Abstract
Standard accounts of commons failure attribute enclosure behavior to greed, short-sightedness, or structural incentives that reward individual extraction at collective expense. This paper proposes an alternative and complementary explanatory variable that the standard accounts cannot see from within their own frameworks: the psychological incapacity for shared constraint. Drawing on object relations theory, developmental psychology, research on narcissistic injury and sovereignty fantasy, and the clinical literature on self-regulation under stress, the paper argues that enclosure behavior is better understood as a psychological defense activated by the experience of constrained shared life than as a rational strategy of resource maximization. When individuals lack the formative capacity to tolerate the internal experience of constraint, limitation, and shared governance, they respond not primarily by seeking more resources but by seeking more control over space—externalizing internal disorder through the domination of shared environments in ways that convert the experience of constraint into the experience of sovereignty. The paper develops a detailed account of the mechanism through which this externalization occurs, examines the specific ways in which governance feedback is experienced as humiliation rather than information by actors with particular formative histories, and proposes the distinction between formation failure and character failure as the conceptual key to a governance response that addresses the psychological substrate of enclosure rather than merely its behavioral surface. It concludes that enclosure is not primarily an economic strategy but a psychological defense, and that governance interventions designed on the assumption that it is the former while ignoring that it is the latter will systematically fail at precisely the moments when they are most needed.
Keywords: enclosure, constraint intolerance, sovereignty fantasy, psychological defense, object relations, narcissistic injury, formation failure, commons governance, externalization
I. Introduction: The Inadequacy of the Greed Hypothesis
The most common explanation of commons failure in both popular and policy discourse is the simplest one: people take too much because they want too much, and the structures of shared governance cannot reliably overcome the gravitational pull of individual self-interest. This explanation—call it the greed hypothesis—has the virtues of parsimony and intuitive plausibility. It corresponds to a recognizable feature of human experience: people do pursue their own interests, sometimes at the expense of others, and shared resources do suffer when that pursuit is unrestrained.
The greed hypothesis is not false. But it is radically incomplete in a way that has serious consequences for governance theory and practice. Its incompleteness lies not in what it asserts but in what it excludes: the psychological dimension of enclosure behavior—the specific motivational, cognitive, and emotional processes through which individuals come to appropriate shared space and resources in ways that exceed their legitimate entitlement and that cannot be adequately explained by reference to resource maximization alone.
Consider three observations that the greed hypothesis cannot explain. First, the observation documented extensively in the behavioral economics literature that people frequently forgo personal gain in order to punish perceived unfairness, maintain perceived equality, or uphold shared norms—even in anonymous, one-shot experimental contexts where there is no reputational or strategic incentive to do so (Fehr and Gächter, 2002; Henrich et al., 2001). If greed were the reliable default, these findings would be anomalies; they are, in fact, robust regularities that require a more complex account of human motivation than the greed hypothesis provides.
Second, the observation that enclosure behavior in real commons governance situations frequently targets control rather than resources—that actors who engage in enclosure often seek to dominate governance processes, monopolize decision-making authority, and appropriate the symbolic markers of sovereignty over shared space in ways that do not obviously serve their material interests and sometimes actively conflict with them. The herdsman who insists on managing the commons even after his herding has ceased, the committee member who expands his role until he has effectively become the committee, the department head who captures organizational processes that fall well outside her department’s mandate—these actors are not maximizing resources; they are maximizing control, and the distinction is analytically important.
Third, the observation that enclosure behavior frequently intensifies in response to governance feedback—that actors who are informed of the consequences of their resource use for the shared system, or who are confronted with the claims of other users, often respond by escalating rather than moderating their appropriation. This observation is directly contrary to what the greed hypothesis, supplemented by informational and monitoring interventions, would predict: if the problem is that self-interested actors lack information about consequences, providing that information should moderate their behavior. In many cases it does not—and the cases where it does not are precisely those where the psychological account proposed in this paper has the most explanatory work to do.
