Progress report

Progress in Human Geography

1–8
Political ecology III: The ª The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0309132516664433
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Matthew D. Turner
University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA

Abstract
Different intellectual strands within political ecology have analyzed changing forms of property institutions
and the commons in particular. While engaging these topics from a number of different perspectives, they
share common understandings of property rights as relational, contested, and shaped by broader political
economies. What is less acknowledged is that political ecologists have, in different ways, studied the hybrid
and mixed forms of property institutions that are often concealed or ignored in the tripartite division of
private, common, and national properties that dominates institutionalist literatures. These theoretical
commitments and research experiences are well-suited for understanding the proliferation of hybrid
property institutions associated with neoliberal forms of governance. By briefly reviewing their synergies, this
report seeks to bring these diverse strands in conversation. It concludes by highlighting useful avenues of
political ecological research and practice that are raised by commoning scholarship and activism.

Keywords
hybridity, neoliberalism, privatization, property

I Introduction Study of the Commons. Still, political ecology’s

theoretical commitments have always sat awk-
The ‘commons’ have figured prominently in the
wardly with those of institutionalist approaches
intellectual history of political ecology as an
that dominate the interdisciplinary commons
approach. Early political ecologists seriously
literature. While these approaches are not inher-
questioned the simplified, rational-choice treat-
ently incompatible, their emphases do differ
ments of society inherent in ‘tragedy of the
markedly – with political ecology focusing on
commons’ formulations. Arguably, the ‘solu-
differences in material interest and power and
tions’ to the tragedy offered by tragedy analysts
the institutionalists’ concern with the collective
– government control and privatization – have
action problem surrounding the benefits derived
served as major foils for political ecological
from a commonly-held good.1
analysis. Enclosures of all sorts including
Building from the same rational-choice
national parks, land titling, and assorted land
premises as Harden, Nobel Prize winner
grabs by private capital have figured promi-
Elinor Ostrom played an instrumental role in
nently in animating the social justice outrage
surrounding conservation and development pro-
grams that fueled and continue to fuel political
Corresponding author:
ecological analysis. Reflecting this, self- Matthew D. Turner, Department of Geography, University
described political ecologists have played active of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
roles in the International Association for the Email: mturner2@wisc.edu

Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at CORNELL UNIV on August 27, 2016

