Abstract
The dominant theoretical positions in commons governance literature divide between pessimism—the Hobbesian tradition in which self-interest makes shared governance chronically unstable without coercive authority—and optimism—the communitarian tradition in which restored solidarity and shared values can recover what modernity has fragmented. This paper argues that both positions fail as foundations for commons theory because both misidentify the relevant explanatory variable. The question is not whether human beings are by nature selfish or cooperative but whether they have been formed in the specific capacities that shared governance requires: externality awareness, boundary discipline, role containment, and the tolerance of imperfect coordination. Drawing on virtue ethics, developmental psychology, institutional theory, and the theological tradition of stewardship, the paper proposes a third position—stewardship as formed competence—that is neither Hobbesian nor communitarian, neither pessimistic nor optimistic, but diagnostic. It identifies stewardship not as a natural disposition, a moral achievement of will, or an act of self-denial, but as a set of learnable, teachable, and institutionally supportable competencies that make sustained participation in shared governance possible. The paper concludes that the formation of these competencies is the primary practical challenge for commons governance and that the failure of that formation—not the intractability of human nature—is the proximate cause of commons collapse.
Keywords: stewardship, formation, commons governance, virtue ethics, externality awareness, boundary discipline, shared constraint, competence
I. Introduction: Between Hobbes and Rousseau
The literature on commons governance has, for much of its history, been organized around two large theoretical intuitions that function less as empirical hypotheses than as background assumptions shaping the questions that get asked and the answers that seem plausible. The first is the Hobbesian intuition: that human beings are fundamentally self-interested, that this self-interest is the primary driver of commons failure, and that sustainable governance therefore requires either external coercive authority or the structural elimination of the commons through privatization. The second is the communitarian or Rousseauian intuition: that self-interested behavior is a product of modern individualism rather than human nature as such, that traditional communities embodied forms of solidarity and shared value that made sustainable commons governance possible, and that the recovery of those forms of solidarity is both the goal and the means of commons restoration.
Hardin’s (1968) essay gave the Hobbesian intuition its most influential modern expression. The communitarian response—articulated in various forms by scholars working in the tradition of civic republicanism, social capital theory, and communitarian political philosophy—has generated a substantial counter-literature insisting that solidarity, trust, and shared norms are both real and causally significant in commons governance. Both positions have produced important insights; neither has produced a satisfactory foundation for commons theory.
The Hobbesian position fails because it cannot explain the historical record. As the preceding paper in this series documented, commons governance systems have succeeded—in some cases for centuries—without either coercive authority or privatization. If self-interest invariably drives toward extraction and enclosure, these cases are inexplicable. The communitarian position fails because it cannot explain variation. If solidarity and shared values are sufficient conditions for commons success, we need an account of why some communities with strong social ties and shared normative traditions nonetheless fail to govern their commons sustainably—and the communitarian literature does not reliably provide one. More fundamentally, the communitarian position tends toward nostalgia: it locates the conditions for successful governance in the past and treats modernity as their destruction, generating a politics of recovery that is often more evocative than practical.
This paper proposes a third position that does not require the pessimism of Hobbes or the nostalgia of communitarianism. It proposes that the relevant question for commons theory is neither “are human beings selfish?” nor “can solidarity be recovered?” but rather: what specific capacities does successful participation in shared governance require, and under what conditions are those capacities formed, sustained, or lost?
The answer this paper develops is that shared governance requires a set of competencies—externality awareness, boundary discipline, role containment, and tolerance of imperfect coordination—that are neither natural nor impossible but formed: developed through practice, supported by institutional structure, and susceptible to both cultivation and atrophy. The theoretical framework that best captures this account is the tradition of virtue ethics, supplemented by developmental psychology and institutional theory, and grounded in the theological concept of stewardship as accountable governance rather than ownership or self-denial.
The paper proceeds as follows. Section II examines the failures of both Hobbesian pessimism and communitarian optimism as foundations for commons theory. Section III develops the concept of formation as the missing theoretical variable and situates it in relation to virtue ethics and developmental psychology. Sections IV through VII analyze the four core competencies of shared governance in turn. Section VIII develops the distinction between stewardship and asceticism that is central to the paper’s constructive argument. Section IX addresses the institutional conditions that support or undermine formation. Section X concludes with a statement of what a formation-based account of stewardship contributes to commons theory and practice.
II. Why Both Pessimism and Optimism Fail
The Hobbesian tradition in political theory begins with a claim about human nature: that human beings are by nature competitive, distrustful, and oriented toward self-preservation and self-aggrandizement. Left without coercive authority, this nature produces a condition of chronic conflict in which life is, famously, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short (Hobbes, 1651/1994). The political conclusion Hobbes drew was the necessity of a sovereign power capable of compelling compliance with rules that individuals would otherwise violate in pursuit of self-interest. Translated into commons governance terms, this becomes Hardin’s prescription: privatize or coerce.
