Abstract
The governance of shared resources has been theorized, debated, and legislated for decades without arriving at a satisfactory account of why some communities sustain commons governance over extended periods while others fail within a single generation. The dominant explanatory frameworks—rational choice theory, structural institutionalism, social capital theory, and behavioral economics—each capture real features of the governance landscape while leaving a critical variable unaddressed: the formative conditions that produce, or fail to produce, the specific human capacities that shared governance requires. This paper argues that formation—the process by which human beings develop stable dispositions for externality awareness, boundary discipline, role containment, and tolerance of imperfect coordination—is the missing variable in political economy’s account of commons governance, and that its absence explains both the empirical failures of dominant frameworks and the practical failures of governance interventions derived from them. The paper situates this argument in relation to Hardin’s rational choice model, Ostrom’s institutional design theory, the behavioral economics of social preference, and the theological tradition of stewardship, and maps the terrain that the suite of which it is the prolegomenon will occupy. It concludes that commons are not given by nature, recovered from tradition, or secured by incentive design alone—they are made, through the slow, specific, and institutionally supported work of formation, and that this recognition transforms both the theoretical agenda and the practical orientation of commons governance research.
Keywords: formation, commons governance, political economy, rational choice, institutional design, stewardship, shared constraint, social preference, prolegomenon
I. The Question That the Literature Has Not Answered
Somewhere between the pastoral simplicity of Garrett Hardin’s overstocked pasture and the institutional complexity of Elinor Ostrom’s polycentric governance systems lies a question that neither has fully answered and that the subsequent literature has addressed only partially: why do some communities develop the capacity for sustained commons governance while others do not, even when the structural conditions for governance success appear to be present?
This is not a question about incentive structures, though incentive structures are relevant to it. It is not a question about institutional design, though institutional design is one of its dimensions. It is not a question about culture or social capital in the aggregate sense in which those terms are usually deployed, though the specific practices and relationships that form human capacity are part of what it asks about. It is a question about formation: about the processes through which human beings develop—or fail to develop—the specific capacities that participation in shared governance requires, and about the conditions—developmental, social, institutional, and theological—under which those processes succeed or fail.
The question is both theoretically prior to and practically more urgent than the questions the dominant frameworks ask. Theoretically, it is prior because the institutional conditions that Ostrom identified as characteristic of successful commons governance—clear boundaries, rule-condition matching, participatory modification, monitoring, graduated sanctions, conflict resolution, recognized autonomy, and nesting—presuppose participants who are capable of exercising judgment about boundaries, constructing and modifying rules, monitoring resource conditions and user behavior, calibrating sanctions to violations, engaging in conflict resolution without defaulting to domination, and sustaining cooperative commitment under conditions of imperfect coordination. These are not capacities that any person who arrives at a commons governance situation automatically possesses; they are formed competencies that must be developed in participants before the institutional design principles can be effective. Practically, the question is more urgent because governance interventions designed on the assumption that incentive structures can substitute for participant capacity have consistently underperformed, often producing the motivational crowding-out effects that Bowles (2016) documented: the replacement of intrinsic normative motivation by external incentive structures that assume and thereby produce the self-interested behavior they were designed to constrain.
Formation is the missing variable—missing not because scholars have been inattentive but because the dominant frameworks of political economy are not equipped to see it. Rational choice theory, which has dominated commons analysis since Hardin, treats individual preferences as given and stable, not as formed and variable; it has no concept of the process by which preferences become what they are, and therefore no way to theorize formation as a governance variable. Structural institutionalism, which Ostrom’s work exemplifies at its best, attends to the design of governance structures with admirable precision but treats the motivational and capacitary attributes of governance participants as background conditions rather than as objects of analysis and intervention. Social capital theory gestures toward the relational conditions of governance success but tends toward aggregate concepts—trust, norms, networks—that obscure the specific processes by which individual participants develop the capacities that shared governance requires. Behavioral economics has documented with precision the conditions under which people deviate from narrow self-interest in favor of cooperative, fair, and norm-governed behavior, but has not developed an account of the developmental and social conditions that produce these behavioral dispositions in some people and not others.
The suite of papers of which this prolegomenon is the introduction proposes formation as the theoretical variable that political economy has lacked, and develops its implications across a range of domains—historical, psychological, institutional, rhetorical, and theological—that the dominant frameworks have addressed in isolation from one another. This paper maps the theoretical terrain those papers will occupy, situates the formation concept in relation to the existing frameworks, and establishes the vocabulary on which the subsequent analysis will draw.
II. What the Dominant Frameworks Get Right and What They Miss
Before proposing formation as a missing variable, it is necessary to be precise about what the dominant frameworks have contributed and where their contributions end. This precision matters because the formation account proposed in this suite is not a rejection of the existing frameworks but an extension of them—an attempt to provide the explanatory substrate that each framework gestures toward but cannot theorize within its own terms.
Rational Choice Theory: The Contribution and the Limit
The contribution of rational choice theory to commons governance analysis is real and should not be dismissed in the enthusiasm for its critique. The basic insight that individual actors respond to incentive structures—that the design of governance systems affects the costs and benefits of different behavioral options and therefore affects behavior—is both true and important. Hardin’s model, whatever its empirical failures and ideological liabilities, identified a genuine structural problem: governance systems that allow unlimited individual extraction from shared resources while distributing the costs of extraction across all users create incentive structures that drive toward overextraction. This is not an artifact of the rational choice framework; it is a real governance problem that any adequate framework must address.