2 Progress in Human Geography
demonstrating that government control and pri-
vatization were not the only solutions for what
Harden eventually retitled ‘the tragedy of the
mismanaged commons’. Ostrom and others
demonstrated that clearly-defined social groups
do self-organize to effectively manage circum-
scribed sets of resources. Clearly, there are other
forms of property and social organization that
could operate successfully outside of the binary
of government control and private property. The
commons literature has provided both intellec-
tual argument and compelling case material to
counter widespread arguments for land privati-
zation and the expansion of state-controlled
reserves and protected areas. This work has had
a significant effect on environmental govern-
ance, contributing to the spread of community-
based approaches to resource management and
conservation worldwide.
Despite these successes, concerns have been
raised about the ability of the common property
framework to address the analytical and politi-
cal challenges created by the proliferation of
‘neoliberal’ models of governance. Neoliberal
environmental policy has not led to ubiquitous
privatization but a proliferation of hybrid forms
of property rights created by new enclosures of
commonly-held resources without the elimina-
tion of more public rights and responsibilities.
Strongly shaped by its reaction against ‘tragedy
analyses’, commons literature has been domi-
nated by studies that seek to demonstrate the
existence, characteristics, and functioning of
common pool property institutions while gener-
ally ignoring or downplaying cases of mixed
institutional forms, ‘weak’ or nonexisting (e.g.
open access) property institutions.2 As a result,
its analytical tools are less suited for under-
standing mixed public-private forms or consid-
ering situations where formal property
institutions of any kind may not be warranted
or effective.
In this report, I seek to bring together a
number of strands within political ecology scho-
larship that speak, in different ways, to the
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diversification of property regimes that deviate
from the tripartite divisions of national, common,
and private properties. The premise of this report
is that their synergies are often under-appreciated
or, at the very least, not openly recognized, thus
leading to a missed opportunity for the develop-
ment of a common set of arguments. In exploring
these synergies, I necessarily will engage with
bodies of scholarship that remain somewhat sep-
arate circles of scholarship within political ecol-
ogy: work that focuses on communities and the
politics that surround their commonly-held
resources and work concerned with questions
of state governance and privatization.3 In review-
ing the interface between these stands, I will
argue that political ecology’s historical engage-
ment with the complexity of the phrase ‘access to
resources’ provides a strong analytical frame-
work for addressing some of the deficiencies of
dominant institutionalist frameworks for under-
standing mixed property forms. I conclude by
relating political ecology to the expanding liter-
ature and activism of ‘commoning’. In so doing, I
hope to plant some seeds (Robbins, 2004) for
constructive engagement by political ecologists
in the (re)making of environmental governance
and property relations. Given the limits of space,
my citations within these literatures are necessa-
rily incomplete and eclectic.
II Properties: Common
and otherwise
Scholars or activists seeking to support or create
common property institutions in the industria-
lized world have expressed frustration with the
dominance of cases in the commons literature
from rural developing world settings (e.g.
Bresnihan and Byrne, 2015). Their frustration
stems from the seeming lack of correspondence
between cases of what are seen as closed soci-
eties of villages and clans organized around
commonly-held pastures, forests, or fisheries
portrayed within the commons literature with
the realities that they are facing with socially-
Turner
porous groups organizing/negotiating around
multiple sets of resources governed by multi-
layered rights and institutions.
As an Africanist, I would argue that cases of
‘pure’ common property – meeting the require-
ments laid out by Ostrom (1990: 90) – are actu-
ally much rarer in developing countries than is
often thought. Empirical work has shown that
systems of common property governance often
include overlapping systems of rights – some
held by sovereigns on behalf of the community,
some shared by members of the community, and
some held by individuals. From multiple per-
spectives, such ‘confused’ systems of property
rights are seen as ‘primitive’ with economic
development both demanding and leading to
their demise (Demsetz, 1967; Glassman, 2006).
These rights are strongly relational – with rights
not solely private or solely communal, and the
relative strength of property claims of a person or
community depending on who is making a com-
peting claim (Bakker, 2013). This is consistent
with work on property as a social institution, one
best thought of as the control over a stream of
benefits against the claims of others. Popular
notions of the physical parcel of land as property
in the West are historically unique – shaped by
what Blomley (2015) describes as the territoria-