The empirical failures of this position have been extensively documented. Ostrom’s (1990) comparative institutional analysis, McKean’s (1992) cross-cultural case studies, and the broader literature on common pool resources have demonstrated that communities do develop and sustain governance institutions without coercive external authority, and that these institutions can be effective over extended periods of time. The Hobbesian tradition cannot account for this evidence without ad hoc qualification, and the qualifications required are substantial enough to call the original position into serious question.
But the Hobbesian tradition’s failure is not merely empirical. It is theoretical. The tradition treats self-interest as a psychological given—a fixed feature of human motivational structure that governance institutions must work around or suppress. This treatment is inconsistent with what we know from developmental psychology, moral philosophy, and the anthropological record about the actual variability of human motivational structure. Human beings do not come into the world with fixed preferences; they come into the world with the capacity to develop preferences, and the preferences they develop are substantially shaped by the social practices, institutional environments, and relational contexts within which they are formed. The self-interested actor of Hobbesian theory is not a description of human nature in the abstract; it is a description of human nature under specific—and specifiable—conditions of formation and social context. Treating this description as universal eliminates precisely the variable—formation—that explains the variation in human motivation that the historical record displays.
The communitarian tradition identifies this error and attempts to correct it by insisting on the social constitution of individual identity and motivation. MacIntyre (1981), Sandel (1982), Taylor (1989), and others in the communitarian philosophical tradition argued against the liberal assumption of the pre-social individual, insisting that human beings are constituted by their membership in social practices, narratives, and communities of value, and that the fragmentation of these communities under modernity produces the impoverished motivational structure that Hobbesian theory takes as natural. The recovery of community, on this account, is the recovery of the conditions under which human beings can act as genuinely social creatures rather than as the isolated, self-interested individuals that liberal theory both describes and, in describing, produces.
This tradition has generated important insights. The social constitution of identity and motivation is a genuine theoretical advance over the liberal assumption of the pre-social individual, and the communitarian analysis of modernity’s fragmentation of social practices and communities captures real phenomena. But the communitarian position faces its own characteristic failures.
First, it tends toward idealization of pre-modern communities that is difficult to sustain against historical scrutiny. Pre-modern communities were not uniformly characterized by solidarity, shared values, and sustainable governance; they were characterized by the same range of governance success and failure that the comparative institutional literature documents across all periods. Solidarity and shared values are necessary but not sufficient conditions for commons success; communities with high social cohesion have managed commons badly, and communities with significant internal conflict have managed commons well, when the relevant institutional conditions were present or absent respectively.
Second, the communitarian position tends to treat formation as a consequence of community membership rather than analyzing the specific content of what needs to be formed. Knowing that human beings are constituted by social practices and communities does not tell us which practices and communities produce the specific competencies that shared governance requires. Not all social practices are formative in the relevant direction; some communities form their members in habits of extraction, domination, and norm violation rather than shared constraint, externality awareness, and cooperative governance. The communitarian framework identifies the mechanism—social formation—without specifying the content—what needs to be formed and by what means.
Third, the communitarian position’s political orientation toward recovery of the past generates a practical agenda that is difficult to act on in contemporary institutional contexts. The conditions of modernity—geographic mobility, market integration, institutional complexity, and cultural pluralism—cannot be reversed, and governance frameworks that depend on reversing them are not practically useful regardless of their theoretical attractiveness.
The third position this paper proposes avoids these failures by accepting from the Hobbesian tradition the insight that human motivation is not reliably cooperative by default, while accepting from the communitarian tradition the insight that human motivation is substantially formed by social practices and institutional context—and then moving beyond both to specify the content and conditions of the formation that shared governance requires.
III. Formation as the Missing Variable: A Theoretical Account
The concept of formation—the process by which human beings develop the capacities, dispositions, and motivational orientations that constitute a mature and competent agent—has a long history in philosophy, theology, and education, but it has been largely absent from commons governance theory. Its absence is the primary theoretical gap that this paper addresses.
The concept derives most rigorously from the Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics. For Aristotle, virtues are stable dispositions to act, feel, and perceive in ways appropriate to one’s situation—dispositions that are acquired through practice rather than given by nature, and that constitute genuine excellence of character rather than mere compliance with external rules. Aristotle’s account of virtue as formed through habituation—through the repeated performance of virtuous acts under the guidance of practical wisdom—establishes the basic framework within which the concept of formation operates: human beings have the capacity for excellent functioning, but the actualization of that capacity requires sustained practice within appropriate social contexts (Aristotle, trans. 1999).
This framework was developed with particular sophistication in the Christian intellectual tradition, where formation (formatio) referred to the process by which human beings were shaped into conformity with a pattern of excellence—in the Augustinian tradition, ultimately the image of God recovered through grace and practice. The concept of stewardship in this tradition is inseparable from formation: stewardship is not a natural disposition but a developed capacity, and its development requires the specific practices, communities, and institutional contexts that make it possible. The theological tradition will be engaged more fully in the sixth paper of this series; what is relevant here is the concept of formation as a technical term for the process by which competencies that are genuinely human but not naturally given are developed through sustained practice within appropriate social contexts.