The limit of rational choice theory is that it treats the identification of this problem as the complete analysis. Having established that the incentive structure of an unregulated commons drives toward overextraction, the rational choice framework concludes that the solution must be structural: change the incentive structure through privatization, coercive regulation, or institutional design, and the behavior will change accordingly. This conclusion follows from the framework’s premise—that behavior is a function of incentive structure applied to given preferences—but the premise is false in precisely the ways that matter for commons governance. Preferences are not given; they are formed. And the formation of preferences in the direction of externality awareness, boundary discipline, and shared constraint is a governance achievement that incentive structures can support or undermine but cannot produce from their own resources.
Bowles and Gintis (2011) documented this failure extensively in their analysis of the evolution of social preferences, demonstrating that human motivational structure is substantially more complex than rational choice theory assumes—that people routinely exhibit strong reciprocity, inequality aversion, and norm-governed behavior that cannot be derived from narrow self-interest maximization, and that the conditions under which these behavioral dispositions are exhibited or suppressed are social and institutional rather than merely incentive-structural. This documentation is important but incomplete: it establishes that people sometimes behave cooperatively and that the conditions of cooperation are social and institutional, without providing an account of the developmental and formative processes that produce the disposition toward cooperative behavior in some people and not others.
Ostrom’s Institutional Design Theory: The Contribution and the Limit
Ostrom’s contribution is of a different order. Where rational choice theory offered a model of inevitable failure, Ostrom offered an empirically grounded account of institutional conditions under which commons governance succeeds—an account derived from systematic comparison of governance systems across multiple resource types, cultural contexts, and historical periods. The design principles she identified—and the broader research program in institutional analysis and development that she established—represent the most significant advance in commons governance theory of the past half-century, and any adequate successor framework must incorporate rather than ignore them.
The limit of Ostrom’s framework is not a failure of attention or rigor; it is a consequence of the methodological commitments that made her empirical contribution possible. Ostrom’s comparative institutional analysis was designed to identify the structural features that characterize successful governance systems—features that could be observed, compared, and codified as design principles applicable across cases. This methodological commitment required treating governance participants as background constants: the analysis compares institutional structures across cases while holding participant characteristics constant, or treating variation in participant characteristics as subsumed under institutional variables. This methodological choice was appropriate for the analytical goal Ostrom was pursuing; but it means that the formation of governance participants—the processes by which they develop the capacities that the institutional design principles presuppose—falls outside the analysis by construction.
Ostrom was aware of this limitation. Her later work on social-ecological systems (Ostrom, 2007, 2009) and her engagement with the behavioral economics literature in her Nobel lecture (Ostrom, 2009) both gesture toward the formative and motivational dimensions of governance that her institutional analysis could not fully address. She acknowledged that the design principles characterize systems that work without fully explaining why some communities develop the capacity to implement and maintain them while others do not. That acknowledgment is the opening through which the formation account proposed in this suite enters.
Social Capital Theory: The Contribution and the Limit
Social capital theory, associated primarily with the work of Putnam (1993, 2000) and Coleman (1988), introduced relational and normative variables into the analysis of governance success in ways that both rational choice theory and structural institutionalism had excluded. The insight that trust, norms of reciprocity, and networks of civic engagement are genuine governance resources—that communities with high social capital govern shared resources more successfully than communities with low social capital—is supported by substantial empirical evidence and represents a real advance over purely structural accounts.
The limit of social capital theory is conceptual rather than empirical. The concept of social capital, as typically deployed, is an aggregate and relatively undifferentiated measure of relational and normative resources. It captures the fact that relational resources matter without analyzing the specific competencies that those resources produce, the specific practices through which those competencies are developed, or the specific conditions under which relational resources produce governance capacity rather than merely social cohesion. Two communities may have similar levels of trust and network density while differing substantially in the governance capacities of their members, because the practices through which their social relationships are constituted form different competencies in their participants. Social capital theory lacks the conceptual vocabulary to make this distinction because it operates at the level of aggregate relational resources rather than at the level of specific formed competencies.
Portes (1998) identified related limitations in his critique of social capital theory, noting its tendency toward circular reasoning—communities with strong institutions have high social capital, and high social capital produces strong institutions—and its inability to explain negative social capital: the formation of strong in-group loyalty and normative cohesion that supports governance failure rather than success by constituting the group against external others rather than in support of shared governance norms. The formation account proposed in this suite addresses both limitations by specifying the content of what needs to be formed and the processes through which formation occurs, rather than treating relational resources as a generic positive variable.
Behavioral Economics: The Contribution and the Limit
The behavioral economics of social preference—associated with the work of Fehr and Gächter (2000, 2002), Henrich et al. (2001), Bowles (2016), and others—has contributed to commons governance analysis by documenting with experimental precision the conditions under which people exhibit cooperative, fair, and norm-governed behavior that deviates from narrow self-interest maximization. The finding that strong reciprocity—the disposition to cooperate with cooperators and to punish defectors, even at personal cost—is both widespread and culturally variable is important for commons governance because it demonstrates that the motivational substrate for shared governance is real and not merely the product of self-interest dressed in cooperative language.
The limit of behavioral economics is developmental: it documents the behavioral dispositions that people exhibit under various conditions without providing an account of the developmental and social processes that produce those dispositions. The cross-cultural variation in social preference that Henrich et al. (2001) documented—substantial differences across cultures in the degree of prosociality, fairness-seeking, and punishment of defectors exhibited in experimental games—is treated as evidence of cultural influence on behavioral disposition without analyzing the specific cultural practices and formative processes that produce the observed variation. This is precisely the gap that the formation account addresses: not the fact that some people and communities exhibit governance-supporting behavioral dispositions more robustly than others, but the processes through which those dispositions are developed and the conditions under which those processes succeed or fail.
