Put ten neighbors around one irrigation ditch, and you will discover that political philosophy is not confined to universities.
Who gets the water? Who cleans the ditch? What happens when somebody takes more than their share? And who gets to decide what a share ought to be?
Suddenly, we have ourselves a government.
I have been thinking about these questions as we report on the proposed water-right changes in Paradise Valley. Those applications deserve careful examination on their own facts. But they also raise an old question: How do free people take care of something they share?
There is a name for this: the commons.
A commons might be a pasture, a fishery, or a shared water source. The important feature is that what one person takes or does can affect what remains available to others.
That does not mean nobody owns anything. Individually held rights can exist within a physically connected system. Owning a water right and sharing a water source can both be true.
Aristotle was wrestling with shared responsibility more than 2,000 years ago. In his “Politics,” he observed that people tend to give less attention to things held in common. Everybody assumes somebody else will handle it.
Apparently, Aristotle had attended a committee meeting.
But he also recognized that a community cannot have nothing in common. The challenge was deciding what should be private, what should be shared, and how the responsibilities should work.
Centuries later, John Locke, whose ideas helped shape American thinking about individual rights, defended private property. Yet he also recognized that land held in common by agreement could not simply be claimed by one person without the consent of the other commoners.
Shared rights were rights, too.
The founders confronted their own versions of this problem. In Federalist No. 7, Alexander Hamilton described western territory ceded to the United States as the “common property of the Union.” He worried about competing claims and the potential for conflict without a common authority to resolve disputes.
Their challenge extended beyond land: How could states meet shared obligations while protecting their independence? How could government have enough authority to function without becoming a threat to liberty?
Those questions have not been retired.
In 1968, biologist Garrett Hardin gave the resource problem a memorable name: “The Tragedy of the Commons.”
Imagine a pasture open to everyone. Each herder benefits from adding another cow, while the cost of the additional grazing is spread among all the herders. Each has an incentive to add animals. Eventually, the pasture suffers and everybody loses.
Hardin’s warning: a decision can benefit the person making it while imposing costs on everyone else.
But political scientist Elinor Ostrom asked what happened when people actually organized to manage shared resources.
She studied communities managing water, forests, fisheries, and pastures. Some failed. Others maintained workable arrangements over generations. Her research helped earn her a share of the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics.
Successful arrangements generally had clear boundaries, rules suited to local conditions, participation by users, monitoring, consequences for violations, and practical ways to settle disputes.
In other words, people did more than hope everybody would behave.
They governed.
Ostrom demonstrated that central control and individual ownership were not the only possibilities. People could build institutions to manage resources together. Courts and public authorities could also play supporting roles.
Hardin later acknowledged that his original argument needed an important qualifier: unmanaged commons.
For those of us inclined to defend individual liberty, Ostrom offers a valuable reminder: People are capable of solving problems together. We should take that capacity seriously.
But liberty also requires accounting for other people’s rights. The freedom to use what belongs to us does not automatically include permission to damage what belongs to somebody else.
That brings us back to the ditch—and to the questions our water reporting must answer.
What changes are proposed? Who could be affected? What does the evidence show? Who bears the financial and societal costs? What protections apply?
We should ask those questions without assuming the applicants are wrong or the neighbors are unreasonable.
Self-government requires more than choosing sides. It requires learning how things work, respecting rights, and accepting responsibility.
Even when—especially when—somebody else was supposed to clean the ditch.
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