Ostrom, the Commons and the Green New Deal

In the course of this effort to find new community paradigms, there has been an ongoing, albeit unexpressed, tendency to gravitate towards what can be viewed as a cluster of three thought leaders, all of whom are women. All three are seen as being clustered around the concept of positively addressing and engaging complexity.

They are Donella Meadows, who has an NCP wiki page, Jane Jacobs, for whom though I haven’t yet built a wiki page, is foundational to Placemaking and the work of Project for Public Spaces particularly her ideas on organized complexity and, although until now neglected despite growing awareness and appreciation, Elinor (Lin) Ostrom.

The initial resource for this post, through Marginal Revolution University, was Elinor Ostrom | Women in Economics. The reason for the current focus, in addition to an understanding that the environmental resources introduced in the last post are not enough on their own to face the wicked challenge of climate change, is due to a question asked on both Twitter and the Facebook group The Ecology of Systems Thinking, “Wondering how Elinor Ostrom's ideas could be applied to the Green New Deal and scaled up to be applied not only nationally but globally?” The result of which was several additional useful resources and an enlightened, educational discussion.

With the world’s climate being considered as the ultimate commons, Ostrom’s Eight Principles for Managing a Commons can be seen as a counter to Garrett Hardin’s more pessimistic perspective on the Tragedy of the Commons problem, which is a systems thinking archetype (number 2 in the list). ”Unnecessary tragedies, like ozone holes and national debts, greenhouse effects and urban air pollution are examples of the Tragedy of the Commons”. In these examples provided by Daniel Kim, two different Causal Loop Diagrams display how the archetype works. As he points out, “Perhaps the trickiest part of identifying a 'Tragedy of the Commons' archetype at work is coming to some agreement on exactly what is the commons that is being overburdened.”

Upon closer examination, Hardin’s approach seems less a top-down means of command and control to the benefit of greedy landlords and more an understandable concern regarding how to address unsustainable population growth. The primary point of disagreement is that Ostrom ”challenged the presumption that rational individuals were helplessly trapped in dilemmas.” 16:04

The above quote is taken from the primary resource for this post, Ostrom’s 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences lecture at Indiana University in which she goes over her basic ideas discussed more fully in her Nobel Prize Lecture paper, on polycentric governance complex economic systems, and the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (24:14) and of particular note, ”Demonstrated that complexity is not the same as chaos in regard to metropolitan governance” (21:13 & 22:13).

A number of her other ideas expressed in the lecture were found especially noteworthy.

“The rules that we use to govern a university, a private firm, a water resource, or any kind of problem need to fit the socio-ecological area or field that they are supposed to control. Having one kind of rule that will work everywhere is a ridiculous kind of thinking.” (17:05)

“The second is that polycentric systems with multiple scales enable a fit between human action situations day to day situations and nested ecological systems.” (17:34). Ostrom seems to use the term situations and the complex environments in which they occur in a manner similar to Russell Ackoff’s idea of messes and others in systems thinking.

So likely any top-down systems, even those well-intentioned such as the Green New Deal, at least in its present form without far more bottom-up policy and technical input, could be suspect.

“Panaceas are dysfunctional” 17:52 I have no doubt that she would have included any specific instance of her own systemic approach and any derivatives, directing attention to the first principle listed above.

“The internal would be actors who are in positions that can take action in light of information that they have and how much control they can take and their net benefits and outcomes and then choose outcomes.” (26:35)

“And when they made decisions anomalously and there was no communication, they did what the theory predicted Just as we found in the field that when it was very big and they couldn’t communicate they over-harvested. All we had to do was introduce the possibility of face to face communication, which is referred to in-game theory as cheap talk, doesn’t make any difference, that enabled them to increase cooperation greatly, and then we allowed them to design their own sanctioning system and they went up to 90% of optimal, a fantastically positive result…” (36:42)

What has to change then is the framework in which these complex interactions occur making the transformation into new paradigms for communities possible. The most important requirement, trust.

“We find that learning to trust others is central. You cannot have a small, medium or large or very large governance mechanism that works over time when people do not trust one another.“ (41:17) This point was also emphasized within the Ecology of Systems Thinking group. The issue considered by the participants is whether the networks of trust could be expanded or scaled up to be effectual against wicked challenges such as climate change.

“But the important thing was if it didn't work you could exit and exit turns out to be a very important, powerful, possibility for citizens and if you have only big units, how do you exit?” (19:52)

Ostrom finishes with the “idea of reform” (43:55) and in particular for me the idea “We must learn how to deal with complexity, not just reject it”. (45:01).