Contemporary developmental psychology provides empirical grounding for the virtue-theoretic framework. The literature on self-regulation—the capacity to modulate one’s own behavior in pursuit of goals that extend beyond immediate impulse—documents with precision the developmental trajectory, social determinants, and institutional supports of precisely the kind of capacity that shared governance requires. Baumeister and Tierney (2011), Mischel (2014), and the broader literature on executive function and self-regulation demonstrate that the capacity to defer immediate gratification, to monitor the consequences of one’s actions for others, and to sustain cooperative behavior in the face of short-term temptations to defect is a genuinely developmental achievement—one that varies substantially across individuals and contexts, that is substantially shaped by early relational experience and social environment, and that can be supported or undermined by institutional design.
This developmental literature does not support either the Hobbesian view that self-interest is the fixed default or the communitarian view that solidarity is natural to traditional communities. It supports a more complex and more useful picture: that human beings have genuine capacities for both self-regulation and self-interested behavior, that the relative development of these capacities is substantially shaped by developmental experience and social context, and that institutional design can either support or undermine the self-regulatory capacities that cooperative governance requires.
McCay and Acheson’s (1987) foundational collection on the question of the commons, and subsequent work by Stern et al. (2002) on the conditions for sustainable governance of common pool resources, point toward the same conclusion from the institutional side: governance success is not simply a function of incentive structure but of the motivational and cognitive capacities of participants—their ability to identify the long-term consequences of their behavior, to take the perspective of other participants, to regulate their extractive behavior in light of collective need, and to sustain cooperative commitment in the face of uncertainty and defection by others. These are not incentive responses; they are competencies. And competencies are formed, not given.
The four competencies that this paper identifies as central to shared governance are not an exhaustive list. They are, rather, the competencies that the evidence—historical, empirical, and developmental—most consistently identifies as the proximate difference between successful and failed commons governance at the level of individual participants. They are: externality awareness, boundary discipline, role containment, and the tolerance of imperfect coordination.
IV. Externality Awareness as a Learnable Competence
The concept of externality, borrowed from economics, refers to the costs or benefits of an individual’s actions that are borne by others rather than by the actor. In commons governance, the relevant externalities are primarily costs: the degradation of shared resources by extractive behavior whose benefits accrue to individual users while its costs are distributed across the user community. Hardin’s herdsman externalizes the cost of each additional animal onto the shared pasture and the community of users; the benefit of the additional animal is his alone.
The standard economic treatment of externalities frames them as a structural problem—a market failure that requires correction through pricing, regulation, or property rights assignment. This treatment is not wrong as far as it goes, but it is incomplete in a way that matters for commons governance. Externalities are not only structural problems; they are also perceptual and cognitive problems. Before the structural question of how to internalize externalities can be addressed, the prior question of whether actors perceive and attend to the external consequences of their behavior must be answered. And the answer, in the developmental and psychological literature, is that externality awareness is a learnable competence that varies substantially across individuals and contexts—not a universal feature of rational agency that can be assumed.
Batson et al.’s (1995) research on perspective-taking and prosocial behavior demonstrated that the capacity to perceive the consequences of one’s actions for others is not automatic but requires the active exercise of cognitive and affective capacities that can be cultivated through practice and social modeling. Children develop the capacity for perspective-taking through developmental processes that require appropriate social scaffolding; adults vary substantially in the habitual exercise of this capacity depending on their developmental history and current social context. The capacity to track the external consequences of one’s own behavior is not a fixed feature of rational agency but a developed competence that is more or less present depending on formation.
In commons governance terms, externality awareness is the competence to perceive—habitually and without special effort—how one’s resource use affects the sustainability of the shared resource and the access of other users. This competence has both cognitive and affective dimensions. The cognitive dimension involves the ability to model the consequences of one’s behavior across time and across the community of users: to understand that the fish taken today reduce the breeding stock available for future seasons, that the water diverted now reduces the supply available to downstream users, that the noise made in a shared living space degrades the quality of that space for others. The affective dimension involves the disposition to care about these consequences—to experience them as morally relevant rather than as irrelevant background conditions for one’s own extractive behavior.
Both dimensions are formed rather than given. The cognitive dimension is developed through education, practice, and the kind of engaged participation in commons governance that makes the consequences of individual behavior visible and salient. Ostrom’s (1990) design principle of effective monitoring is relevant here: governance systems that make the state of the shared resource visible to users are systems that support the development and exercise of externality awareness by ensuring that the consequences of extractive behavior are perceivable. The affective dimension is formed through the social practices, relational contexts, and normative environments that cultivate care for others as a stable disposition rather than a contingent response to situational factors.
The implications for institutional design are significant but not straightforward. Institutions can support externality awareness by making the consequences of individual behavior visible, by creating social contexts in which those consequences are discussed and attended to, and by structuring participation in commons governance in ways that require participants to attend to the resource state and the claims of other users. But institutions cannot substitute for the affective dimension of externality awareness: governance systems that rely entirely on monitoring and enforcement to produce externality-sensitive behavior are systems that have failed to form the competence and are attempting to compensate for that failure through structural means. As Bowles’s (2016) analysis of the crowding-out effect demonstrates, this compensation is often counterproductive, undermining the intrinsic motivation for externality awareness that effective formation would have produced.
