risky in the latter (cf. Wade,
1988), but because of specific historical processes in which widespread
diversification out of irrigated rice cultivation and the in-migration of
successful dryland cultivators had the (totally unintentional) effect of under-
mining a centuries-old system of irrigation management in the clay soil
villages. The insight he draws from this analysis is that: ‘the erosion of
‘‘public’’ systems of resource use in black cotton soil villages, and their
retention in sandy soil villages is the result of complex factors of settlement,
caste power, property rights and economic opportunities, revenue systems
and colonial markets. This complexity has to challenge any oversimplified
ecological deterministic reading of the pattern of collective action’ (Mosse,
1997: 495; emphasis added).
Along similar lines, Scoones (1999: 493–4) criticizes the institutional
literature (and here he includes the work of Bromley, 1992 and Ostrom,
1990) for failing to address the complexity, uncertainty and dynamic qual-
ities that underlie ecological processes and environmental change. In par-
ticular, he argues that institutional approaches to collective action and
conservation of common pool resources (along with many other strands
of environmental studies) tend towards a ‘balance of nature’, in which
ecological processes and institutional processes are assumed to approach a
state of equilibrium. Drawing upon theories of non-linearity, uncertainty
and chaos, he argues that ‘new ecological’ approaches have demonstrated
the limitations of the equilibrium model, concluding that interdisciplinary
420 Craig Johnson
approaches may help scholars to transcend the ‘balance of nature view that
has dominated both academic and policy discussions in the past’ (Scoones,
1999: 496–7; cf. Harriss, 2002).
Such insights illustrate a number of important points about the tensions
that have emerged in contemporary commons scholarship. First, there is
clearly a tension between a scholarship grounded primarily in historical
explanation of the kind that Mosse (1997) favours and one based on
formal modelling of individual decision making and rational choice
(cf. Goldman, 1998). Although the lines are by no means neatly drawn,
entitlement scholarship on the commons tends to favour a ‘sociological-
historical’ method (Mosse, 1997: 468–70), which contrasts with the econ-
omistic assumptions that underlie the collective action school. Contrary to
the tragedy school, which explains commons dilemmas (and their reso-
lution) in terms of (individually) calculated responses to structural incentives
(for example Ostrom, 1990; Wade, 1988), entitlement scholars understand
and explain the degradation of common pool resources in terms of a
historical process grounded in the privatization and commercialization of
local resource systems. Beck and Nesmith (2000: 129), for instance, argue
that the privatization and commercialization of local resources have elim-
inated poor people’s access to the commons in rural India and West Africa,
and at the same time undermined traditional indigenous practices of
resource management. Along similar lines, Jodha (2001: 202) argues that
the failure to manage or rehabilitate common pool resources in rural areas
of Rajasthan is due to a combination of government policy, which has
encouraged privatization, ‘indifferent’ leadership at the local level and low
use-values, which reduces incentive to invest in their management.
Responding in part to the work of Jodha, Prakash (1998: 175) argues
that the ‘increasing penetration of the modern market economy’ has not
only undermined local resource management structures, it has also
‘blurred and diffused’ the relationships that underlie local institutions
and traditions: ‘The result is that the poor must largely fend for themselves
within new social structures and private property regimes that, despite the
occasional success of land reform policies, give them a marginal status’
(Prakash, 1998: 175).
Second, there is a normative tension within the literature, between a body
of scholarship that is normatively pre-disposed towards the study of effi-
ciency and conservation and one for whom inequality, poverty and exclu-