The Ecology of Systems Thinking discussion extended the political and economic perspective of the Tragedy of the Commons problem to a more biologically based orientation. A recommended article by Dr. David Sloan Wilson connects Ostrom’s work with evolutionary biology and in doing so establishes cooperation as a viable evolutionary strategy and points out major transitions becoming higher-level organisms in their own right, such as the rise of the first bacterial cells, multicellular organisms, eusocial insect colonies, and human evolution.

Part of the debate, delineated by the disciplines of physics and biology, was on the initial starting point and slope of the trend between population, population density, and food that brought us to our current predicament and applying that to predict a future course of either potential transformation or inevitable destruction. Having only cursory knowledge, I did not take a side. Another topic was on the increasing complexity inherent in wider circles, larger groups, or higher levels of polycentric governance which from my perspective I saw as similar to Dunbar's Number. Here is an RSA video of Dunbar explaining his theory.

Past NCP posts looked at the scaling of networks based on Dunbar's Number applied to Asset Based Community Development, as well as the concept of carrying capacity being applied to communities. These will be returned to for closer examination and likely some revision in future posts already begun raising new questions and some simmering old ones.

According to Cormac Russell, Managing Director of Nurture Development, the average person has fifty-one other persons in their associational lives but he argues that we each need one hundred fifty persons citing Robin Dunbar, the originator of Dunbar's Number.

The number of 150, according to Dunbar "refers to those people with whom you have a personalized relationship, one that is reciprocal and based around general obligations of trust and reciprocity." Cormac asserts that these need to be friends and neighbors, not other service users, professionals, or even family. “It comes down to how many unforced and unpaid for relationships of acceptance we have in door knocking distance.” Including ”family” in the latter group should have been questioned back then more closely as kinship is a primary basis for Dunbar’s number.

There is not, however, a single Dunbar Number but rather a scale of numbers, of ever-widening circles of connection constrained by a cognitive limit because this limit is a direct function of neocortex size, and this, in turn, limits group size where stable interpersonal relationships can be maintained. This cognitive constraint or gap needs to be overcome, logically to my mind, by some systemic means. The working hypothesis is that Asset Based Community Development can contribute to this but doesn't seem to solve it on its own.

Elinor Ostrom’s work cannot in my view be said to be mainstream which is actually part of the reason she appeals to New Community Paradigms. Her work continues through the Ostrom Workshop now the cornerstone of the beginning of a new NCP wiki-page.

Active Digital Citizens Seeking New Community Paradigms pt. 2

Continuing from the last post, the third week of  The Active Citizen in a Digital Age course dealt first with why digital matters to democracy in two parts, the first on the nature of digital data itself and the nature of networks arising from the interaction of that data. We create a tremendous amount of digital data in our every day, the vast majority having nothing to do with our ideas of democracy. Fundamentally different and in addition to other types of physical based resources we need to be concerned with in engaging as active citizens, digital is still concerned with how are we going to use our time and money? Digital data is the instructor informs us, a non-rival and non-excludable good unlike the other two. “Basically that means that lots of people can use it at once and it's hard to keep others from using it.” 

The nature of the network, exchanging digital data over networks, mobile, wireless spectrum, cable or broadband, is made up of physical structures. One important feature being the vast quantity of information that can now be stored. Every digital action gets recorded and stored and that storage keeps growing, not necessarily accessible, intentionally or not but it does keep growing. There are entities, usually market-based companies involved with maintaining this digital infrastructure making such exchanges happen from app and software developers to equipment builders, to network providers creating access to the creators of digital products we are interacting with, be it social media companies or search engines. 

All of our mutual digital transactions also involve a third party, intermediary infrastructure providers. This matters because all of the data representing the information we are exchanging (information turned into 1s and 0s) is stored on their servers. The nature of digital means that there is a difference between what gets remembered, what gets shared, and what will last when action is taken in either the digital space or the analog space.  

More information and insight on this topic is available through the Digital Impact Toolkit from the Digital Civil Society Lab at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society which supports the ethical, safe, and effective use of digital data by civil society organizations.

The course recognizes in the second part of the lesson that the two components of the first part lead to the dangers of going digital. In part because digital democracy plays by a different set of rules than does analog democracy. How we participate in civil society is influenced, impacted, and defined based on the nature of both digital data and its network infrastructure.

The problem is that digital infrastructure is built by companies, usually for-profit and is monitored by governments. Therefore there is no individual, private space in the digital world so there is no real civil society in digital space. According to the course though, civil society needs to function as an independent space separate from markets and governments.