The formation of externality awareness, then, is not primarily a design problem; it is a practice problem. It requires the sustained exercise of perspective-taking, consequence-modeling, and care for others within social contexts that make these practices meaningful, visible, and valued. Communities that have developed these practices—through participation in governance institutions, through social norms that make externality-blind behavior visible and sanctionable, through educational and religious traditions that cultivate care for the commons as a genuine good—have the foundational competence for shared governance. Communities that have not developed these practices face a governance problem that institutional design alone cannot solve.
V. Boundary Discipline: Distinguishing Legitimate Claim from Enclosure
The second competence required for successful commons governance is what this paper terms boundary discipline: the capacity to distinguish between the legitimate assertion of one’s own claim within a shared governance system and the enclosure of shared space or resources through the appropriation of control that exceeds one’s legitimate entitlement.
This distinction is less obvious than it appears. In any commons governance system, individual users have legitimate claims—entitlements to specific uses of shared resources, defined by the governance rules of the community and grounded in membership, contribution, and need. The assertion of these claims is not merely permissible; it is essential to the functioning of the governance system, since a system in which no user ever asserted a legitimate claim would be a system without meaningful entitlement structure. Boundary discipline is not the suppression of legitimate claim assertion; it is the competence to know where legitimate claim ends and enclosure begins.
This distinction is genuinely difficult, not because the conceptual boundary is unclear but because the psychological and social pressures that drive claim expansion are powerful and often operate below the level of explicit awareness. The progression from legitimate claim assertion to enclosure typically does not occur through a conscious decision to appropriate shared resources; it occurs through a series of small expansions, each of which can be individually justified, that cumulatively produce a pattern of appropriation that exceeds legitimate entitlement. The herdsman who adds one more animal to the shared pasture because the pasture appears to have capacity is not consciously choosing to externalize costs; he is making a locally reasonable judgment that has, when multiplied across all users, catastrophic collective consequences.
Boundary discipline is the competence to interrupt this progression—to perceive the gap between locally reasonable judgment and collectively sustainable behavior, and to regulate one’s own behavior in light of that gap rather than in light of the local judgment alone. This requires both the cognitive competence of externality awareness—understanding how one’s behavior affects the shared resource and other users—and a second, distinct competence: the capacity to constrain one’s own behavior in light of what one knows, rather than in light of what one wants.
This second capacity is what Baumeister and Tierney (2011) identify as self-regulation in the developmental psychology literature: the ability to modulate behavior in pursuit of goals that extend beyond immediate impulse and immediate self-interest. Self-regulation is a genuine developmental achievement, substantially shaped by early relational experience and the availability of social models who demonstrate the practice of self-constraint in shared contexts. It is not reliably present across all adults, and it is subject to depletion under conditions of stress, resource scarcity, and chronic uncertainty—precisely the conditions under which commons governance is most frequently tested.
The theological tradition of stewardship is particularly instructive at this point. The biblical concept of stewardship—most fully articulated in the parables of Jesus concerning the management of entrusted resources (Matthew 25:14–30; Luke 12:42–48; Luke 16:1–13) and in the Torah’s land tenure provisions—does not frame the steward’s constraint as self-denial but as the appropriate recognition of the limits of one’s entitlement. The steward does not own the resources under management; the steward is accountable for them to a higher authority. This framing removes the psychological tension between self-interest and constraint by redefining the self’s interest: a steward whose self-understanding is constituted by accountability to an owner does not experience constraint as a sacrifice but as the appropriate exercise of a role. The constraint is internal to the identity rather than external to it.
This observation has implications beyond the specifically theological context in which it arises. Governance systems that can establish a meaningful account of stewardship—of resource use as accountable management rather than sovereign ownership—create the conditions under which boundary discipline can be exercised without the chronic motivational struggle that the Hobbesian tradition assumes. Where stewardship is constitutive of role identity, boundary discipline is the expression of that identity rather than its suppression.
Conversely, governance systems that frame resource entitlement in terms of ownership—even within formally common property regimes—create conditions under which boundary discipline is continuously undermined by the psychological logic of property: if I own this, the question of how much I may appropriately take is answered only by what I can take, not by what the resource system or the user community can sustain. The conceptual and psychological shift from ownership to stewardship is not merely semantic; it is motivationally consequential, shaping the frame within which individual resource decisions are made in ways that either support or undermine boundary discipline.
VI. Role Containment and the Rejection of Sovereignty Fantasy
The third competence required for shared governance—role containment—addresses a specific failure mode that is distinct from both externality blindness and boundary indiscipline, though it is related to both. Role containment is the capacity to exercise one’s legitimate function within a shared governance system without expanding that function into domains that belong to other roles, and without treating the authority appropriate to one’s role as a license for broader control over shared space and governance processes.