III. Formation: A Technical Definition and Theoretical Location
The concept of formation, as this suite employs it, requires precise definition to distinguish it from related but distinct concepts: education, training, socialization, and character development. These distinctions are not merely terminological; they reflect substantive differences in what is being claimed about the processes through which human governance capacity is developed.
Formation, in the technical sense employed here, refers to the process by which human beings develop stable dispositional orientations—stable patterns of perceiving, evaluating, motivating, and acting—that constitute genuine competencies for shared governance rather than merely behavioral compliance with governance rules. Formation differs from education in that it targets stable dispositions rather than information and knowledge, though education may contribute to formation when it is designed to do so. It differs from training in that it produces intrinsic motivation rather than merely skill acquisition, though training may be part of the formative process. It differs from socialization in its specificity: socialization refers to the general process by which individuals acquire the norms and behaviors appropriate to a social group, while formation refers to the development of specific competencies for shared governance that may or may not be produced by socialization in any given community. And it differs from character development in the breadth of its reference: character development typically refers to the formation of moral character in the most general sense, while formation as used here refers specifically to the governance-relevant competencies that commons governance requires.
The theoretical lineage of the concept is primarily Aristotelian. Aristotle’s account of virtue as stable disposition (hexis) developed through habituation (ethismos)—through the repeated performance of virtuous acts under conditions that make the exercise of practical wisdom possible—establishes the basic framework within which formation operates (Aristotle, trans. 1999). Virtues, for Aristotle, are not natural endowments; they are developed through practice in appropriate social contexts. But they are also not merely learned behaviors that could be unlearned as easily as they were acquired; they are stable dispositions that become constitutive of the agent’s character—part of who the person is, not merely part of what the person does under particular incentive conditions.
This Aristotelian framework was developed by MacIntyre (1981) in After Virtue and by MacIntyre (1988) in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? into a sustained argument that the concept of virtue as formed through participation in social practices is the necessary foundation for any adequate account of human action and social life—including, though MacIntyre did not develop this application explicitly, governance of shared resources. The concept of social practice as a cooperative activity with internal goods, standards of excellence, and constitutive rules that form the practitioners in specific virtues is the theoretical vehicle through which formation operates in MacIntyre’s account, and it is directly applicable to commons governance: participation in well-designed governance institutions is a social practice in MacIntyre’s sense, and sustained participation in such institutions forms governance participants in the virtues—the stable dispositional competencies—that the institution requires and expresses.
The developmental psychology literature provides empirical grounding for this theoretical framework without being reducible to it. Research on executive function and self-regulation (Mischel, 2014; Baumeister and Tierney, 2011), on perspective-taking and prosocial motivation (Batson, 1991), on secure attachment and the capacity for constructive engagement under stress (Bowlby, 1988; Ainsworth et al., 1978), and on the development of moral reasoning (Kohlberg, 1981; Gilligan, 1982) all converge on a picture of human motivational and cognitive development as substantially shaped by developmental experience and social context—as genuinely formative in the technical sense rather than merely responsive to incentive structures applied to given preferences.
The theological tradition of stewardship, examined at length in the sixth paper of this series, contributes to the formation concept a dimension that the philosophical and psychological traditions do not provide: an account of why the formation of governance competencies is not merely practically useful but theologically required—why the failure of formation is not merely a governance problem but a distortion of the human relationship to creation and to the Creator. This theological dimension is not incidental to the formation account; it is, as the theological paper argues, the source of its deepest rationale and its most fundamental claim about what human beings are and what they are for.
IV. The Four Competencies and Why They Are the Right Ones
The formation account developed in this suite identifies four specific competencies as the governance-relevant outcomes of successful formation: externality awareness, boundary discipline, role containment, and tolerance of imperfect coordination. These four competencies are not arbitrary or exhaustive; they are identified as the governance-relevant competencies by the convergence of three independent lines of evidence: the comparative institutional literature on commons governance success and failure, the developmental psychology literature on self-regulation and prosocial motivation, and the theological tradition of stewardship as accountable governance.
Externality awareness is the competence to perceive—habitually, without special effort—the consequences of one’s resource use for the shared resource system and for other users. It has both cognitive and affective dimensions: the cognitive ability to model consequences across time and across the community of users, and the affective disposition to care about those consequences as morally relevant rather than as irrelevant background conditions for one’s own extractive behavior. The absence of externality awareness is the proximate mechanism of the commons failure that Hardin described: the herdsman who adds the marginal animal does not perceive or does not care about the distributed cost that addition imposes on the shared resource and on other users. The presence of externality awareness is what makes monitoring and feedback systems effective: participants who habitually track the consequences of their behavior for the shared system use the information that monitoring systems provide, while participants who lack externality awareness treat monitoring information as irrelevant to their resource decisions.
Boundary discipline is the competence to distinguish between legitimate claim assertion within a shared governance system and enclosure—the appropriation of control or resources that exceeds one’s legitimate entitlement—and to regulate one’s own behavior in light of that distinction rather than in light of the locally plausible reasoning that drives incremental enclosure. The absence of boundary discipline is the driver of the proto-enclosure behavior that Paper 2 of this series analyzes: the progressive expansion of individual control over shared space through a series of small, individually justifiable steps that cumulatively constitute enclosure. The presence of boundary discipline is what makes the governance category of legitimate entitlement operative: participants who know where their legitimate claim ends and exercise the self-regulatory capacity to stay within that limit maintain the shared governance system, while participants who lack either the knowledge or the self-regulatory capacity progressively erode it.