The paper proposes that these observations can be explained—and that commons governance theory can be significantly advanced—by the addition of a variable that rational choice theory and structural institutionalism both lack: the psychological dimension of shared constraint, including the specific ways in which the experience of constrained shared life activates defensive responses in actors with particular formative histories, and the specific mechanisms through which those defensive responses produce the enclosure behaviors that governance theory attributes to greed or structural incentive.
The paper proceeds as follows. Section II develops the concept of constraint as a formative and developmental category, establishing the theoretical basis for understanding constraint tolerance as a formed competency rather than a natural attribute. Section III constructs the theoretical framework of the sovereignty fantasy and identifies its behavioral markers in governance contexts. Section IV examines identity fragility as the specific psychological condition that makes shared space threatening rather than merely inconvenient. Section V analyzes the mechanism of externalization through which internal disorder is converted into spatial and governance domination. Section VI addresses the specific dynamics through which governance feedback is experienced as humiliation by actors whose self-regulatory capacity depends on the maintenance of an expansive sense of control. Section VII develops the distinction between formation failure and character failure that is central to the paper’s practical implications. Section VIII concludes with a statement of what the psychological account contributes to commons governance theory and what governance responses it implies.
II. Constraint as a Developmental and Formative Category
The concept of constraint, as deployed in the commons governance literature, is almost exclusively structural: constraint refers to limitations on individual behavior imposed by institutional rules, monitoring systems, sanction mechanisms, or property rights assignments. This structural understanding of constraint is analytically necessary but psychologically insufficient. It treats constraint as an external condition that governance systems impose on actors whose interior responses to that imposition are uniform and predictable—actors who experience the cost of constraint as a straightforward reduction in their ability to pursue their preferences, and who therefore respond to constraint in proportion to its structural strength.
The developmental and clinical psychology literatures offer a very different picture. In these traditions, constraint is first of all an internal experience—a phenomenological reality that is encountered before it is analyzed, that is felt before it is reasoned about, and that activates motivational and emotional responses that precede and substantially shape the reasoning processes through which actors subsequently represent their situation to themselves and others. The internal experience of constraint is not uniform across persons; it varies substantially depending on the developmental history through which individuals have learned—or failed to learn—to tolerate and navigate the inevitable limitations of shared life.
Developmental psychology has documented with considerable precision the trajectory through which constraint tolerance is normally acquired. The infant experiences constraint as absolute frustration—the gap between desire and satisfaction is not yet mediated by any understanding of why the gap exists, any confidence that it will be closed, or any capacity for the self-regulation that could manage the affective experience of deprivation. The normal developmental trajectory involves the progressive development of precisely these mediating capacities: the cognitive ability to understand why constraint exists, the relational trust that provides confidence in the eventual satisfaction of needs, and the self-regulatory capacity to tolerate the gap between desire and satisfaction without catastrophizing it or demanding its immediate resolution (Winnicott, 1965; Bowlby, 1988; Ainsworth et al., 1978).
This developmental trajectory is substantially shaped by the relational environment within which it unfolds. Winnicott’s (1965) concept of the holding environment—the relational context provided by good-enough parenting that allows the infant to develop the capacity for independent functioning without experiencing the withdrawal of support as abandonment—identifies the primary social condition for the development of constraint tolerance. The holding environment does not eliminate constraint; it provides the relational security within which constraint can be experienced, processed, and integrated rather than defended against. The child who grows up in an adequate holding environment develops what Winnicott termed the capacity to be alone in the presence of another: the ability to function independently, to tolerate frustration, and to accept limitation, because the relational security that grounds this functioning is sufficiently internalized to remain available even when the other is not physically present.