The failure of role containment produces what Paper 2 of this series terms the sovereignty fantasy: the progressive expansion of individual control over shared space and governance processes that is driven not by extractive interest in resources but by psychological need for control that shared governance frustrates. The sovereignty fantasy is recognizable in multiple institutional contexts: the committee member who attempts to exercise executive authority over a deliberative body, the department manager who appropriates organizational resources and processes that fall outside the department’s mandate, the homeowner association member who treats shared community standards as a vehicle for imposing personal preferences on neighbors. In each case, the driver is not greed for resources but the inability to tolerate the constrained and negotiated character of shared authority.
Role containment is the competence that the sovereignty fantasy lacks. It involves the capacity to exercise one’s legitimate role fully and effectively without collapsing the distinction between one’s own role and the governance system as a whole. This distinction is both cognitive and psychological. Cognitively, it requires an accurate understanding of what one’s role is, what authority it carries, and where its limits lie—an understanding that is often less clear in practice than governance frameworks assume. Psychologically, it requires the capacity to function within those limits without experiencing the limits themselves as threats to one’s identity or competence.
The psychological dimension of role containment has been examined in the organizational literature on role conflict and role overload (Kahn et al., 1964) and in the clinical literature on narcissistic personality organization (Kernberg, 1975; Kohut, 1977). Both literatures identify the experience of role limits as potentially threatening to individuals whose sense of competence and identity depends on maintaining an expansive sense of agency and control. For such individuals, governance systems that require role containment—that define roles with clear limits and require deference to other roles for decisions that fall outside one’s own—are experienced as frustrating and demeaning rather than as appropriate expressions of shared governance. The response is often the kind of informal role expansion and sovereignty assertion that Paper 2 identifies as proto-enclosure behavior.
The formation required to support role containment involves the development of what Erikson (1963) termed ego integrity in the developmental sense: a stable sense of identity that does not depend on the continuous expansion of control, that can tolerate the experience of constrained agency without experiencing it as diminishment, and that can find competence and satisfaction in excellent performance within defined limits rather than requiring unlimited scope as a condition of self-worth. This is not a naturally given disposition; it is a developmental achievement that requires appropriate relational and institutional conditions.
In the context of commons governance, role containment requires governance institutions that clearly define roles, communicate those definitions to participants, and maintain them consistently enough that role expansion is visible and correctable before it becomes entrenched. But it also requires, at the level of participant formation, the development of a self-understanding that is constituted by role excellence rather than role expansion—a self-understanding in which doing one’s own job well within appropriate limits is a genuine source of satisfaction rather than a frustrating constraint on the expression of competence.
The stewardship tradition again provides a relevant formative frame. The biblical steward’s competence is defined by the excellence of management within the scope of entrustment: the faithful steward is the one who does well with what has been entrusted, not the one who expands the scope of entrustment without authorization (Luke 16:10). This framing supports role containment by defining excellence in terms of faithful performance within defined limits rather than in terms of the expansion of those limits—a definition that is motivationally quite different from the definition implied by an ownership frame, in which the expansion of control is a natural expression of proprietorial interest.
VII. Accepting Imperfect Coordination: The Hardest Formation Task
The fourth competence required for shared governance is, in practice, the most demanding: the capacity to accept that shared governance systems will not produce perfect outcomes, that coordination will often be imperfect, that decisions will sometimes be wrong, that one’s own legitimate interests will sometimes be inadequately served, and that none of these inevitable features of shared governance constitutes a sufficient reason to withdraw from the system, to defect to individual or extractive behavior, or to seek control as a substitute for tolerable but imperfect coordination.
This competence is the hardest because the alternatives—defection, withdrawal, or control-seeking—are genuinely attractive responses to the experience of imperfect coordination, and because the temptation to pursue them is strongest precisely when the governance system most needs participants to remain engaged and constructive. Commons governance systems that work do so not because they produce perfect outcomes but because their participants have developed the capacity to remain committed to the system through the experience of imperfect outcomes—to distinguish between failures that indicate the need for reform and failures that are endemic to the constrained and negotiated character of shared governance itself.
The theoretical literature on collective action identifies the vulnerability of cooperative systems to defection under conditions of uncertainty and perceived non-reciprocity (Axelrod, 1984; Ostrom et al., 1994). Governance participants who observe that others are not fully complying with shared rules face a genuine dilemma: continued compliance in the face of non-reciprocity places them at a disadvantage relative to defectors, while defection contributes to the collapse of the cooperative system from which they benefit. Axelrod’s (1984) analysis of the evolution of cooperation demonstrated that stable cooperation is possible under repeated interaction but is vulnerable to defection under conditions of uncertainty about others’ intentions and limited information about others’ behavior—precisely the conditions that characterize many real commons governance situations.
The capacity to tolerate imperfect coordination is, in part, a response to this structural vulnerability. It involves the cognitive capacity to distinguish between defection that is genuinely threatening to the governance system and deviation that is within the normal range of variance in any cooperative system; the affective capacity to manage the frustration and anxiety that perceived non-reciprocity produces without defaulting to retaliatory defection; and the motivational capacity to remain committed to the long-term project of shared governance even when short-term experience is disappointing.
