{"id":181,"date":"2018-09-11T17:29:28","date_gmt":"2018-09-11T17:29:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mint.10yearsafterthecrash.com\/?p=181"},"modified":"2020-02-17T05:35:23","modified_gmt":"2020-02-17T05:35:23","slug":"book-review-bending-the-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/book-review-bending-the-rules\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Bending the Rules"},"content":{"rendered":"

Review of Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals: Cooperative Alternatives Beyond Markets and States.<\/em>
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\nDerek Wall has fashioned a short guide for radicals from the work of a non-radical economics heavyweight.
\n\u200b
\nReview\u00a0by John Barry<\/strong><\/p>\n

Derek Wall is a radical in his integration of scholarship and green political and movement activism in the UK. He has written a \u201crule book for radicals\u201d based on the ideas of less-than-radical thinker, non-activist and Nobel Prize winner, Elinor Ostrom. Arguably there is a contradiction in drawing radical implications and strategies from someone who themselves is not so inclined. This is the conundrum Wall covers in this admirably short, well-written and sharply observed book.<\/p>\n

Ostrom is best known as an academic who became the first and only female Nobel Laureate in economics whose work on the commons and common pool resources, empirically challenged the \u201ctragedy of the commons\u201d idea \u2013 where individuals users of a shared resource act solely in their own\u00a0self-interest but against the common good by depleting or damaging the resource. \u00a0She disproved the idea through field studies on small, local communities manage shared natural resources, such as fishing waters and forests. Her work proved that when natural resources are collectively owned and managed, people develop rules (including sanctions and exclusion of non-owners) on how the resources are used and cared for in ways that are democratic, productive and ecologically sustainable.Wall describes his task as to \u201cmake her work accessible and to show how those on the left, especially the ecosocialist left, can make productive use of her diverse and provocative thinking\u201d. Wall largely agrees with most of Ostrom\u2019s work, and he is clearly inspired by her. This makes his \u201cradical\u201d reading of Ostrom\u2019s ideas a little forced at times but he has not written a hagiography. He points out gently inter alia, the gap between her personal commitment to radical ideas and her professional silence on those; her lack of political activism; and her inattention to the importance of culture (a flaw Wall rightly claims she shares with Marx).<\/span><\/p>\n

Ostrom herself was a pragmatist more than a political radical. She was perhaps a liberal democratic pragmatist \u2013\u00a0a problem-solver in the American pragmatist tradition. But she consistently abjured overtly political approaches in her research \u2013 viewing them perhaps as dogmatic and constraining and violating some sense of \u201cobjective\u201d or \u201cvalue free\u201d social science. As Wall notes: \u201cOne rule that radicals can take from Ostrom is that we should reject slogans and broad principles but instead focus on interventions. We want an ecological society, so rather than simply proclaiming this we need to ask what this means in practice\u201d. Here bread and roses come to mind. Can we not have both? Indeed, do we not need both \u2013 vision and critique alongside policy and practices?<\/p>\n

However, I do completely take Wall\u2019s point in terms of Ostrom\u2019s pragmatism acting as a useful counterbalance to the abstract critique and prophylactic proselytising about \u201cafter the revolution\u201d than still sadly infects progressive politics. Later in the book he notes:
\n\u201cWhile she personally enjoyed debate, problem solving was what she emphasised. She was not looking for an essential and total solution to say, ecological problems or inequality but kept these concerns in the background and was interested in a specific intervention in a particular context [emphasis added].\u201d<\/p>\n

And here one wonders how Ostrom managed to background and bracket-out inequality, for example, when examining a problem of resource mismanagement. Or how inequality, power, class, race, or gender were eventually then brought back (if indeed they were) into her diagnosis, analysis and prescription.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, Wall makes a stout defence of the radical implications of her ideas. He interprets them imaginatively from Ostrom\u2019s dry, formalistic presentation of her defence of the commons, cooperative management of resources and so on, and her use of the often deadly dull and politically insipid language of game theory, prisoner\u2019s dilemma, common pool resources and open access regimes.<\/p>\n

This book demonstrates that there is a horizon of organisational and creative possibility beyond the state and the market and that Ostrom\u2019s \u201ccareful research is a powerful weapon of self-defence for those who wish to protect a commons under threat\u201d. And more than that, Wall shows how in pre-dating modern states and markets, forms of commons regimes and systems offer robust, existing examples of localised, democratic and egalitarian politics and political economy.<\/p>\n

While critical of the free market, neither Ostrom nor Wall is suggesting commons as necessarily supplanting the state. And neither of them is proposing commons as the main means for the transition beyond \u201cactually existing unsustainability\u201d and ecocidal capitalism. Wall views the commons as complementing the state, but with a preference for decentralising and empowering communities to manage commons as much where feasible. He sees a democratising state empowering and enabling localised, citizen-based productive resource ownership and control.<\/p>\n

Wall shows that Ostrom herself was more a liberal than a radical. \u00a0And there are even tentative indications in Wall\u2019s interpretation of Ostrom that her ideas are compatible with a distinctly \u201crepublican\u201d account of democracy as collective self-management and echo some of the \u201clibertarian municipal\u201d ideas of Murray Bookchin and that her focus on \u201cmicro-level\u201d radical institutional change complements the \u201cmacro-level\u201d stressed by Marx.<\/p>\n

But even within the liberal tradition \u2013 as portrayed, for example, in de Tocqueville\u2019s magisterial analysis of 19th century America: Democracy in America (an inspiration for Ostrom) \u2013 we can find arguments for building a more democratic society and not simply a more democratic political system. And Wall is correct in pointing out that she was not a \u201ccapital G\u201d Green yet she shared many of the values and principles of Greens such as Wall and indeed myself. Those ideas include her views on \u201csatisficing\u201d \u2013 taking a course that will satisfy the minimum requirements to achieve a particular goal; her critique of overconsumption; her concern for the democratic and sustainability benefits of commoning and commons systems; support for more participative democratic decision-making; and her personal (but regrettably not professional or political) support for worker cooperatives.<\/p>\n

Her eight design rules (which should in my view be read in conjunction with permaculture design principles) are:<\/p>\n