The failure of the holding environment—in the forms of neglect, unpredictable caregiving, intrusion, or the chronic failure to respond adequately to the child’s needs—disrupts this developmental trajectory in ways that have lasting consequences for the individual’s capacity to tolerate constraint in adult life. Kohut (1977) described this disruption in terms of the failure of selfobject functions: the caregiving relationships that normally provide the child with the mirroring, idealization, and twinship experiences that build a stable and coherent sense of self. When these functions are chronically unavailable or inadequate, the self that develops is fragile—dependent on external sources of validation and control for the maintenance of coherence that a securely developed self would maintain from internal resources.
This developmental account of the origins of constraint intolerance is not a claim that all enclosure behavior can be traced to childhood trauma or developmental failure in a simple etiological sense. The relationship between developmental history and adult governance behavior is mediated by many factors—social context, institutional environment, cultural norms, and the specific pressures of particular governance situations—and the developmental literature does not support simple causal claims about the relationship between specific childhood experiences and specific adult behaviors. What it does support is the claim that the capacity for constraint tolerance is a developmental achievement rather than a natural given, that this achievement varies substantially across individuals and populations, that its variation is substantially shaped by developmental experience and social context, and that its absence produces specific patterns of response to the experience of constrained shared life that the governance literature has not adequately theorized.
The concept of formation, as developed in the prolegomenon to this suite and in Paper 5 on stewardship as competence, provides the theoretical framework within which this developmental account is most usefully situated. Formation is the process through which stable dispositional orientations are developed through practice in appropriate social contexts—and constraint tolerance is precisely such a stable dispositional orientation: a formed competency rather than a natural endowment, developed through the repeated experience of navigating constraint within relational contexts that provide adequate support for that navigation, and susceptible to both cultivation and atrophy depending on the social and institutional conditions within which it is embedded.
The implication for commons governance is significant. If constraint tolerance is a formed competency rather than a natural given, then governance interventions that assume its uniform presence across participants—that design monitoring systems, sanction mechanisms, and conflict resolution processes on the assumption that participants can tolerate the experience of constrained shared life without defensive response—are interventions that will fail precisely where participants lack the formative history that constraint tolerance requires. Understanding the psychology of constraint intolerance is therefore not supplementary to governance design; it is a prerequisite for governance design that can function in the real conditions of human variability rather than in the idealized conditions of uniform rational agency.
III. The Sovereignty Fantasy: Theoretical Construction and Behavioral Markers
The concept of the sovereignty fantasy, as this paper develops it, refers to a specific motivational and cognitive pattern that emerges in actors with inadequate constraint tolerance when they encounter the conditions of shared governance: the progressive redefinition of shared space as personal territory, the experience of shared governance as an intrusion on legitimate personal authority, and the behavioral drive to convert shared governance into personal control. The sovereignty fantasy is not a deliberate strategy; it is a psychological defense—a way of reorganizing the experience of constrained shared life that converts the intolerable feeling of limitation into the more manageable feeling of contested sovereignty.
The concept draws on several related theoretical traditions. Fromm’s (1941) analysis of the authoritarian character—the personality organization that seeks to escape the anxiety of freedom by surrendering to a higher power or dominating those perceived as weaker—identifies a related but distinct pattern: the flight from freedom into domination that is driven by the anxiety of self-determination rather than by the incapacity for shared constraint. Kernberg’s (1975) object relations account of narcissistic personality organization provides a closer theoretical analogue: the grandiose self that defends against underlying feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness by maintaining an inflated sense of entitlement and superiority, and that responds to perceived threats to this grandiosity with rage, contempt, or the devaluation of others. Kohut’s (1977) competing account of narcissistic injury and the fragmented self provides a further theoretical resource: the self that has not received adequate mirroring and idealization in development and that therefore remains dependent on external validation for the coherence that would otherwise be internally maintained.