Role containment is the competence 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 absence of role containment produces the sovereignty fantasy that Paper 2 identifies as a distinct failure mode from enclosure: the drive to control the governance system rather than merely to appropriate its resources—the committee member who attempts to exercise executive authority, the department manager who monopolizes organizational resources and processes. The presence of role containment is what makes differentiated governance structures—the nested, polycentric governance systems that Ostrom identified as characteristic of successful large-scale commons—functional: participants who can exercise their roles fully and excellently without collapsing the boundaries between their roles and the governance system as a whole enable the system to function as designed.
Tolerance of imperfect coordination is the competence to remain constructively engaged with a shared governance 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, and to maintain cooperative commitment under conditions of uncertainty and perceived non-reciprocity without defaulting to defection, withdrawal, or control-seeking. The absence of this competence is the most common proximate cause of governance system collapse: not the failure of institutional design or the exhaustion of structural incentives, but the withdrawal of participants whose capacity to tolerate imperfect coordination under stress has been exceeded. The presence of this competence is what makes governance system resilience possible: participants who can remain constructively engaged through failure, who experience imperfect coordination as a problem within a valued relationship rather than as evidence that the relationship is not worth maintaining, provide the motivational substrate on which governance reform is possible.
These four competencies are governance-relevant not because they are exhaustive of what governance participants need—they are not—but because they are the specific competencies that the evidence most consistently identifies as the proximate difference between successful and failed commons governance at the level of individual participants. They are what participants who can sustain shared governance over the long term have that participants who cannot do not have. And they are what formation must produce if commons governance is to succeed.
V. Why Formation Is Prior to Institutional Design
The claim that formation is prior to institutional design requires careful statement because it is easily misread as a claim that institutional design is irrelevant to governance success—a claim that the evidence does not support and that this suite does not make. The relationship between formation and institutional design is not one of competition or substitution; it is one of dependence and mutual constitution. Formation is prior to institutional design in the specific sense that the governance capacities presupposed by good institutional design must be present in participants before the design can be effective; but institutional design is simultaneously one of the most powerful formative environments available, shaping the motivational and capacitary attributes of participants in ways that either support or undermine the governance competencies on which the design depends.
The claim of priority is best understood through a simple observation: governance design principles are specifications of what governance structures should look like given that participants have certain capacities—the capacity to monitor resource conditions and report accurately, to calibrate sanctions to violations with judgment rather than merely following rules, to engage in conflict resolution rather than defaulting to escalation, to participate in rule modification with genuine concern for governance effectiveness rather than merely for personal advantage. When participants lack these capacities, governance structures designed on the assumption that they are present do not produce the outcomes the design principles predict; they produce the pathological variants of those outcomes—monitoring systems that become surveillance instruments for dominant actors, sanction systems that become tools for targeted intimidation, conflict resolution mechanisms that become arenas for sovereignty assertion, rule modification processes that become vehicles for capturing governance norms in the interest of powerful participants.
The evidence for this priority is distributed across the governance literature but rarely assembled in its implications. Platteau (2004) documented the failure of decentralization programs in developing countries that transferred formal governance authority to local communities without attending to the formation of the governance capacities those communities needed to exercise that authority effectively—producing, in many cases, governance capture by local elites that was worse than the centralized systems the decentralization was designed to replace. Agrawal and Gibson (1999) demonstrated that the assumption of communities as homogeneous units with shared governance interests—an assumption embedded in much of the commons design literature—obscures the internal power dynamics that determine whether formally participatory governance institutions serve the community as a whole or are captured by the interests of those already powerful within it. Both findings point to the same conclusion: that institutional design without formation produces governance structures that powerful actors capture and redirect toward their own interests.
The converse claim is equally important: institutional design is one of the most powerful formative environments available for the development of governance competencies. The design principles that Ostrom identified are not merely structural features of successful governance systems; they are, as Paper 5 of this series argues in detail, formative practices that develop the competencies they presuppose in participants who engage them over time. Participatory rule modification, when genuine rather than performative, forms participants in the habit of attending to the consequences of governance rules for the resource system and for other users—a habit that is the institutional expression of externality awareness. Graduated sanctions, when fairly calibrated and consistently applied, form participants in the understanding of where legitimate behavior ends and enclosure begins—a cognitive map that supports boundary discipline. Accessible conflict resolution, when used rather than avoided, forms participants in the practice of constructive engagement with governance disagreement—a practice that is the institutional expression of tolerance for imperfect coordination.
This mutual constitution of formation and institutional design—in which institutional design presupposes formative outcomes that it simultaneously produces—is not a vicious circle but a developmental dynamic that has both a direction and a starting point. The direction is toward the mutual reinforcement of formed governance competence and effective institutional design; the starting point is whatever formative resources a community brings to its governance situation. Communities that bring substantial formative resources can implement and maintain more sophisticated institutional designs; communities with minimal formative resources require institutional designs that both function with limited participant capacity and work to develop that capacity through the governance practices they establish.
This developmental dynamic is what the formation-based account of commons governance adds to the institutional design literature: not a competing framework but a developmental dimension that the design literature implicitly assumes without theorizing. The question for governance intervention is not merely which design principles to implement but how to sequence the development of participant capacity and institutional sophistication in ways that produce the mutual reinforcement rather than the mutual destruction of formation and design.
VI. The Ideological Dimension: Why Formation Has Been Invisible
Having established the theoretical case for formation as the missing variable in political economy, the paper turns to a question that the theoretical analysis cannot itself answer: why has formation been invisible to the dominant frameworks, and why does its invisibility persist despite the evidence that points toward it?