“Civil society is an institutional manifestation of our basic human rights to peaceable assembly, free expression and, privacy.”

Lucy Bernholz, Senior Research Scholar, Stanford University, PACS

Director, Digital Civil Society Lab (and course instructor) wrote her own perspective on this issue. She produces the Philanthropy and the Social Economy: Blueprint (2016), an annual industry forecast about the ways we use private resources for public benefit. Particular interest should be paid to pages 20 to 23. 

“Yes, we can use digital tools to expand free expression and assembly; yes, these tools can be used to expand the voices we hear and participation by many. But civil society actors - in the US specifically - are fooling themselves if they think that digital tools are innately and always democratizing.”

She points out that civil society actors - in the US this means nonprofits and foundations as well as social movements, protestors, and activists - must protect the right and capacity to organize online, to express oneself and assemble peaceably outside of government or corporate control in digital spaces, if we are to maintain that right and capacity offline.

The digital rights agenda is civil society's agenda.

The challenge then is how to reclaim and protect this loss of civil society? There are apps that are designed to protect privacy by encrypting communications for example. There still remains though the essential real world on-the-ground (analog world) steps of finding allies, working together, crafting a strategy and message which requires having a private space to come together. 

Open Society Foundations United States, an organization which works to build vibrant and tolerant societies whose governments are accountable and open to the participation of all people, video  Shrinking Civic Spaces discusses how and why governments across the world are shutting down spaces for civic engagement and how civil society can unite to prevent it.

"Solidarity between the online blogger and the gay rights activist, between the NGO that's getting shut down and the social movement that's turning out on the streets. Because although those actors might look and think that they're different from each other, what they have in common is they're all manifestations of our right to organize and mobilize..."

            

Danny Sriskandarajah, Secretary General and CEO Civicus
           (4:45-5:08 of  Shrinking Civic Spaces)

The course also provides a link to an Oxfam video on some examples of civic tech projects. The video is a rather long webinar so here is the Google Doc of the presentation (23 slides) which has the advantage of making the associated links available. 

Our assignment for the third week was to create a team list of citizen actions that were digitally dependent, discuss the list as a team and list the team's responses to each of the following three prompts:

1. How do digital tools allow us to participate more/better/at greater impact than before?
2. The downsides of using digital tools for participation are significant. In what ways do you think digital tools should not be used for engagement in civil society (certain things, in certain ways)? Why?
3.  What role do digital tools play in your team's action plan from Assignment #2?   

The team members each submitted their own lists and our team leader did a rather good job in organizing them into common themes.

• Digital tools can take over for other forms of civil participation.
• Digital tools make communication and organization faster and more possible.
• Digital tools can make us more informed and expand our thinking.
• Digital tools can spread false and misleading information very quickly and without check, as well as encourage superficial understanding of issues.
• Digital tools can take over for other forms of civil participation.
• Digital tools can lead to entrenched, narrow modes of thinking.

As far as how do digital tools allowing us to participate more/better/at greater impact than before for myself, I cited access to the digitally available resources from different organizations in the NCP wiki, for example, Healthy Cities, Project for Public Spaces and Regional Governance and Policy. I also turned to new ways of thinking featured in the wiki, such as Systems Thinking Applications or Design Thinking or Community Arts or Asset Based Community Development. Then applying these to democratic processes involved concepts such as Governance through Community.

The question of what are the significant downsides of using digital tools for participation and in what ways, (see Usman Haque) and when do you think digital tools should not be used for engagement in civil society have been dealt with before for some time?

Digital democracy requires a level of individual digital literacy or fake news storytelling which can take over the community conversation. Tools like Big Data can be a two edged sword and used against the community interest. We often use digital technology in a superficial sense not drilling down into understanding the workings of the systems we wish to transform or the unintended consequences that could arise from our actions. I am also of the view that we can put ourselves into opposition or a role of permanent underdog rather than actually transforming governance. Instead of transforming a persistent deleterious entrenched system we merely enter into a subsidiary oscillating relationship with it.

Part 3

Finding Pathways for Vehicles of Change

This blog post is going to break from the current Systems Practice focus (most recent post first) of the last two blog posts to update the newest resource additions to the New Community Paradigm (NCP) Wiki. This time though it will also tie them to a location on the recently unveiled Kumu based NCP Wiki Map, that was rolled out over four blog posts and which now has a home on both the NCP blog and wiki. If this is the first time with the NCP Wiki Map then there is a tour which provides a general explanation. 