sion constitute a central focus. This divergence would not matter (that is,
there would not be a tension) were it not for the fact that both bodies of
scholarship are centrally interested in low income areas of the developing
world. Reflecting on their findings from fieldwork in Zimbabwe, Campbell
et al. (2001: 595), highlight what they perceive to be a ‘lack of congruence
between the optimism of the (common property) literature and the realities
on the ground’. This they attribute to one of two possibilities: (1) that the
exceptionally inhospitable climate they find in Zimbabwe (the focus of their
work) is substantially unique; or (2) that ‘the optimism of the CPR literature
[is] an artefact of particular ideologies or to the overstatement of the
successes’ (ibid.). As to what these ‘particular ideologies’ would be, and
how they would bias the work of the common property literature, the
authors provide little detail. However, they do highlight a concern that the
common property literature’s pre-occupation with formal modelling and
theory building implies an attempt to engineer the institutions of societies
in which most commons scholars are not members (cf. Goldman, 1998: 21).
In critical response, they call for a ‘more detailed . . . [and] in-depth
understanding of the processes involved in the evolution and dynamics of
institutions’ (ibid.: 596).
Such concerns are echoed by Prakash (1998: 168), who argues that the
commons literature (and here he is referring to what I have called the
collective action school), ‘has largely circumvented the implications of inter-
nal differentiation . . . the plurality of beliefs, norms and interests . . . the
effects of complex variations in culture and society, as well as social,
political and economic conflict relating to the commons’. The problem, he
argues, is that the policy analyst’s ‘abstraction from the complexities of field
settings’ may lead to ‘a reification of concepts, models and strategies’ (ibid.).
Similar assertions are made by Mosse (1997: 486), who argues that common
pool resource management ‘cannot (as is so often the case) be isolated from
context and viewed as a distinctive type of economic activity’. Earlier in the
article, and in more detail, he argues that ‘an institutional analysis of
indigenous resources systems is unlikely to be useful unless it has first
correctly characterized the social relations and categories of meaning and
value in a particular resource system. In the first place this means resisting
the tendency to impose a narrow definition of economic interest, utility and
value’ (Mosse, 1997: 472).
Perhaps most critical of the collective action literature is Michael
Goldman (1998: 21), who identifies ‘a fundamental tension between know-
ledge production and historical consciousness, a tension between casting a
blind eye towards the destructive forces of capitalist expansion onto
the commons and a broad smile that beams at the ‘‘underskilled’’ local
commoner who defies all odds by protecting the commons’.
In sum, there is a strong body of criticism which challenges the collective
action literature for its instrumental and historically de-contextualized
understanding of common property relations. In critical response, pro-
ponents of this viewpoint have called for a more historical understanding of
the ecological and socio-economic factors that affect the myriad relations on
which property, common property and other forms of resource entitlement
are based. In the following section I argue that although demands of this
kind are certainly justifiable, their appeals are unlikely to have a significant
effect on the intellectual mainstream of commons scholarship. Specifically, I
argue that the voice of this critical literature has been muted by two
‘structural’ factors: first, the entitlement and collective action scholarships
422 Craig Johnson
are largely isolated from one another; second, the collective action school
aims to contribute to an empirically-grounded theory of social action, in
which historical contingencies are merged with a scientific frame which is
capable of testing falsifiable propositions about human behaviour. We now
turn to the challenges and implications of achieving this marriage.
SHIPS IN THE NIGHT: HISTORY AND SCIENCE IN COMMONS