The answer is not primarily a matter of scholarly inattention. The invisibility of formation in political economy’s account of commons governance is produced by a set of theoretical and ideological commitments that are prior to any specific empirical question—commitments about human nature, about the proper units of social analysis, and about the relationship between individual and collective life that structure what can be seen within each framework.
The rational choice commitment to given and stable preferences is the most fundamental source of formation’s invisibility in the dominant framework. If preferences are given—if the motivational structure of governance participants is a constant rather than a variable—then the process by which that motivational structure is produced cannot be an explanatory variable. The formation question—why do some people develop governance-supporting motivational orientations while others do not?—is not merely unanswered within the rational choice framework; it is unaskable, because the framework’s foundational premise eliminates the variability that the question requires.
The methodological individualism that characterizes both rational choice theory and much of the institutional economics tradition provides a second source of invisibility. Methodological individualism treats the individual as the irreducible unit of social analysis, explaining social outcomes as the aggregate results of individual actions. This commitment makes it possible to analyze the incentive structures that affect individual behavior and the institutional structures that aggregate individual choices into collective outcomes; it makes it difficult to analyze the social practices and relational contexts through which the individual motivational structure that the analysis takes as given is itself produced. Formation is inherently a social and relational process—it occurs within families, communities, governance institutions, and cultural traditions—and a framework committed to methodological individualism has structural difficulty seeing it.
The ideology of possessive individualism that Macpherson (1978) identified as the foundational assumption of liberal political theory provides the deepest source of formation’s invisibility. If human beings are by nature self-interested proprietors of their own persons and capacities—if self-interest is the natural condition from which governance institutions must work—then the formation of motivational orientations that are not reducible to self-interest is not merely analytically invisible but politically inconvenient. It suggests that the self-interested actor of liberal political theory is not a description of human nature as such but a description of a specific formative outcome—of what human beings become when formed by practices and institutions that treat self-interest as natural and legitimate—and that different formative conditions could produce different motivational outcomes. This suggestion is threatening to a political tradition that derives the legitimacy of its institutional arrangements from the claim that they work with human nature as it is rather than requiring human nature to be different from what it is.
Paper 4 of this series develops the analysis of moralization as a mechanism for making enclosure appear natural and inevitable—for converting a specific institutional and formative failure into an apparent expression of human nature that requires enclosure as its correction. The invisibility of formation in political economy is the theoretical counterpart of this moralization: by treating self-interested behavior as given rather than formed, the dominant frameworks make the governance conditions that produce self-interested behavior appear as descriptions of human nature rather than as explanatory targets requiring understanding and intervention.
The formation-based account proposed in this suite is thus not merely a theoretical correction to the dominant frameworks; it is a political and ideological intervention that makes visible what those frameworks systematically exclude. To say that commons are made rather than given—that the governance capacities required for shared life are formed through specific practices in specific social contexts rather than either naturally present or permanently absent—is to contest the ideological claim that enclosure is the inevitable response to human nature and to insist that the conditions under which human beings develop governance capacity or fail to develop it are themselves objects of political analysis and intervention.
VII. Theological Grounding: Why the Formation Account Needs It
The suite of which this paper is the prolegomenon includes a theological paper that the preceding papers in the series might appear not to require. The historical, psychological, institutional, rhetorical, and developmental analyses of the preceding papers constitute a theoretically coherent account of commons governance failure and its formation-based corrective without needing to invoke theological commitments. Why, then, does the suite include a theological paper at all, and why does the formation account need the theological grounding that paper provides?
The answer operates at two levels: the level of explanatory completeness and the level of normative grounding.
At the level of explanatory completeness, the theological tradition—specifically, the biblical land ethic developed in Leviticus 25, the prophetic material examined in Isaiah, Amos, and Micah, and the stewardship theology of the New Testament parables—provides historical evidence of a governance framework that recognized, analyzed, and responded to commons failure and enclosure dynamics with institutional sophistication that secular political economy has not yet matched. The Jubilee provision is the most striking example: a structural anti-enclosure mechanism that provides for the periodic reversal of accumulation and the restoration of distributed tenure—not as moral exhortation but as enforceable legislation embedded in the institutional fabric of the covenant community. Secular commons theory has not produced an equivalent, and the reasons for its failure to do so are themselves illuminating: the secular frameworks lack the theological grounding—the claim of divine ownership that makes permanent alienation categorically impermissible—that gives the Jubilee provision its unconditional character. A governance provision that can be overridden by economic necessity is not equivalent to a covenant obligation that cannot be, and the difference matters for governance resilience under stress.
At the level of normative grounding, the formation account requires a rationale for why formation in the governance competencies identified in this suite is obligatory rather than merely prudent—why the failure to develop externality awareness, boundary discipline, role containment, and tolerance of imperfect coordination is not merely a governance inefficiency but a moral and theological failure. The secular frameworks can demonstrate that communities with well-formed governance participants govern better than communities without them; they cannot demonstrate that the formation of those participants is morally required rather than merely instrumentally desirable. The biblical tradition can and does make this stronger claim: the formation of human beings in the capacities for accountable stewardship of creation is not merely useful but required—required by the covenant terms under which creation is held in trust, required by the character of the Creator-Owner whose governance of creation defines what legitimate human dominion looks like, and required by the human vocation as image-bearers commissioned to represent that governance faithfully across generations.
This theological claim does not invalidate the secular analysis; it grounds it in a way that the secular analysis cannot ground itself. The secular formation account can say: communities that form their participants in governance competencies sustain commons governance, and the failure to do so produces commons collapse. The theological formation account can add: the formation of governance competence is what human beings were made for, the failure of that formation is a distortion of the human vocation, and the judgment that the prophets announce on enclosure is not an arbitrary sanction but the natural consequence of a fundamental disorder in the human relationship to creation and to the Creator. These are different kinds of claims, operating at different levels of analysis; but they are complementary rather than competing, and the suite that includes both is more complete than a suite that includes only one.