The NCP Wiki map seeks to develop connections or bridges across sectors. All of the updates in this post are part of or are in some way connected to the Places map but can be followed to Healthy Communities or to Community Ecology. 

It is the resources, available online, found in the New Community Paradigm (NCP) Wiki that are the vehicles for change. The NCP Wiki Map connotes possible paths that could be taken. The posts of this blog are but one rationale or mental model for taken a particular path or using the suggested vehicles, one among many possible. 

The State of Placemaking 2016, brought more than 450 dedicated public space practitioners, and policymakers to chart the future of the placemaking movement structured around ten major issues that converge in public space,  referred to as “transformative agendas.” Placemaking, as a determining aspect of Places, can be seen as being most comprehensively defined by the Project for Public Spaces (PPS).  

In the NCP Wiki Places map, the circled Project for Public Spaces is seen as arising from Places and being related to the more general Community Places. (double clicking a circled element opens up wiki page, clicking “On Kumu Wiki Map” at top of a wiki page opens up the map). It is the wiki page Community Places that contains the blog posts, near the bottom of the page, seeking to define the developing NCP mental model for placemaking.

Place as Social and Economic Engine was one of the first wiki bridge pages and an early basis for developing a mental model for NCP as defined by blog posts listed at the bottom of the wiki page. It was so named, again as an extension of the correction to the same erroneous presumption underlying placemaking, that the strata of the geographic community below the businesses, city hall politics and those residents connected with city hall were of secondary value. While in truth, it is the created physical attributes of a place that are the dynamic foundation or engine of the community’s social and economic generation.

Place as Social and Economic Engine is the home for Strong Towns, who introduced the newest addition VERDUNITY, a team of civil engineers, planners, and sustainability specialists with expertise in land use planning and zoning, municipal finance, transportation planning and design, stormwater management and green infrastructure implementation, and urban design and placemaking. They started VERDUNITY  because they realized that elaborate, expensive infrastructure projects were making things more economically fragile and unsustainable. This was a disruption in their way of thinking, of their mental models. They are now working on changing other people’s mental models of how they think about the way we have been planning and building our cities and neighborhoods. More will be said about VERDUNITY in a future post.

Place as Social and Economic Engine on the NCP Wiki Map is seen as a bridge between Place and Economics (access between Places and Economics via a link is in the narrative section to the left). 

The newest addition to Planning the Urban Landscape is New Urban Mechanics, a network of civic innovation offices that explore how new technology, designs, and policies can strengthen the partnership between residents and government and significantly improve opportunity and experiences for all. It could have arguably been put under Community Change Agencies but personal choice and only personal was that these programs were more closely related to the existing underlying physical, placemaking, and political infrastructure of a community. The related blog posts, again listed at the bottom of the wiki page, provide some perspectives on a past effort in Los Angeles history to redefine the larger urban landscape. 

Planning the Urban Landscape approaches Places from a broader perspective looking not from the build up of smaller changes over time but the accumulation of those changes overall. It is seen as a bridge between Places and Community Ecology. 

Under the wiki page Healthy Cities is the recent addition of Bridging Health & Community, an extension of  the previously listed Creating Health Collaborative which aims to transform how we approach health so that it goes beyond institutional healthcare and public health to include fostering community agency, strengthening the field of practice that bridges those in the health sector and those who foster community agency helping to establish the critical link between a community's ability to make purposeful choices and its health. Being able to measure differences in life expectancy by income across areas and then to identify strategies to improve health outcomes for low-income Americans would be a useful ability. Health Inequality Project uses big data to help accomplish this.

The bridge from Places to Healthy Cities, under the Healthy Communities map, is Planning for Healthy Communities. It could also be an element in the Pathways to Healthy Communities map and the Art and Healthy Communities map. Two specially constructed maps that put together a path that incorporated elements that are often placed in silos and considered distinct and separate. 

Taking a higher altitude perspective, the Wiki Bridges Map connects all the New Community Paradigm sectors, including Places, Healthy Communities, and Community Ecology, together. 

A closer look at the pathway for Places indicates that at under the current New Community Paradigm configuration, Healthy Communities and Places are well integrated together but Community Ecology is somewhat isolated. 

Could Bridging Health & Community and Creating Health Collaborative under Healthy Cities be integrated with New Urban Mechanics under Planning the Urban Landscape and extended from Places to Community Ecology integrating the two together more closely?

There are also other deeper pathways that could utilize the online resources found in the NCP Wiki. Under Project for Public Places (click the URL or double click the circled element to open the wiki page) is Agenda Spotlight: Placemaking and Health - Project for Public Spaces.