These capacities are not developed in isolation. They require what psychologists studying attachment and relational development have identified as the capacity for secure functioning under stress: the ability to maintain cognitive clarity and constructive engagement in relationships and institutions that are experienced as frustrating or inadequate, without either anxious over-investment that collapses appropriate self-differentiation or avoidant withdrawal that sacrifices the relationship or institution entirely (Bowlby, 1988; Ainsworth, 1978). The developmental conditions that produce this capacity in individuals are those that provide sufficient relational security that the experience of frustration does not feel like abandonment, sufficient experience of repair after rupture that imperfect relationships are not treated as failed relationships, and sufficient practice of constructive engagement under conditions of conflict that the response to governance failure is reform rather than defection.
Sandel’s (1982) analysis of community membership is relevant here: participants in shared governance systems who have what Sandel calls a constitutive commitment to the community—whose identity is partly constituted by membership in the shared project—have a motivational resource for tolerating imperfect coordination that participants with merely instrumental commitment to the system do not. For the constitutively committed participant, the experience of imperfect coordination is experienced as a problem within a valued relationship rather than as evidence that the relationship is not worth maintaining. This motivational difference is significant for governance resilience under stress.
The institutional conditions that support this competence include the conflict resolution mechanisms that Ostrom (1990) identified as a design principle of successful commons—mechanisms that make constructive engagement with governance failure available as an alternative to defection—and the graduated sanction systems that allow deviation to be addressed without the kind of punitive response that escalates conflict rather than resolving it. But the institutional conditions are again necessary rather than sufficient; what they support is the exercise of a competence that must have been formed in participants before the institutional conditions can be effective.
A governance participant who has not developed the capacity to tolerate imperfect coordination will not be helped by accessible conflict resolution mechanisms; such a participant will experience the mechanisms themselves as additional arenas for sovereignty assertion rather than as resources for constructive resolution. The formation of tolerance for imperfect coordination is prior to the institutional design that the design principle literature specifies—and it is the prior condition that the design principle literature does not adequately address.
VIII. Stewardship and Asceticism: A Critical Distinction
Having identified the four competencies that shared governance requires, the paper now addresses a potential misunderstanding that the concept of stewardship as formed competence is likely to generate: the conflation of stewardship with asceticism.
Asceticism, in the tradition from which the term derives, refers to the practice of self-denial for its own sake—the disciplined suppression of desire, appetite, and self-interest as a spiritual or moral discipline. In its religious forms, asceticism has often been understood as the mortification of the flesh and the subordination of natural desire to spiritual discipline. In its secular forms, it appears as the suppression of individual preference in the name of collective good, or the valorization of self-sacrifice as such. Both forms share the basic structure of identifying individual desire or interest as the problem and its suppression as the solution.
The account of stewardship as formed competence that this paper proposes is not ascetic in this sense, and the distinction matters both theoretically and practically.
Theoretically, the distinction matters because asceticism and stewardship rest on fundamentally different accounts of the relationship between individual interest and shared governance. The ascetic account treats individual interest as inherently in tension with shared governance, requiring suppression for the sake of the collective. The stewardship account, as developed in this paper, treats the relevant capacities—externality awareness, boundary discipline, role containment, tolerance of imperfect coordination—not as suppressions of individual interest but as expressions of a more adequately understood individual interest. The person who has developed externality awareness does not suppress the desire to extract resources; she perceives consequences that make unlimited extraction contrary to her own genuine interest as a participant in a sustainable shared system. The person who exercises boundary discipline does not sacrifice what is rightfully his; he has developed a self-understanding within which appropriating what is not rightfully his has no genuine attraction.
This is the point at which the virtue ethics tradition is most clearly relevant. For Aristotle, virtue is not the suppression of desire but its appropriate formation: the virtuous person desires the right things, in the right measure, at the right time, and in the right relation to others—not because desire has been suppressed but because it has been educated and formed (Aristotle, trans. 1999, II.3). The just person does not suppress the desire for more than her fair share; she has been formed in such a way that taking more than her fair share has no genuine attraction, because her sense of what is desirable has been shaped by her understanding of just relationship. The courageous person does not suppress fear; she has been formed in such a way that the things worth fearing are genuinely feared and the things not worth fearing do not occasion disproportionate anxiety.
Stewardship, understood as formed competence, operates in the same register. The genuine steward does not suppress extractive desire through an act of will; she has been formed in such a way that the role of steward—accountable governance of shared resources for the benefit of the community and in accordance with the terms of entrustment—is genuinely satisfying, and that the enclosure behaviors that asceticism would merely suppress have lost their attraction through the formation of an alternative self-understanding.
Practically, the distinction matters because asceticism as a governance strategy is fragile in precisely the ways that shared governance needs to be robust. Governance strategies that depend on participants suppressing their own interests through acts of will are strategies that will fail under conditions of sustained stress, resource scarcity, and perceived non-reciprocity—precisely the conditions under which governance resilience is most needed. The suppression of desire is a motivational resource that is subject to depletion; the formation of desire in accordance with a stewardship self-understanding is a motivational resource that is replenished by the very practices of shared governance that it supports.