lization of property. While more likely ignored in
the West, property is inherently relational and
thus deeply political.
Within the development literature, recogni-
tion of the limitations of institutionalist perspec-
tives to address this complexity has grown with
terms such as ‘institutional bricolage’ and ‘criti-
cal institutionalism’ increasingly invoked (Hall
et al., 2014). As an approach, political ecology
has long embraced the relational underpinnings
of property. This view of property rights as being
socially-mediated, over-lapping and contested,
and necessarily embedded within people’s liveli-
hoods, has been further developed and articu-
lated by political ecologists and others since
(e.g. Leach et al., 1999; Ribot and Peluso,
2003). The view of a singular resource managed
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3
by a closed social group using a single set of rules
reflects more the framings of common property
scholarship than the reality of commonly-held
resources in the developing world.4 While insti-
tutional contexts differ, the complexity and mul-
tiplicity of commonly-held property in the
Global South and North are similar (Blomley,
2008).
III Analysis and management
of the commons
A range of scholars have critiqued development
and conservation efforts to improve common
property management, as intentionally or unin-
tentionally working to advance market principles
to the detriment of the public good (Goldman,
1997).5 The concern is not about rule-making per
se6 but the common tendency to seek to improve
the management of resources by formalizing
rules of access and clearly circumscribing
commonly-held resources and the social groups
using them. Formalization and circumscription
by local communities can occur both in consort
with and in resistance to territorialization pro-
grams of the state (Peluso, 2005). This process
has been described as ‘proxy privatization’ by
Osborne (2015), since both formalization and
circumscription can contribute directly to priva-
tization and individualization (Mansfield, 2004)
– two of six key elements of commodification as
described by Castree (2003). In addition, other
work has shown that these elements may contrib-
ute over time to changing views of land and other
commonly-held resources themselves – contri-
buting to ideas that they could be seen as alien-
able with rights to them bought and sold (e.g. Li,
2007; Osborne, 2015; Green and Baird, 2016).
IV New forms of governance
and the commons
Over the past 25 years there has been an
embrace of smaller government, privatization,
liberalization of markets, and increased reliance
4 Progress in Human Geography
on market mechanisms for regulation. This
complex, contradictory, and conflicted set of
processes has loosely been assigned the
umbrella label of neoliberalism. Associated
with these trends, there has been an emphasis
on the privatization of government services and
renewed efforts to formalize property rights. At
the same time there are reports of a large expan-
sion of government-controlled protected areas
with variable access rights accorded to individ-
uals and groups (Deguignet et al., 2014) as well
as the growth of government-recognized com-
mon property areas (Agrawal, 2007). These
trends alone suggest that the neoliberalism has
not resulted in ubiquitous ‘full’ privatization.
It is important to recognize that the expansion
of mixed forms of property with neoliberalism
due to the uneven and incomplete expansion of
private rights is not surprising. Unfettered pri-
vate property and commodification, despite the
rhetoric, do not serve society or capital interests.
This reflects not only Polanyi’s double move-
ment but the demands of capital for
government-provided services that are critical
for accumulation (Robertson, 2006; Robbins
et al., 2012). In short, the proliferation of
commons-like institutions is not necessarily
anti-capitalist but actually can be seen as an
attempt to sustain the functioning of capitalism
(Caffentzis, 2010).
These points are illustrated by the case of the
‘global land grab’ that most typically refers to
the loss of often commonly-held lands in the
Global South (Baird, 2014). This phenomenon,
which suggests large-scale privatization of land,
has led to a revisitation of the concept of primi-
tive accumulation. New treatments of primitive
accumulation as well as the concept of accumu-
lation by dispossession emphasize that enclo-
sure is not a development stage of capitalism
but an ongoing process of privatization and pro-
letarianization (Harvey, 2003; Glassman,
2006). Moreover, state actions lie at the heart
of extra-economic mechanisms of dispossession
of commonly and privately-held land, with the
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resulting forms of privatization depending on
the invocations of national interest if not types
of nationalized property (Baird, 2011). Political
ecologists have contributed significantly to our
understanding of: the complex politics underly-
ing these dispossessions (McCarthy, 2004; Hart,
2006; Baird, 2011; Hall, 2012); the importance
of the characteristics of the resource being dis-
possessed (Sneddon, 2007; Perreault, 2012);
and how dispossessions can lead to a mix of
property rights held by different actors (Green
and Baird, 2016). If we see de-commoning
(enclosure) as an ongoing contested process that
just as often produces property claims of mixed