SCHOLARSHIP
In an important and provocative article, Arun Agrawal (2001) makes the

case that commons scholarship has tended to be disproportionately focused
on case studies of small and local resource user groups, and that this
preoccupation understates the important ways in which resource system
attributes, user group attributes and the ‘external social, physical and insti-
tutional environment affect institutional durability and long-term manage-
ment at the local level’ (Agrawal, 2001: 1650–1). Methodologically, he
makes the case that ‘existing work has yet to develop fully a theory of
what makes for sustainable common-pool resource management’ (ibid.:
1651). Reviewing principally the work of Ostrom (1990), Wade (1988) and
Baland and Platteau (1996), Agrawal argues that:
Systematic tests of the relative importance of factors important to sustainability, equity, or
efficiency of commons are relatively uncommon . . . Also uncommon are studies that connect
the different variables they identify in causal chains or propose plausible causal mechanisms.
Problems of incomplete model specification and omitted variables in hypothesis testing are
widespread in the literature on common property. (Agrawal, 2001: 1651)13
Particularly undeveloped in the literature, he argues, are studies which

isolate the causal importance of market forces, technology, population
pressures and the state.14
Agrawal makes a strong case that a more valid and predictive under-
standing of what makes for durable common property regimes will require a
more systematic and scientific approach. This science will entail a ‘careful
attention to research design, index construction to reduce the number of
13. Although he consciously avoids the task of defining ‘efficiency, equity and sustainability’,
it is clear from his analysis that Agrawal is principally concerned with ‘the durability of
institutions’ (Agrawal, 2001: 1650), and the conditions under which individuals will
implement and enforce common property regimes.
14. Since first presenting this paper, I have been informed that Agrawal has moved to
embrace a more historical and far less positivist approach to the study of the commons.
Moreover, it is worth pointing out that his own body of scholarship (especially Agrawal,
1999) moves far beyond the type of positivism being prescribed in Agrawal (2001). That
having been said, I would argue that, for the purposes of this exercise, the articulation
matters more than the individual. In other words, even though the author may have
changed his views, the publication — Agrawal (2001) — still constitutes an important
articulation in an influential and widely read journal.
variables in a given analysis, and a shift toward comparative rather than