This distinction also has implications for how the cultivation of stewardship competence is understood as a social and institutional project. If stewardship were asceticism, the relevant educational and formative project would be one of moral exhortation: convincing people to suppress their self-interest for the sake of the commons. This project has a poor track record, for the obvious reason that moral exhortation does not reliably produce genuine motivation—it produces, at best, temporary compliance and, at worst, the kind of moralistic performance that masks unchanged motivational structure. If stewardship is formed competence, the relevant project is the design of social practices, institutional contexts, and educational environments that genuinely form the competencies required for shared governance—externality awareness, boundary discipline, role containment, and tolerance of imperfect coordination—by providing the conditions under which these competencies are practiced, reinforced, and made constitutive of participants’ self-understanding.
The difference between these two projects is the difference between governance that depends on moral performance and governance that depends on genuine formation. The first produces compliance; the second produces competence. And it is competence, not compliance, that commons governance requires.
IX. Institutional Conditions That Support Formation
The argument of this paper has insisted throughout that formation is prior to institutional design—that governance systems cannot substitute for the formative conditions that produce the competencies shared governance requires. This priority does not mean that institutional design is irrelevant to formation; on the contrary, institutional contexts are among the most powerful formative environments available, and the design of governance institutions has consequences for the formation of participants that are distinct from, and in some cases more important than, the governance consequences that design principle analysis typically addresses.
Several institutional features are particularly relevant to the formation of the competencies identified in this paper.
Participatory governance structures support the formation of all four competencies by creating regular occasions for the exercise of externality awareness, boundary discipline, role containment, and coordination under imperfect conditions. Commons governance systems that require active participant engagement in monitoring, rule modification, and conflict resolution are systems that provide regular practice in the competencies required for shared governance—practice that is formative in the Aristotelian sense of constituting the habits through which stable dispositions are developed. Governance systems that reduce participant involvement to passive compliance with externally determined rules eliminate these formative occasions and, over time, atrophy the competencies that they do not provide occasions to exercise.
Transparent monitoring and feedback systems support the development of externality awareness by making the consequences of individual behavior visible to participants in ways that support the cognitive and perceptual dimensions of that competence. Governance systems that provide participants with regular, accurate, and accessible information about the state of shared resources—information that connects individual use patterns to resource condition—are systems that support the habit of consequence-tracking that externality awareness requires.
Narrative and memorial practices support the formation of stewardship identity by embedding individual resource use within a larger account of community history, responsibility, and relationship. Communities that maintain active memory of their governance history—including both successes and failures, and the stories that make both meaningful—provide participants with the narrative resources for a stewardship self-understanding that is constitutive rather than merely instrumental. The importance of such practices is documented across the diverse commons cases in the historical literature, from the oral traditions of Japanese fishing communities to the written records of Swiss alpine corporations, and their atrophy is consistently associated with the weakening of the governance systems they support.
Graduated entry and mentorship structures support formation by creating the conditions under which less experienced participants learn the competencies of shared governance from more experienced ones—not through explicit instruction alone but through the observation and imitation of practiced stewardship in action. Governance systems that provide structured pathways for entry into participation, and that embed new participants in relationships with experienced ones, are systems that make the transmission of formed competence from one generation of participants to the next possible. Systems that lack such structures must either import competence from elsewhere or face the progressive atrophy of the competencies on which they depend.
None of these institutional features is sufficient to produce formation without the relational and social conditions that the earlier sections of this paper identified as necessary. But they are the institutional expressions of those conditions—the ways in which governance systems can create and maintain the environments within which formation occurs.
X. Conclusion: What a Formation-Based Account Contributes
The argument of this paper can be stated in summary form as follows. Commons governance theory has been organized around two large theoretical intuitions—the Hobbesian intuition that self-interest makes shared governance chronically unstable, and the communitarian intuition that solidarity and shared values can recover sustainable commons from modernity’s fragmenting effects—neither of which provides an adequate foundation for the theory or practice of commons governance. The missing variable in both traditions is formation: the process by which human beings develop the specific competencies that shared governance requires.
The four competencies identified in this paper—externality awareness, boundary discipline, role containment, and tolerance of imperfect coordination—are neither natural nor impossible. They are formed: developed through practice in appropriate social and institutional contexts, supported by governance structures that create occasions for their exercise, and constitutive of a stewardship self-understanding that is the motivational foundation of sustainable shared governance. The formation of these competencies is prior to institutional design in the sense that it is the condition without which institutional design cannot be effective; it is also shaped by institutional design in the sense that governance institutions are themselves powerful formative environments.
The concept of stewardship as formed competence is the constructive alternative to both Hobbesian resignation and communitarian nostalgia. It is non-utopian: it does not assume the best of human nature, does not depend on the recovery of pre-modern solidarity, and does not require the suppression of individual interest through moral exhortation. It is, however, genuinely hopeful: it insists that the competencies required for shared governance are real, learnable, and institutionally supportable—that the tragedy of the commons is not the inevitable expression of human nature but the contingent result of formative failure, and that formative failure is neither universal nor irreversible.