The sovereignty fantasy, as this paper constructs it, draws on all three traditions while being fully reducible to none. It is distinguished from the authoritarian character by its orientation toward personal sovereignty rather than submission to authority: the actor in the grip of the sovereignty fantasy does not seek a higher power to submit to but seeks to become the higher power in the local governance context. It is related to but not identical with narcissistic personality organization: not every actor who exhibits the sovereignty fantasy meets clinical criteria for narcissistic disorder, and the fantasy can be activated situationally in actors who do not exhibit it chronically. And it is grounded in the Kohutian account of the fragmented self without being limited to it: the sovereignty fantasy is one specific response to the experience of selfobject failure, among others, and is activated specifically by the conditions of shared governance rather than by the broader range of conditions that activate narcissistic injury in Kohut’s account.
The sovereignty fantasy has several characteristic behavioral markers in governance contexts that distinguish it from the simple greed that the rational choice account assumes.
The first marker is the displacement of resource interest by control interest. The actor in the grip of the sovereignty fantasy is not primarily interested in taking more of the shared resource; he is interested in controlling access to it, governing its distribution, and defining the terms under which others may use it. The commons herdsman driven by greed adds more animals to the pasture; the commons participant driven by the sovereignty fantasy seeks to become the person who decides how many animals each herdsman may add. This distinction is not merely behavioral; it reflects a fundamentally different motivational structure that requires a fundamentally different governance response.
The second marker is escalating response to constraint. Where the greedily motivated actor moderates his behavior when constraint is adequately enforced—when the cost of extraction is raised sufficiently to make restraint individually rational—the sovereignty-fantasy-motivated actor escalates in response to constraint, experiencing the imposition of governance limits not as a rational signal to modify behavior but as an assault on a self-understanding that depends on the maintenance of unrestricted authority over shared space. This escalating response is what explains the otherwise puzzling observation that governance feedback sometimes intensifies enclosure behavior rather than moderating it: the feedback is not received as information but as humiliation, and the response to humiliation in actors with fragile self-structures is not moderation but counterattack.
The third marker is the moralization of other participants. The actor in the grip of the sovereignty fantasy does not merely take more than his share; he constructs a narrative in which his appropriation is legitimate and the claims of other participants are illegitimate. Other participants are represented as irresponsible, incompetent, or insufficiently invested in the shared resource to deserve governance authority—as people who need to be managed rather than as co-participants with legitimate standing in shared governance. This moralization serves a dual function: it provides narrative justification for the actor’s appropriation of governance authority, and it manages the anxiety that the presence of other legitimate participants generates in a self that cannot tolerate the constrained and negotiated character of shared authority.
The fourth marker is the identification of governance process with personal attack. The actor in the grip of the sovereignty fantasy experiences governance processes—monitoring, sanctioning, conflict resolution, participatory rule modification—not as neutral institutional mechanisms but as vehicles for targeting him specifically. Monitoring feels like surveillance; sanctioning feels like persecution; conflict resolution feels like forced submission; participatory rule modification feels like the dilution of authority that should be his alone. This misidentification of governance process with personal attack is a reliable indicator that the sovereignty fantasy is operative, because it reflects the actor’s inability to maintain the distinction between himself and the governance system—a distinction that depends on precisely the self-differentiation and constraint tolerance that his formative history has not produced.
These four behavioral markers—displacement of resource by control interest, escalation in response to constraint, moralization of other participants, and identification of governance process with personal attack—form a recognizable behavioral cluster that governance practitioners encounter regularly but rarely analyze systematically. The theoretical framework of the sovereignty fantasy provides the analytical tools for that systematic analysis, and the formation account provides the developmental and social substrate that explains why some actors are vulnerable to this fantasy while others are not.
IV. Identity Fragility and the Perception of Shared Space as Threat
The sovereignty fantasy does not operate in isolation. It is activated by a specific perceptual condition: the experience of shared space—space that is governed by rules that apply to everyone, that constrains everyone’s behavior including one’s own, and that requires ongoing negotiation with the legitimate claims of others—as a threat to identity rather than as a resource for community. This perceptual condition is what this paper terms identity fragility: the vulnerability of a self-structure that cannot tolerate the experience of being one among many legitimate claimants in a shared governance system without experiencing that condition as a fundamental challenge to its coherence and worth.