case study analysis’ (ibid.: 1665). It will also require a larger number of
cases, and a systematic isolation of causal variables.
This approach to common property research is firmly rooted in an
epistemology which seeks to construct general and predictive theories
about the durability of common property regimes. This predilection is
particularly apparent in his critique of the lack of research design in local-
ized case study research:
When a large number of causal variables potentially affect outcomes, the absence of careful
research design that controls for factors that are not the subject of investigation makes it
almost impossible to be sure that the observed differences in outcomes are indeed a result of
hypothesized causes . . . If the researcher does not explicitly take into account the relevant
variables that might affect success, then the number of selected cases must be (much) larger
than the number of variables . . . many of the existing works on the management of common-
pool resources, especially those conducted as case studies or those that base their conclusions on
a very small number of cases, suffer from the problem that they do not specify carefully or
explicitly the causal model they are testing. (ibid.: 1661; parentheses in original, emphasis added)
Drawing upon the work of King et al. (1994), Agrawal (2001: 1661) argues
that errors of this kind can result in an emphasis on ‘causal factors that may
not be relevant’, or an omission of ones which are.
Agrawal’s approach is not uncommon in the social sciences. Indeed, one
could make a strong case that it is highly consistent with and (in the case of
King et al., 1994) directly influenced by the work of major intellectual figures
in American political science. In Designing Social Inquiry, King et al. (1994:
7–9) make the case for a social science which makes causal and/or descriptive
inferences on the basis of empirical research, using ‘public’ (as opposed to
private or ‘esoteric’) methods in which conclusions are uncertain, falsifiable,
and contingent upon a recognized system of inference.15
Such assertions are echoed (and apparently influenced) by Karl Popper,
whose Poverty of Historicism (1957) famously rejected the idea that histor-
ical ‘laws of motion’ can be applied in the social sciences as they commonly
are in the natural sciences. Underlying Popper’s case against ‘historicist’
explanation was an important distinction between historical accounts which
look for regularities and ‘innumerate facts . . . in some kind of causal fash-
ion’, and those which argue that ‘unique events . . . may be the cause of other
events’ (Popper, 1957 /1997: 146). In a thinly veiled assault on Marx’s and
Marxist historiography, Popper argues that historicist accounts, in which
causal explanations are made on the basis of ‘unseen’ laws of motion, are
inconsistent with a scientific (and therefore falsifiable) understanding of
reality: ‘The attempt to follow causal chains into the remote past would
15. Other direct linkages can be made between Robert Keohane — a highly influential figure
in political science — and the collective action school. Keohane and Elinor Ostrom, for
instance, co-edited a volume in 1995, which sought to draw theoretical inferences from the
study of ‘heterogeneity and cooperation’ in local and international domains.
424 Craig Johnson
not help in the least, for every concrete effect with which we might start has
a great number of different partial causes; that is to say, initial conditions
are very complex, and most of them have little interest for us’ (ibid.: 150).
To eliminate the bias which, according to Popper, is inherent in all
historicist accounts, social science must introduce a ‘preconceived selective
point of view into one’s history’ (ibid.: 150), which would permit the testing
of competing and falsifiable hypotheses. Methodologies of this kind can be
understood primarily in terms of Popper’s epistemology, which was firmly
grounded in the art of deduction:16
I do not believe that we ever make inductive generalizations in the sense that we start with
observations and try to derive our theories from them. I believe that the prejudice that we
proceed in this way is a kind of optical illusion, and that at no stage of scientific development
do we begin without something in the nature of a theory, such as a hypothesis, or a
prejudice, or a problem — often a technological one — which in some way guides our
observations, and helps us to select from the innumerable objects of observation those which
may be of interest. (ibid.: 134)
Although one would not want to draw too fine a line of congruity,17
current arguments in favour of complementary or ‘tripartite’ (Laitin, 2003)
ways of combining historical narrative, deductive modelling and the con-
struction of positivist theory (for example Bates et al., 1998; Campbell and
Pederson, 2001; King et al., 1994; Laitin, 2003) appear to have far more in
common with Popper’s understanding of history and the behaviouralist
tradition in social science than with the assertions advanced by critical
scholars of common property (for instance Mosse, 1997).18 Underlying
this approach is a foundational belief that historical narrative can be incorp-
orated into a scientific frame, in which the inherent bias of historicist
thinking is eliminated while still maintaining the context of past events.
16. How one forms the original hypothesis, prejudice or problem was a matter of some
difficulty for Popper (cf. Hollis, 1994), rectified only partially by his belief that human
beings are ‘born with expectations’, which are ‘prior to all observational experience’. The
most important of these, he argued, was the expectation of ‘finding a regularity’ (cited in
Hollis, 1994: 74).
17. Although they certainly cite him favourably, King et al. (1994) support an epistemology
that appears quite different from Popper’s. For King et al. (1994), induction and the
interpretation of relevant facts and important debates constitute an important first step in
the acquisition of knowledge.
18. Indeed, although I agree with Immergut’s (1998: 6) assertion that ‘the new institutionalists
vehemently reject observed behaviour as the basic datum of political analysis’, and that
this shared aversion constitutes a theoretical ‘core’ of the approach, I would argue that the
institutional approaches I have documented in this paper share a number of
methodological tenets with the earlier behavioural school, namely the focus on empirical
(as opposed to normative) theorizing, the falsification of testable hypotheses, the
inconclusive nature of theoretical statements, the central importance of method and the
‘public’ nature of social science and the ‘scientific community’. All of these, it is worth
adding, were influenced directly and profoundly by the work of Popper (for a com-
prehensive treatment of behaviouralism in American political science, see Ricci, 1984).
Reflecting on the ‘state of the art’ in institutional scholarship, Campbell and