rather than pure form, we can see the process of
communing, which will be turned to later in this
report, as a similarly contested process that
seeks to expand shared rights and responsibil-
ities within mixed property forms.
V The proliferation of mixed
property relations
Recent research has shown a proliferation of
property forms in which the state, private indi-
viduals and various social groups of civil soci-
ety hold rights and responsibilities over
different benefits/services provided by a bio-
physical feature or process (e.g. Brown, 2007;
Holder and Flessas, 2008; Bakker, 2010). More-
over, situations of overlapping rights of differ-
ent forms held by different individuals and
groups are not new to the world but have been
simplified or ignored by standard common
property analyses. At a basic level, we can think
of the production of mixed institutional forms
under capitalism as resulting from barriers to
full privatization (including lack of privatiza-
tion interest) and the incomplete layering of
more private claims onto public goods and
services.
As common property scholars have long
argued, practical difficulties in enclosing cer-
tain resources can inhibit the full development
of private rights. The oceans or atmosphere are
Turner
often used as examples of common pool
resources that, because of the difficulties (or
high cost) of enclosure, may be better seen as
public goods (despite the fact that their use sub-
tracts from the use of others). With technologi-
cal change, information and knowledge
likewise have become increasingly difficult to
enclose (Caffentzis, 2010; Hardt and Negri,
2011). Still, if a resource in question is of suf-
ficient interest to capital, different services of
even atmospheric or oceanic systems can be
enclosed for private use through government
regulation (e.g. Mansfield, 2004, 2006). Thus
we may see the transformation but not elimina-
tion of the commons through privatization, due
to barriers and the resistance of people – the
commons that persist are not the simple por-
trayals of the pure commons but of hybrid form,
what Eizenberg (2012) describes as the ‘actu-
ally existing commons’. It is most telling that it
is generally resources of limited value to capital
– unproductive drylands or vacant lots in
economically-depressed neighborhoods –
where privatization pressures are low and ‘com-
moning’ of the poor remains most visible
(Blomley, 2008; Foster, 2011). This can also
be seen in the case of the privatization of gov-
ernment services, with private firms only
accepting those services and service areas that
are profitable, shedding the unprofitable ser-
vices and areas to governments or community
groups (Bakker, 2013; Harris, 2013).
The growth of mixed or hybrid property
forms cannot be explained by barriers to full
enclosure or commodification alone. The
growth of market-based environmental regula-
tion has been associated with the layering of use
rights to different characteristics of nonhuman
nature. For instance, while the atmosphere can-
not be ‘owned’, regulatory attempts have cre-
ated tradeable carbon offset credits, such as the
Clean Development Mechanism’s Certified
Emission Reduction Credits, or tradeable rights
to release SO2 or CO2 (emission permits). The
vagaries of the atmosphere’s weather have also
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5
been capitalized on as another risk to be insured
against in the form of catastrophe bonds or
index-based insurance schemes (Johnson,
2013a, 2013b). Arguably, the creativity of
efforts to create financial value reaches its most
flamboyant extreme (at least currently) in the
stacking of ecosystem service credits where
spatially-overlapping credits for different eco-
system services (e.g. biodiversity, carbon, and
water-quality) are bought/valued by various
entities while being produced/maintained/
owned by different social groups (Robertson
et al., 2014). As Robertson and Wainwright
(2013) argue, the proliferation of these new
abstracted assets and commodities exposes
the limited attention by political ecologists
and others to longstanding debates over the
question of value. Processes of valuation are
important not only for the necessary quan-
tification required for exchange but reflect
who values, pays for, and owns the ‘services’
in question.
These new property systems deviate strongly
from visions of the tripartite division of private,
common and national property. They often have
mixed or hybrid forms and thus are similar to
the forms of customary tenure where multiple
rights are held by different people to different
streams of benefits from agricultural land, for-
ests, or fisheries. They are thus neither novel nor
necessarily unsuited for social and ecological
realities. In fact, it could be argued that they
better reflect the true relational nature of prop-
erty where webs of social relations encircle con-
tested resources with value. The violence
associated with enclosure is mirrored by the
analytical violence done by those institution-
alists who overly simplify property systems
and in so doing exclude the rights of individ-
uals and communities in their portrayal of the
collective action problem. One would hope
that political ecology, whether First or Third
World, brings to these situations a sensitivity
to the micropolitics that surround these com-
plex property systems.
6 Progress in Human Geography