VIII. The Suite and Its Architecture
The papers that follow this prolegomenon develop the formation account across six specific domains, each of which addresses a different dimension of the central argument while remaining independently publishable as a scholarly contribution to the relevant specialized literature.
Paper 1, The Myth of the Inevitable Tragedy, establishes the empirical and historical foundation of the suite by demolishing the inevitability thesis on which Hardin’s model depends and replacing it with the diagnostic question that the formation account requires: not whether commons fail but under what conditions of formation, institutional design, and social accountability they do so. The paper’s analysis of Hardin’s assumptions as political commitments rather than neutral analytical premises, its documentation of historical commons that worked, its account of Ostrom’s design principles as empirical correction, and its identification of the rational actor model’s category error when applied to normed communities together establish the negative case: the dominant framework is inadequate. The formation account developed in subsequent papers provides the positive alternative.
Paper 2, Constraint Intolerance and the Psychology of Enclosure, develops the formation account from the psychological side, analyzing the specific motivational and dispositional conditions that produce enclosure behavior—the sovereignty fantasy, identity fragility, and the externalization of internal disorder through domination of shared space. This paper provides the psychological depth that the institutional analysis cannot supply and that the theological account presupposes: an account of what is happening in the persons who enclose, that goes beyond the description of enclosure as greed or self-interest to identify the specific formative failures—the inadequate development of constraint tolerance, externality awareness, and the capacity for shared identity—that produce enclosure as a psychological necessity rather than a rational choice.
Paper 3, From the Office Refrigerator to the Aquifer, demonstrates the scale-invariance of the formation failure pattern—the recurrence of the same four-stage sequence of commons failure across radically different scales and contexts. The paper’s analytical use of micro-scale vignettes as primary data rather than mere illustration is methodologically significant: it demonstrates that the formation failure that drives commons collapse is visible at scales and in contexts that the standard commons governance literature, focused on natural resource systems, does not examine, and that the visibility of formation failure at these scales provides diagnostic access that large-scale studies cannot.
Paper 4, Moralization as Enclosure Technology, completes the critical analysis of the suite by examining how enclosure acquires and maintains its legitimacy—how the displacement of shared governance by individual accumulation is represented as the correction of commons failure rather than as its cause, and how the rhetoric of responsibility and disorder functions not to describe reality but to foreclose the alternatives that a formation-based account would make visible. This paper is the suite’s most directly critical contribution: it identifies moralization as an instrument of enclosure rather than a response to it, and provides diagnostic tools for detecting this instrument in policy and institutional discourse.
Paper 5, Stewardship as Formed Competence, develops the suite’s constructive argument: a non-utopian account of the specific competencies that successful commons governance requires and the conditions under which those competencies are formed, sustained, and supported by institutional design. The paper’s central distinction between stewardship and asceticism—between the formation of desire in accordance with a stewardship self-understanding and the suppression of desire through acts of will—is the conceptual key to the constructive argument: stewardship is not self-denial but competence, and the cultivation of stewardship is not moral exhortation but formative practice.
Paper 6, Land, Limits, and Judgment, grounds the formation account in the theological tradition that provides its deepest rationale: the biblical land ethic of Leviticus 25, the prophetic indictment of accumulation in Isaiah, Amos, and Micah, and the stewardship theology of the New Testament parables. The paper demonstrates that the biblical tradition constitutes a coherent anti-enclosure framework of greater structural sophistication than secular commons theory has achieved, and argues that its superiority at precisely the points where secular theory is weakest—the grounding of the accountability claim, the diagnosis of institutional capture, the structural ambition of the Jubilee correction, and the theological account of formation—makes it an indispensable interlocutor for commons governance theory rather than a supplementary moral perspective.
The suite as a whole constitutes a sustained argument that commons governance theory has been organized around the wrong explanatory variable—incentive structure rather than formation—and that the reorientation of that theory around formation transforms both its theoretical agenda and its practical implications. Commons are not given by nature; they are not recovered from tradition; they are not secured by incentive design alone. They are made—through the slow, specific, and institutionally supported work of forming human beings in the capacities for shared governance that shared life requires. That work is the most important governance project of any age, and it has been systematically neglected by the frameworks that have dominated political economy’s account of shared life.
IX. Conclusion: What It Means to Say That Commons Are Made
The title of this prolegomenon is intended as a thesis, not a slogan. To say that commons are made rather than given is to make a specific theoretical claim with specific implications, and the conclusion of this paper is the appropriate place to state those implications with precision.
It is a claim against inevitability. Commons are not inevitably fated to fail, as Hardin’s model implies, nor inevitably recoverable through solidarity, as communitarian optimism assumes. Their success or failure is contingent on the formative, institutional, and social conditions under which governance participants develop or fail to develop the competencies that shared governance requires. This contingency is the foundation of the suite’s diagnostic orientation: the question for any commons governance situation is not “will this fail?” but “what formative conditions are present or absent, and what does their presence or absence predict about governance outcomes?”
It is a claim about process. Commons are made through processes—developmental, relational, institutional, and theological—that have specific content, specific conditions of success and failure, and specific relationships to the institutional design principles that the governance literature has documented. Understanding these processes is both a theoretical task and a practical one: theoretical because the processes have not been adequately theorized in the dominant frameworks, and practical because they are the target of the governance interventions that formation-based commons theory recommends.