Pederson (2001) describe what they perceive to be a ‘second movement’ in
institutional analysis, in which historical institutionalists and rational choice
perspectives (along with the work of ‘organizational’ and ‘discursive insti-
tutionalists’) are merging to produce more productive forms of institutional
analysis. Central to their case is the assertion that first, there is ‘no a priori
reason’ that methodological differences (between historical and rational
choice perspectives) should prevent the combination of positivist deduction
and hypothesis testing with ‘thick’ description and, second, there are
complementarities — of arguments, insights and problems — that can be
developed to merge the two approaches (Campbell and Pederson, 2001:
263–9). Along similar lines, King et al. (1994: 37) argue that science and
cultural/historical interpretation ‘are not fundamentally different endeav-
ours aimed at divergent goals’. On the contrary, they contend that historical
and contextual narratives can complement scientific methods ‘by helping to
frame better questions for research’ (ibid.: 38). In this respect, their conclu-
sions are very consistent with those put forth by Bates et al. (1998), in which
the contextual narratives of historical induction are ‘combined’ with the
rigour of deductive positivism (developed largely in the tradition of game
theory and rational choice).
Much like Popper (1957/1997), all of these authors advocate a hypothetic-
deductive approach in which the assumptions, propositions and conclusions
of formal models are tested both in terms of their logical coherence and
their consistency with empirically knowable facts. However, the histor-
iography that underlies the convenient marriage between theory and history
is very different, I think, from that which informs the aforementioned calls
(for history and context) on the part of critical commons scholars. More-
over, and this is quite important, it is not at all clear that historicist
interpretations and the construction of positivist theory can co-exist quite
so easily. As Immergut (1998: 26–7) has argued, there is an important
tension that exists between historical accounts which stress the importance
of particularism, context and contingency, and the construction of theory
based on the systematic comparison of historical conditions and events.
Historical narratives in which social outcomes are explained in terms of a
contextually-specific series of conditions and events do not lend themselves
well to (scientific) comparison. As she concludes: ‘Without a sufficiently
broad comparative perspective, historical institutionalists risk overstating
the uniqueness of their case. Furthermore, it is difficult to see how such
historical narratives can ever be proved wrong’ (Immergut, 1998: 27).
In his controversial Making Social Science Matter, Bent Flybjerg (2001)
argues that attempts to emulate the natural sciences in the social sciences are
inherently self-defeating because scientific inferences about human behav-
iour can never approximate the ‘context-dependent’ factors that determine
human motivation: ‘The problem in the study of human activity is that
every attempt at a context-free definition of an action, that is, a definition
426 Craig Johnson
based on abstract rules or laws, will not necessarily accord with the prag-
matic way an action is defined by actors in a concrete social situation’
(Flyvbjerg, 2001: 42). Of particular concern here is the role that history
can play in social scientific research and, by extension, the way in which
history is understood and applied to the understanding of social phenom-
ena. On this question, Collingwood (1946 /1992: 5) was deeply sceptical:
The past, consisting of particular events in space and time which are no longer happening,
cannot be apprehended by mathematical thinking . . . Nor by scientific thinking, because the
truths which science discovers are known to be true by being found through observation and
experiment exemplified in what we actually perceive, whereas the past has vanished and our
ideas about it can never be verified as we verify our scientific hypotheses.
Although such assertions do not necessarily contradict the approaches

favoured by Bates et al. (1998), King et al. (1994) and Laitin (2003), they do
raise questions about the means by which historians and other social scien-
tists select and interpret the ‘facts’ that are most important to their model.
King et al. (1994: 15) argue that social science research should pursue
questions which are ‘‘‘important’’ in the real world’, and ‘make a specific
contribution to an identifiable scholarly literature by increasing our collect-
ive ability to construct verified scientific explanations of some aspect of the
world’. To be fair, the authors acknowledge early on in their work that they
are dealing primarily with knowledge systems concerned with empirical
inference, and that they quite consciously ‘sidestep’ more controversial
questions relating to ‘the nature and existence of truth, relativism and
related subjects’ (ibid.: 6). Having said that, it is difficult to accept these
assertions without questioning the processes by which importance, relevance
and ‘the real world’ are defined in a scholarly context.
To Collingwood (1946 /1992) and to historians of his persuasion (such as
Hobsbawm, 1987: 1–12; Moore, 1966: 509–23), critical reflection about the
act of historical interpretation constitutes a central aspect of post-scientific
revolution thinking about the past. In a similar vein, ‘post-modern’
re-interpretations of knowledge and knowledge systems are deeply sceptical
about ‘universal’ concepts, such as progress and truth (Harvey, 1990;
Schuurman, 1993). In this respect, a critical reflection about the core values
and assumptions that underlie social science research and social science
questions is fundamental to the acquisition of knowledge.
What makes the current trend in American political science so intriguing
(and here I am referring primarily to the work of Bates et al., 1998;
Campbell and Pedersen, 2001; King et al., 1994; Laitin, 2003) is the relative
lack of theorizing about the core values on which social science should be
based (cf. Flyvbjerg, 2001; Gore, 2000). Indeed, unlike the behaviouralists,
who went to great lengths to defend the separation of facts and values, their
inherent scepticism about normative statements and the empirical study of
human behaviour (see, especially, Ricci, 1984), the new scientific approaches
to political science and to history invest relatively little energy in this
seemingly crucial exercise. As alluded to earlier, the methodologies