VI Political ecology constructively with communities and activists

and commoning
The proliferation of ‘actually existing com-
mons’ around the world illustrates how com-
mon property is a set of social institutions and
interactions that not only allocate a stream of
benefits but produce and maintain them. A rec-
ognition of the ‘commons’ as a set of social
relations that are not fixed but changing has led
some to argue that the term common(s) should
also be seen as a verb: ‘to common’ (Frederici,
2010; Fournier, 2013; Bresnihan and Byrne,
2015; Noterman, 2016). Invocations of ‘com-
moning’ are most prevalent in the industrialized
world. In contrast to a rule-based allocative
commons, these efforts embrace a political and
moral commons of production in resistance to
the individualization and privatization inherent
to capitalism (McCarthy, 2005; Blomley, 2008;
St. Martin, 2009; Foster, 2011).
Given that the commons can be seen as being
produced to support capitalism, there are clearly
tensions with the new embrace of cooperatives,
urban gardens, conservancies, and community-
controlled resources. Some commentators dis-
tinguish actions that seek to defend or produce
communal rights under capitalism as pro-
capitalist in contrast to anti-capitalist common-
ing movements (Caffentzis, 2010). Moreover,
rural indigenous groups defending their com-
munal rights are seen as reactive (defending
precapitalist claims) rather than proactive to
capital (promoting alternatives). Unfortunately,
to this reader, it is far from clear how the devel-
opment of community-based urban agriculture
in Detroit is any more anti-capitalist than strug-
gles by West Africans to defend their ‘ancestral’
village lands against the dispossession by inter-
national concessionaires. Yes, the latter is reac-
tive, but not through simply an invocation of
tradition but through ever changing and creative
ways.
Commoning activism and scholarship offer
opportunities to political ecologists to work
in support of their attempts to develop condi-
tions that support shared use, management, and
production of needed resources. Such efforts
would most likely be with ‘actually existing
commons’ of mixed rather than pure property
form. Therefore, it would allow political ecolo-
gists to grapple with illuminating how these
mixed institutional forms work in practice as
mediated by ideology and political power (see
Noterman, 2016). One could point to a number
of political ecologists that have been involved in
such efforts but, as a field, political ecology can
learn much from the new commoning literature
and the theoretical understandings of property
that underlie it. Political ecology as well has
much to offer the commoning field – not only
through its history of scholarship on the social
mediation of resource access but through its suc-
cess of working through differences and com-
monalities between the political ecologies of
the South and North. This rich history provides
political ecology with a depository of analyses
and activism around the processes of de-
commoning and commoning across a wide range
of cultural and political-economic contexts.
Acknowledgements
This report benefited from conversations with Leila
Harris, Elsa Noterman, and Morgan Robertson. Its
deficiencies are all mine.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of inter-
est with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the
research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Notes
1. Political ecological analyses of the commons generally
fall into Johnson’s ‘entitlement’ scholarship on the
commons (in contrast to ‘collective action’ scholarship)

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Turner
and McCay and Jentoft’s thick (versus thin) model of
explanation in commons research (McCay and Jentoft,
1998; Johnson, 2004).
2. Ostrom’s ‘polycentric’ framework is designed to
provide a means to analyze more complex property
systems (Ostrom, 2010).
3. These bodies of work only loosely align with the pro-
blematic but commonly invoked distinction between
First and Third World political ecologies
4. Common property scholarship has tended to treat
common property management as a collective action
problem with the need for clear and transparent rules to
contain free-riding and to avoid the conflict and social
tensions that arise from unrestrained individualistic
behavior.
5. This is despite the fact that these efforts, except in the
case of some payment for ecosystem service schemes, are
presented unambiguously as alternatives to privatization.
6. Although in some cases explicit formal rules may not be
necessary for long-term successful management of
common-pool resources. It has been argued that such
‘open-access’ situations can in fact work socially and
ecologically (e.g. Mansfield, 2006; Moritz et al., 2013).
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