Challenges and potentials in collaborative management of urban commons

Abstract

Governance of shared resources has been intensely studied by Elinor Ostrom and colleagues. There is a very rich body of work on the governance of shared resources such as fisheries, watersheds, woodlands and the like, These authors have shown that common resources can be managed effectively without recourse to privatization or direct government control. This paper seeks to highlight key issues of how commons in urban settings have been studied in academic literature with the purpose to develop an understanding of what, if any, characteristics are specific or accentuated in the governance of urban commons. The paper begins with a brief discussion of how the commons framework and its application in traditional commons and proceeds to a discussion of urban commons. Subsequently we seek to delineate a small set of characteristics that seem relevant in many of the studied cases and which seem to derive from characteristics of the urban setting. We argue that a careful consideration of these characteristics will provide input to a much-needed understanding of how shared resources in an urban setting can be collaboratively managed and developed.

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