Identity fragility, in the sense employed here, does not refer to clinical pathology in the diagnostic sense, though it can shade into it. It refers to a specific vulnerability in the self’s relationship to its own boundaries and authority—a vulnerability that is produced by inadequate formation in the developmental conditions through which a stable and differentiated sense of self is normally established. The relevant dimension of self-structure is what Erikson (1963) termed ego identity: the experienced sense of continuity and sameness that allows a person to function consistently across different social contexts and under conditions of stress and uncertainty without requiring continuous external validation or the elimination of competing claims in order to maintain a sense of coherent selfhood.
A person with adequate ego identity can participate in shared governance as one participant among others without experiencing that participation as a diminishment of self. The legitimate claims of other participants are not experienced as threats to one’s own claim; the governance rules that constrain everyone’s behavior are not experienced as personal impositions; and the negotiated, imperfect, and sometimes frustrating character of shared governance is experienced as an inherent feature of any system that takes multiple legitimate claims seriously rather than as evidence that the system is working against one specifically.
A person with identity fragility cannot reliably maintain this equanimity. For such a person, the shared governance situation presents a constellation of experiences that are disproportionately threatening: the presence of other participants whose claims are as legitimate as one’s own implies that one’s own claim is not uniquely privileged; the governance rules that constrain one’s behavior imply that one does not have the authority to determine one’s own relationship to the shared resource; the feedback processes that inform one of the consequences of one’s behavior imply that one’s judgment is subject to external evaluation; and the conflict resolution processes that engage one in negotiation with others imply that one’s preferences do not automatically prevail. Each of these experiences, individually manageable by a person with adequate identity security, is experienced by a person with identity fragility as a specific threat to the self’s coherence and worth.
Benjamin’s (1988) analysis of the dynamics of domination and recognition in interpersonal relationships provides a useful theoretical framework for understanding this vulnerability. Benjamin argued that the fundamental human need for recognition—for the acknowledgment of one’s subjectivity by another whose subjectivity one in turn acknowledges—creates a characteristic tension in relationships between the desire to be recognized and the desire to maintain control. The person who can tolerate this tension—who can remain in relationship with another whose subjectivity constrains one’s own—has achieved what Benjamin terms intersubjectivity: the capacity to recognize and be recognized by another who remains genuinely other. The person who cannot tolerate this tension defensively eliminates it by reducing the other to an object—denying the other’s subjectivity in order to eliminate the constraint that subjectivity imposes.
In commons governance terms, this dynamic produces a characteristic pattern: the actor with identity fragility, unable to tolerate the experience of sharing governance authority with other participants whose subjectivity is as real as his own, defensively reduces those participants to objects—to people who lack the competence, the investment, or the legitimate standing to claim co-governance authority. The moralization of other participants that was identified in the previous section as a behavioral marker of the sovereignty fantasy is, in Benjamin’s framework, the conversion of co-participants from subjects to objects: the narrative move that eliminates the constraint of others’ subjectivity by denying that subjectivity itself.
Ferenczi’s (1933) account of the identification with the aggressor provides a further dimension of the identity fragility analysis. Ferenczi described a defensive strategy in which the person who has been unable to integrate experiences of powerlessness and subjugation identifies with the source of that subjugation—adopts the perspective and authority of the aggressor rather than remaining in the vulnerable position of the subjugated—as a way of converting an intolerable experience of helplessness into a more manageable experience of power. Applied to commons governance, this dynamic suggests that actors who have formative histories characterized by experiences of constrained powerlessness—who have been governed without adequate participation, subjected to rules without adequate voice, or denied legitimate authority in contexts where authority was important to them—may respond to shared governance situations by seeking to occupy the position of the authority that constrained them rather than by participating as one among equals. The sovereignty fantasy, on this account, is the governance expression of identification with the aggressor: the conversion of the experience of being governed into the drive to govern, driven by the intolerable memory of powerlessness rather than by the straightforward desire for resources.