advanced by Bates et al. (1998) and King et al. (1994) are justified princi-
pally in terms of what is considered important among a scholarly community.
More dauntingly (see below), Laitin’s (2003: 170) defence of ‘tri-partite’
science appears to favour an evolutionary process of natural selection, in
which ‘antiquated’ methods can and should be discarded if they fail to
produce what he calls ‘valid social knowledge’.
Although it would be misleading to conclude that the collective action
school has advanced a posture of this kind (see below), a connection between
the current trend in American political science and mainstream commons
scholarship can be made. Underlying Agrawal’s aforementioned critique
(2001) of case study research, for instance, was an assumption that the goal
of social science research on the commons is to produce general and pre-
dictive theories of human behaviour. However, at no point in the article does
Agrawal (2001) defend the claim that social science work on the commons
should aim to develop general and predictive theories. Going by the very vocal
arguments that have been marshalled against the pursuit of de-contextualized
theory, we can infer that many critical commons scholars are not interested in
developing general and predictive theories of human behaviour. Indeed, their
ambitions are more modest, and historically specific.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In this article, I have argued that normative and methodological tensions

between entitlement and collective action scholars are reflective of wider
processes ongoing primarily in American political science. I argue that these
tensions are largely concerned with the core questions, values, assumptions
and methodologies that underlie these two different bodies of thought.
Towards the end of the article, I argue that ambitious attempts to merge
scientific approaches with historical narratives are limited in the sense that
they subvert the peculiarities of historical events to the logic of deductive
reasoning. Without an explicit justification for the selection and interpret-
ation of historical ‘facts’ (and for what constitutes facts), treatments of this
kind are unsurprisingly threatening to those who understand history
(including the questions, assumptions, values and methodologies that
inform one’s history) as contingent and context-specific.
In Making Social Science Matter, Flyvbjerg (2001) argues that the retreat
from normative theorizing (what he calls ‘value-rationality’) in the social
sciences is symptomatic of a wider trend, in which the ideals of natural
science have usurped a more traditional Aristotelian concern for questions
concerning ‘Where are we going?’; ‘Is this desirable?’ and ‘What should be
done?’ (Flyvbjerg, 2001: 60). Central to this transformation is the emergence
of a scholarship (what Flyvbjerg calls ‘episteme’) which is centrally
concerned with the construction of generalizable theory inferred from
428 Craig Johnson
hypothetico-deductive methodologies. Such methodologies, he argues, are