The practical implication is both demanding and specific. Commons governance that succeeds in the long term must attend not only to the design of incentive structures, monitoring systems, and sanction mechanisms, but to the formation of participants in the competencies that those structures presuppose. This attention to formation is not supplementary to governance design; it is its foundation. And the recognition of that foundation is the contribution that a formation-based account of stewardship makes to the theory and practice of commons governance.
Notes
Note 1. The term “formation” is used throughout this paper in its technical sense as a process of dispositional development rather than in its colloquial sense of training or education, though it includes both. The distinction matters because formation in the technical sense refers to the development of stable dispositions—habits of perception, motivation, and action—rather than the acquisition of information or skills that can be applied without dispositional change. A participant who has been trained in the rules of a commons governance system has received education; a participant who has developed the habit of externality awareness, boundary discipline, and constraint tolerance has undergone formation. Governance systems frequently provide the former while assuming the latter.
Note 2. The relationship between the Aristotelian virtue ethics tradition and the institutional theory of commons governance has not been extensively developed in the literature, despite the obvious theoretical affinity between Aristotle’s account of virtue as formed through practice in social contexts and Ostrom’s account of governance competence as developed through participation in well-designed institutions. MacIntyre’s (1981) After Virtue provides the most sophisticated recent account of virtue ethics in relation to social practice theory and is an essential resource for developing this connection. The theological development of this connection, particularly in the Thomistic tradition, is relevant to the sixth paper in this series.
Note 3. The crowding-out effect documented by Bowles (2016) and independently by Frey and Oberholzer-Gee (1997) represents one of the most significant findings for the argument of this paper. If the introduction of external incentive structures undermines intrinsic normative motivation, then governance systems designed on the assumption that participants lack the relevant competencies—and that therefore rely on incentive structures to compensate for that lack—are likely to produce the very motivational deficit they assume, over time. The practical implication is that governance design should be calibrated to the actual motivational structure of participants, supporting existing competencies rather than assuming their absence.
Note 4. The distinction between stewardship and asceticism developed in Section VIII has theological as well as philosophical significance. The Christian ascetic tradition, in some of its forms, has treated the body, desire, and material creation as inherently problematic—as obstacles to spiritual development requiring suppression rather than as good things requiring formation and right ordering. The biblical tradition of stewardship does not support this view. The creation is good (Genesis 1); the mandate to steward it is a positive commission rather than a disciplinary constraint; and the formation required is the formation of desire in accordance with good creation rather than the suppression of desire as such. This theological distinction has practical implications for how stewardship formation is understood as a social project: it supports formation through positive practice and participation rather than through exhortation to self-denial.
Note 5. The four competencies identified in this paper are not equally difficult to form, and they are not equally well supported by existing institutional frameworks. Externality awareness is the most cognitively tractable and the most amenable to institutional support through monitoring and feedback design; it is also the most extensively studied in the environmental psychology and behavioral economics literatures. Tolerance of imperfect coordination is the most psychologically demanding and the least amenable to direct institutional support; it depends most heavily on the relational and developmental conditions that governance institutions can support only indirectly. This asymmetry has implications for governance design: systems that provide strong support for externality awareness while neglecting the formation of tolerance for imperfect coordination are systems that will be vulnerable to collapse under the conditions of stress and uncertainty that make that tolerance most necessary.
Note 6. The narrative and memorial practices identified in Section IX as institutional supports for formation deserve more attention than the commons governance literature has given them. The importance of community memory to governance resilience is implicit in much of the historical literature—the long institutional memory of successful commons is consistently noted—but has not been theorized as a formative mechanism. Alasdair MacIntyre’s (1981) account of the role of narrative in constituting practice-based communities provides the theoretical resources for this analysis, and it is a direction that the present suite’s subsequent work will explore.
Note 7. The concept of secure functioning under stress, derived from the attachment theory tradition of Bowlby (1988) and Ainsworth (1978) and applied here to governance participation, points toward a dimension of the formation question that the commons governance literature has not addressed: the relationship between developmental history and governance competence. If the capacity to tolerate imperfect coordination under stress is substantially shaped by early relational experience—as the attachment literature suggests—then the formation of this competence in adults requires attention to the relational conditions of adult life as well as to governance institutional design. This observation does not translate into a simple therapeutic agenda for commons governance, but it does suggest that the conditions of social life within which governance participants are embedded—housing security, economic stability, relational support—are not merely background conditions for governance design but constitutive elements of the formative environment within which governance competence is sustained or lost.
Note 8. The Jubilee legislation of Leviticus 25, addressed more fully in the sixth paper of this series, is relevant to the argument of this paper because it represents the most fully developed legislative expression of stewardship as a constitutive rather than merely instrumental framework for resource management. The Jubilee provision—the return of land to its ancestral holders every fiftieth year, the release of debt, and the liberation of those enslaved through debt—is not merely a redistributive mechanism; it is a structural instantiation of the theological claim that the land belongs to YHWH and that human tenure is stewardship rather than ownership (Leviticus 25:23). This framing transforms the governance question from “how much am I entitled to extract?” to “how am I required to manage what has been entrusted to me?”—a transformation with precisely the motivational consequences that the analysis of stewardship vs. asceticism in Section VIII describes.
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