It is a claim about time. Commons are made slowly. The formation of governance competencies is a developmental achievement that requires sustained practice in appropriate social and institutional contexts—not a quick intervention that produces reliable governance capacity in the short term. The governance interventions implied by the formation account are therefore long-term investments in the conditions of human development rather than short-term adjustments of incentive structures. This implication is uncomfortable for policy frameworks oriented toward measurable outcomes in short time horizons, but it is what the evidence requires.
It is a claim about responsibility. If commons are made rather than given—if their success or failure is the contingent result of formative conditions rather than the inevitable expression of human nature—then the conditions of formation are objects of political and moral responsibility. Communities, institutions, and governance systems bear responsibility for the formative conditions they create or fail to create—for whether they produce governance participants capable of shared life or participants whose incapacity for shared constraint drives the enclosure dynamics that the prophets condemned and that the Jubilee was designed to correct.
And it is, finally, a claim about hope. If commons are made, they can be made better. The tragedy of the commons is not the final word on human nature or on the possibilities of shared life. It is a description of what happens when formation fails—when the conditions for developing governance competency are absent or actively undermined—and a challenge to understand those conditions well enough to produce them deliberately, sustain them institutionally, and ground them in the theological account of human vocation that gives them their deepest rationale.
That is what the papers that follow this prolegomenon are an attempt to do.
Notes
Note 1. The term prolegomenon (from the Greek prolegomena: things said beforehand) is used deliberately to signal that this paper functions as a theoretical orientation for the suite as a whole rather than as an independent contribution to any single specialized literature. Its audience is correspondingly broader than that of the individual papers: while each subsequent paper is addressed primarily to scholars in a specific field—institutional economics, political psychology, organization studies, sociology, political philosophy, or biblical theology—the prolegomenon is addressed to readers who want to understand how those contributions cohere and why the coherence matters. It is, in the tradition of prolegomena in philosophical literature, the paper that makes the other papers intelligible as a unified argument rather than a collection of independent contributions.
Note 2. The claim that formation is the missing variable in political economy should be distinguished from the closely related but distinct claim that culture is the missing variable—a claim associated with scholars including North (1990), Platteau (2000), and Fukuyama (1995). The culture claim holds that the shared beliefs, values, and norms of a community explain governance outcomes that institutional analysis cannot account for. The formation claim is both more specific and more dynamic: it holds that the specific competencies required for shared governance—externality awareness, boundary discipline, role containment, and tolerance of imperfect coordination—are developed through specific practices and relational contexts that can be identified and supported, rather than being the aggregate expression of cultural heritage that can be described but not directly produced. Formation is the mechanism through which culture becomes governance capacity, and specifying that mechanism is both more analytically tractable and more practically useful than invoking culture as an explanatory variable.
Note 3. The relationship between the formation account proposed in this suite and the capabilities approach of Sen (1999) and Nussbaum (2011) deserves acknowledgment. The capabilities approach holds that human development should be understood in terms of the actual capabilities that people have to live flourishing human lives—capabilities that depend on both internal attributes of persons and external conditions of social and institutional life. The governance competencies identified in this suite are a subset of capabilities in this sense: formed human powers that are both internal achievements and products of social and institutional conditions. The formation account is more specific than the capabilities approach in its identification of which capabilities matter for commons governance and through which processes they are developed, but it operates within a broadly compatible theoretical framework.
Note 4. The concept of practical wisdom (phronesis) in Aristotle’s ethics is relevant to the formation account in ways that the papers of this suite do not fully develop. Phronesis is the meta-virtue that governs the exercise of all specific virtues: the capacity to perceive what a situation requires and to respond appropriately—to exercise the right virtue, in the right measure, at the right time, toward the right person. For commons governance, practical wisdom is the capacity to navigate the specific and variable situations that governance presents—to know when constraint is required and when flexibility is appropriate, when to assert legitimate claim and when to defer, when to invoke sanctions and when to engage in conflict resolution—in ways that serve the long-term health of the shared governance system. The formation of practical wisdom is both the deepest goal of the formative processes that the suite describes and the most difficult to specify in terms of determinate content, because it is precisely the capacity to respond well to situations that cannot be fully anticipated.
Note 5. The relationship between the formation account and the literature on organizational learning (Argyris and Schön, 1978; Senge, 1990) is worth noting for readers working in organizational and management contexts. The organizational learning literature identifies the capacity to detect and correct errors in organizational functioning—including the deeper-level errors in the assumptions and frameworks that govern organizational behavior—as the central challenge of organizational development. The formation of governance competencies, as analyzed in this suite, is a related but distinct challenge: not merely the development of organizational learning capacity in the abstract, but the development of specific dispositional orientations toward shared governance that make organizational learning in the governance domain possible. The two literatures are complementary rather than overlapping, and their integration represents a productive direction for subsequent research.
Note 6. The gendered dimensions of commons governance and commons failure have received increasing attention in the literature since Agarwal’s (1994) foundational work on gender and forest governance in South Asia. The formation account proposed in this suite is not gender-neutral in its implications: the socialization and formative practices that produce the governance competencies of externality awareness, boundary discipline, and role containment differ substantially by gender in most societies, and the differential formation of men and women in these competencies has predictable consequences for commons governance outcomes. These dimensions deserve more extended treatment than the suite provides, and the development of a gender-sensitive formation account for commons governance is an important direction for subsequent research.