particularly hostile to methods based on an appreciation of context and an
application of value-rational theory to issues of praxis (what Flyvbjerg calls
‘phronesis’).19
Flyvbjerg’s thesis raises important questions about what social science is
doing and what it can be expected to do. However, it is not abundantly clear
that the phronetic method he espouses would necessarily resolve problems
of interpretation, a point raised quite convincingly by David Laitin (2003).
Although more nuanced and contingent, the case study approach is surely
prone to the same problems of interpretation and inference, as Clifford
Geertz’s (1973) distinction between a ‘wink’ and a ‘tick’ makes clear. Reflect-
ing on this analogy, King et al. (1994: 41) argue that even the most careful
ethnographies are dependent on the observation and interpretation of
human behaviour.
Far more central to the tensions that exist in the commons literature is a
divergence between a social science which seeks to build theory on the basis
of scientific empiricism and an ethnography which rejects the universalism
that underlies the scientific approach. The post-modern rejection of all
things universal, and the impasse this created for development theory and
practice, was certainly part of this process (cf. Gore, 2000; Schuurman,
1993). Equally important, however, was an evolution in American political
science, in which critical reflections about core values were replaced by a
pragmatic empiricism.20 Biases of this kind were particularly pronounced
during the behavioural movement of the post-war period. However, as I
have argued here, one can make the case that the retreat from critical theory
is equally (and in some ways more) apparent in the new institutionalism, of
which collective action scholarship on the commons is a part.
19. Responding to similar criticisms, Bates et al. (1998: 11) argue that the methods they
espouse are primarily ‘problem driven’, and are not centrally concerned with building
theory. However, these assertions do not appear entirely consistent with their concluding
chapter (ibid.: 231–6), in which they assess the extent to which game theoretic modes and
historical narratives can be applied in other settings. Although they take great care to
stress that such comparisons depend on the complementarities of the cases being
compared, the very fact that they seek to assess the generalizability of their assertions
suggests that they are interested in the construction of theory.
20. The reasons for the normative retreat in American political science are a matter of some
debate, and go well beyond the scope of this paper. Included among many possible
explanations are the professionalization, fragmentation and organization of academia
(Cohn, 1999; Ricci, 1984); the development of new and powerful quantitative techniques
(Cohn, 1999); the desire to emulate natural science, particularly among mainstream
economics (Cohn, 1999; Fine, 2001; Flyvbjerg, 2001); the aversion to value-laden
theorizing in America during McCarthyism and the Cold War (Leys, 1996); the
pragmatic orientation of development studies (Leys, 1996); and, more recently, the
widespread discrediting of grand normative theories of development and change (Gore,
2000; Leys, 1996; Schuurman, 1993).
The problem this creates for the study of social phenomena (such as
common property relations) is that proponents of context and ethnographic
method and those favouring a scientific frame are left with little common
ground to stand on. This is due in large part to the very large gap that exists
between a post-modern rejection of universal theorizing, which appears
fundamental to the critique of critical commons scholars, and a pragmatic
approach to empirical research. The concern of course is that power and
pragmatism — as opposed to open and critical reflection and debate — will
define and decide the direction of scholarship. In his critique of Bent
Flyvbjerg’s (2001) call for a more contextualized social science, David Laitin
(2003: 170) argues that methodologies based on context and historical
narrative ‘must be combined with statistical and formal analysis if the
goal is valid social knowledge’. Responding to the ‘Perestroikan challenge’
to the perceived lack of pluralism within American political science, Laitin
(ibid.: 180) concludes that, ‘A scientific frame would lead us to expect
that certain fields will become defunct, certain debates dead, and certain
methods antiquated. A pluralism that shelters defunct practitioners cannot
be scientifically justified’.
In other words, the explanatory utility of a methodology or a discipline
can be measured in terms of the contribution it makes to our understanding
of social phenomena. Scientific rigour thus provides a ‘natural’ means of
selecting the methodologies that will best explain the things we want to
know. However, what we want to know and how we go about knowing it
are surely contestable questions, whose values and assumptions should be
subject to the kinds of hard inquiry that Popper (1957/1997) so strongly
favoured. Without a strong and contested justification of what constitutes
desirable social knowledge, the difference between using scientific rigour to
separate good theories from bad and the construction of dogma becomes
very fine indeed.
Towards the end of their concluding chapter, Campbell and Pedersen
(2001: 274) make the crucial observation that ‘political criteria’ (alongside
empirical validity and normative considerations) will determine the extent to
which different theoretical ‘paradigms’ in the institutional literature will be
able to combine to produce a second movement in institutional analysis:
There is ample evidence showing that those paradigmatic views that came to dominate the
intellectual landscape at different moments in history did so in part because they were
backed by substantial material resources and intellectual elites who were able to gain
footholds in important institutional arenas where they could articulate their ideas, train
protégés, and establish influential intellectual and professional networks for the propagation
of their views. (ibid.)
In this article, I have (hopefully) made the case that the commons literature,
and the journals and academic associations in which this literature has been
articulated, are by no means as closed and dogmatic about alternative and
critical interpretations of reality. Indeed, it is a testament to bodies like the
430 Craig Johnson
International Association for the Study of Common Property that such a