There is growing evidence showing that place impacts people’s health on multiple scales. From obesity and chronic disease to depression, social isolation, and increased exposure to environmental toxins and pollutants, the world faces very different health challenges today than it has in the past, and many of these challenges are directly related to how our public spaces are designed and operated.

It could be an important component of the Pathways to Healthy Communities map and naturally be expanded to be encompassed by Community Ecology. How it is used could be determined in a number of different ways depending upon the needs of a particular community. 

It is believed though it has not been adequately examined that finding specific potential pathways for the utilization of online resources will greatly help in the development of new community paradigms. 

Finding the soul of your community and the reason to create your own community paradigms

In the last post, Placemaking - for communities the canvas becomes the art, we began exploring the concept of  Place and Placemaking from the perspective of  Project for Public Spaces or PPS and similar organizations.

Placemaking, was defined by PPS as both an overarching idea and a hands-on tool for improving a neighborhood, city or region.  The linked to site went on to say of Placemaking:

Put simply, it involves looking at, listening to, and asking questions of the people who live, work and play in a particular space, to discover their needs and aspirations. This information is then used to create a common vision for that place.

The New Community Paradigm Places wikipage  which will serve as a depository for community resources on Place was also introduced.  Community Places, was examined in the last post.  This post will deal with what has been described as the  Soul of a Community.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Gallup joined forces and following an approach similar to PPS studied cities across the country to determine what attaches people to their communities by launching the Knight Soul of the Community project in 2008.  Three years and close to 43,000 interviews later with people in 26 communities, the study found three main qualities responsible for attaching people to place:

1. Social offerings, such as entertainment venues and places to meet, 
2. Openness (how welcoming a place is) and 
3. Area’s aesthetics (its physical beauty and green spaces)

The same three answers apply to cities across the country as shown by the Vimeo video below An Explanation of Community Attachment - Soul of the Community Project.




What is even more interesting is that these three aspects which provide for Residential or Community Attachment also have a strong correlation with economic prosperity.  By studying the 26 individual cities that participated in the study, it is possible to determine what steps can be taken to replicate the same results.  The study showed both good and opportunities for improvement in each city. Each city had a its own story to tell. The stories were of place and, more importantly, the stories were of people and how they interacted with the place they called their community.

From the Aberdeen post:

Despite its high ratings of resident caring, social offerings remains a challenge area for Aberdeen, specifically in the areas of local night life and arts and cultural events. This must be addressed as these areas are particularly important to young people. Over the past three years of the study, Aberdeen has made significant gains in attaching young people 18-34 years old to the community. Imagine what could be possible with more attention to these aspects of social offerings.

From the Corpus Christi post:

The comments I had read in the article announcing the presentation flooded my mind as I stood facing what seemed to be a completely different crowd that night. And I worried about deflating that crowd with my honest response. But I said, “It seems to me that some of you, and I’m not sure if you’re in this room, but some of you are stuck in place.”

The Soul of the Community study helps identify new approaches to help create transformational change and new possibilities for continued progress, in other words it helps in creating new community paradigms.  A community can use the study’s findings to help optimize the strengths of their community and address the challenge of improving of areas community attachment thereby potentially increasing local economic growth.


This effort' to create new community paradigms began by looking at economic development in working to create Liveable Cities through Liveanomics.  The relationship of community attachment to economic development in the Soul of the Community Study provides particular relevance for this effort by going beyond the recent economic crisis as the study's findings can help leaders include new ideas into the existing economic rebuilding and development conversation.

Good economics and finance are essential to the sustainability of a city but they are not the soul of the community and do not make up the all of that community's wealth.  This was demonstrated in the one Southern California city included in Knight Soul of the Community Study - Long Beach, California..

Ratings of the local economy increased in 2010; however, the economy is still not a key factor emotionally connecting residents to their communities. Perception of local leadership is rated lower in 2010, but it is not a key driver in attaching residents to Long Beach.

To increase its community wealth, Long Beach added to its own natural assets of good weather and relaxed Southern California attitude by investing in high-quality bicycle infrastructure and encouraging bike-related businesses.

Long Beach according to PPS offers charisma according to their online article How Charismatic Is Your City? showing that there is more to a community than just the city budget and that investments into the livability of the community can have a long term return on that investment.  Charlie Gandy, mobility coordinator of the city of Long Beach, California talks about his city and what they have done to enhance their charisma for the members of the community and others in this TEDx. video.