Note 7. The digital commons represent a governance domain in which the formation-based analysis of this suite is both particularly urgent and particularly difficult to apply. The scale, anonymity, and rapid change characteristic of digital commons—platforms, open-source software, knowledge commons, and internet governance—make the relational and developmental conditions for formation difficult to establish and maintain, while the governance failures of digital commons—platform capture, knowledge enclosure, and the exploitation of open-source commons by proprietary actors—exhibit precisely the patterns of unaccountable extraction and sovereignty fantasy that the suite analyzes. Hess and Ostrom’s (2007) foundational work on knowledge commons and Benkler’s (2006) analysis of networked commons governance are the most important entry points to this literature, and the application of formation-based analysis to digital commons governance is a significant direction for subsequent research.
Note 8. Readers familiar with Polanyi’s (1944) The Great Transformation will recognize affinities between the formation account proposed in this suite and Polanyi’s analysis of the disembedding of markets from social relationships as the central dynamic of modernity’s disruption of sustainable community life. Polanyi’s argument—that the attempt to organize economic life entirely through self-regulating markets destroys the social relationships and normative frameworks on which both economic and community life depend—is a large-scale version of the same analysis that the formation account applies to commons governance specifically. The connection is not coincidental: the formation of governance competence requires the embedding of economic activity in social relationships and normative frameworks precisely of the kind that market disembedding destroys. Polanyi’s historical analysis is the background against which the suite’s formation-based account should be read, and the relationship between the two deserves more extended development than the present papers provide.
References
Agarwal, B. (1994). A field of one’s own: Gender and land rights in South Asia. Cambridge University Press.
Agrawal, A., & Gibson, C. C. (1999). Enchantment and disenchantment: The role of community in natural resource conservation. World Development, 27(4), 629–649. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0305-750X(98)00161-2
Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A. (1978). Organizational learning: A theory of action perspective. Addison-Wesley.
Aristotle. (1999). Nicomachean ethics (T. Irwin, Trans.). Hackett. (Original work ca. 350 BCE)
Batson, C. D. (1991). The altruism question: Toward a social-psychological answer. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Baumeister, R. F., & Tierney, J. (2011). Willpower: Rediscovering the greatest human strength. Penguin Press.
Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. Yale University Press.
Berkes, F. (Ed.). (1989). Common property resources: Ecology and community-based sustainable development. Belhaven Press.
Bowles, S. (2016). The moral economy: Why good incentives are no substitute for good citizens. Yale University Press.
Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (2011). A cooperative species: Human reciprocity and its evolution. Princeton University Press.
Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development. Basic Books.
Bromley, D. W. (Ed.). (1992). Making the commons work: Theory, practice, and policy. ICS Press.
Coleman, J. S. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94(Suppl.), S95–S120. https://doi.org/10.1086/228943
Cox, M., Arnold, G., & Tomás, S. V. (2010). A review and reassessment of design principles for community-based natural resource management. Ecology and Society, 15(4), Article 38. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-03704-150438
Dietz, T., Ostrom, E., & Stern, P. C. (2003). The struggle to govern the commons. Science, 302(5652), 1907–1912. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1091015
Fehr, E., & Gächter, S. (2000). Cooperation and punishment in public goods experiments. American Economic Review, 90(4), 980–994. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.90.4.980
Fehr, E., & Gächter, S. (2002). Altruistic punishment in humans. Nature, 415(6868), 137–140. https://doi.org/10.1038/415137a
Feeny, D., Berkes, F., McCay, B. J., & Acheson, J. M. (1990). The tragedy of the commons: Twenty-two years later. Human Ecology, 18(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00889070
Fukuyama, F. (1995). Trust: The social virtues and the creation of prosperity. Free Press.
Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Harvard University Press.
Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243–1248. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.162.3859.1243
Henrich, J., Boyd, R., Bowles, S., Camerer, C., Fehr, E., Gintis, H., & McElreath, R. (2001). In search of homo economicus: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies. American Economic Review, 91(2), 73–78. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.91.2.73
Hess, C., & Ostrom, E. (Eds.). (2007). Understanding knowledge as a commons: From theory to practice. MIT Press.
Hobbes, T. (1994). Leviathan (E. Curley, Ed.). Hackett. (Original work published 1651)
Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on moral development: Vol. 1. The philosophy of moral development. Harper and Row.
MacIntyre, A. (1981). After virtue: A study in moral theory. University of Notre Dame Press.
MacIntyre, A. (1988). Whose justice? Which rationality? University of Notre Dame Press.
Macpherson, C. B. (Ed.). (1978). Property: Mainstream and critical positions. University of Toronto Press.
Mischel, W. (2014). The marshmallow test: Mastering self-control. Little, Brown and Company.
North, D. C. (1990). Institutions, institutional change and economic performance. Cambridge University Press.
Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating capabilities: The human development approach. Harvard University Press.
Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press.
Ostrom, E. (2007). A diagnostic approach for going beyond panaceas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(39), 15181–15187. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0702288104
Ostrom, E. (2009). Beyond markets and states: Polycentric systems for complex economic systems. American Economic Review, 100(3), 641–672. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.100.3.641
Platteau, J.-P. (2000). Institutions, social norms, and economic development. Harwood Academic.
Platteau, J.-P. (2004). Monitoring elite capture in community-driven development. Development and Change, 35(2), 223–246. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.2004.00350.x
Polanyi, K. (1944). The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. Farrar and Rinehart.
Portes, A. (1998). Social capital: Its origins and applications in modern sociology. Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.24.1.1
Putnam, R. D. (1993). Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton University Press.
Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. Simon and Schuster.
Sandel, M. J. (1982). Liberalism and the limits of justice. Cambridge University Press.
Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. Knopf.
Senge, P. M. (1990). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. Doubleday.
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Harvard University Press.
Thompson, E. P. (1991). Customs in common: Studies in traditional popular culture. Merlin Press.
Wright, C. J. H. (1990). God’s people in God’s land: Family, land, and property in the Old Testament. Eerdmans.