diverse range of methodologies and opinions can co-exist. That having been
said, I would argue that critical reflections about methodology — and
within them, reflections about history’s role in methodology — are in
need of further scrutiny (a point made forcefully by Agrawal, 2001).
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San Francisco, CA: Institute for Contemporary Studies.
Craig Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political

Science at the University of Guelph (Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1, Canada).
His research interests centre upon the political economy of resource access
and conflict in rural areas, primarily in South and Southeast Asia. A central
focus of his research and scholarship has been the historical and theoretical
links among property rights, institutions and environmental conservation.
In association with the London-based Overseas Development Institute, he is
currently completing a three-year study of decentralization and rural liveli-
hood diversification in India. Future research will include a three-year study
of globalization, livelihoods and poverty in the Indian State of Madhya
Pradesh, and an inquiry into the changing nature of environmental vulner-
ability in low-income areas of the developing world.
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Uncommon Ground: The ‘Poverty of History’ in

Common Property Discourse

It would not be a great exaggeration to say that scholars of environmental

Rejecting and in many cases disproving Hardin’s famous parable (1968),

management, exclusion and alienation, thereby creating and /or maintaining

1. Mosse (1997) classifies these two schools in terms of ‘economic-institutional’ and

sanctions that encourage individuals to conserve the commons, ‘entitlement

school aims to contribute to an empirically-grounded theory of social

EFFICIENCY, EQUITY AND THE ‘COMMONS DILEMMA’

the creation of an incipient working class (Thompson, 1963: 237–58).

regulating the ways in which individuals obtain access to a ‘natural’ flow of

To borrow an analogy from Polanyi (1957), mainstream scholarship on the

COLLECTIVE ACTION AND THE COMMONS DILEMMA

Collective action scholarship on the commons is thus principally interested

affect social outcomes. Such outcomes are explained both in terms of

Framed in this way, past decisions, co-operation and institutional arrange-

created a situation in which the probability of losses, resulting from malfea-

Primarily a review of evidence and argument, the assertions made by Baland

Table 1. Collective Action and Entitlement Scholarship on the Commons7

Problematic Conservation and management Inequality and access

These calculations are extrapolated from Jodha’s four-year study of poverty

In my own research, which documents the establishment and enforcement of

poor terms of trade. Even for the relatively well-endowed owner-operators,

theoretic, the implication here is that different property rights regimes

SHIPS IN THE NIGHT: HISTORY AND SCIENCE IN COMMONS

In an important and provocative article, Arun Agrawal (2001) makes the

Particularly undeveloped in the literature, he argues, are studies which

variables in a given analysis, and a shift toward comparative rather than

Reflecting on the ‘state of the art’ in institutional scholarship, Campbell and

Although such assertions do not necessarily contradict the approaches

seemingly crucial exercise. As alluded to earlier, the methodologies

In this article, I have argued that normative and methodological tensions

hypothetico-deductive methodologies. Such methodologies, he argues, are

International Association for the Study of Common Property that such a

Craig Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political

XXVI, 2, 2003 –– Ecology of the Modern World-System

Institutions $98/yr. Managing Editor, Review

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