As studies have shown, natural resources and livelihoods sustained by the commons are under assault around the world by multinational firms acting conjointly with host-national governments. In some cases, international agencies are also complicit; although troubling, their failure to protect the commons is unsurprising—given the lack of international norms focused on protecting the commons.
We draw on a village impact study from Sierra Leone, where the World Bank (WB), joined by the African Development Bank and others, sponsored a hydroelectric project that dispossessed subsistence farmers of common lands jointly held by kin-groups and farmed individually by households, using a rotational bush-fallow system adapted to the local environment. By diminishing their holdings, the project significantly reduced the capacity of user communities to avoid the commons dilemma of resource depletion—shortening fallow periods, degrading soils and sharply increasing labor for weeding—all without adequate compensation for recurrent losses, nor due consideration in project design. At the same time, however, the WB and its partners took great care to follow international norms protecting biodiversity.
The primary source of international neglect, we argue, is epistemic, a consequence of how the commons has ordinarily been defined and represented in both scholarly and public discourse—in terms of the weakness of exclusion rather the tenure rights of users. If principles of inclusion, such as tenure rights, are understood as constitutive of the commons, then external vulnerability is a universal commons attribute; for tenure necessarily depends on external recognition, exposing users to local and global asymmetries of power. When national governments fail to recognize the tenure rights of commons users, international agencies can provide a critical source of leverage—if supported by recognized international norms. Articulating those norms is important, unfinished work collectively for commons scholars, in particular, the IASC.