Menzies-Lyth’s (1960) organizational application of Kleinian object relations theory provides a third relevant framework. Menzies-Lyth analyzed the way in which social institutions develop structural arrangements that function as defenses against the anxieties that the institution’s primary task activates in its members. Applied to commons governance, this analysis suggests that enclosure behaviors—the appropriation of governance authority, the moralization of other participants, the resistance to monitoring and feedback—may function not only as expressions of individual psychological defense but as institutionally structured defenses that become embedded in the governance system’s social arrangements over time. The sovereignty fantasy is not only an individual psychological phenomenon; it is capable of becoming an institutional pattern, in which the governance system’s structural arrangements systematically protect the appropriations of dominant actors by providing them with institutionalized rationales that convert personal sovereignty assertion into organizational policy.
V. Externalizing Internal Disorder: The Mechanism of Enclosure
The concept of externalization, borrowed from the clinical psychology literature, refers to the process by which internal psychological states—anxiety, disorder, conflict, inadequacy—are attributed to, projected onto, or displaced into the external environment rather than being processed internally. Externalization is a normal and sometimes adaptive psychological process; the experience of being overwhelmed by internal states that one cannot process alone is a universal human experience, and the communication of internal distress to others who can help manage it is a fundamentally social and relational capacity. What makes externalization pathological—or, in governance terms, destructive—is when it takes the specific form of externalizing internal disorder into the governance of shared space: converting the experience of internal constraint, disorder, and inadequacy into the domination and reorganization of shared environments.
The mechanism of this specific form of externalization operates through what Klein (1946) termed projective identification: the psychological process in which intolerable aspects of the self are projected onto another person or environment, and then the self relates to that person or environment as if it actually contained those projected aspects. In governance terms, the actor who cannot tolerate the experience of internal disorder—the anxiety of inadequacy, the experience of constraint, the sense of being insufficient to the demands of a complex shared governance situation—projects that disorder onto the shared governance system and onto other participants, and then relates to the system and participants as if they, rather than the actor, were the source of the disorder.
The behavioral consequence of this mechanism is characteristic and recognizable. The actor who has externalized internal disorder into the shared governance system does not experience himself as the source of governance difficulty; he experiences himself as the person who is attempting to bring order to a disordered system. The monitoring systems that other participants experience as accountability mechanisms he experiences as evidence of the irresponsibility of those being monitored. The conflict resolution processes that other participants experience as constructive engagement with governance difficulty he experiences as evidence of the inability of other participants to manage themselves without his intervention. And the governance rules that apply to everyone, including himself, he experiences as poorly designed constraints that someone with genuine competence—himself—would not need and should not be subject to.
This perceptual reorganization is not deliberate dishonesty; it is the genuine phenomenological experience of the actor whose externalization has reorganized the governance landscape in terms of his own psychological defense. He is not pretending to experience the shared governance system as disordered; he genuinely experiences it that way, because the disorder that he cannot tolerate internally has been relocated, through projective identification, into the system and into the other participants. And the governance interventions that are appropriate responses to the disorder he has introduced—the monitoring, sanctioning, and conflict resolution processes that commons governance theory identifies as design principles for successful commons—are experienced by him as confirmations of the disorder he has projected rather than as responses to his own contributions to that disorder.
This mechanism explains several governance phenomena that the standard frameworks have difficulty accounting for. It explains why governance feedback—accurate information about the consequences of an actor’s resource use—sometimes produces escalation rather than moderation: the actor who has externalized his disorder does not receive feedback as information about his own behavior; he receives it as confirmation that the system is disordered in the ways he has projected. It explains why enclosure behavior is frequently accompanied by elaborate self-justifying narratives: these narratives are not strategic cover stories but genuine accounts of how the situation appears to an actor whose externalization has reorganized his perception of the governance landscape. And it explains why the removal of one enclosing actor from a governance system does not reliably eliminate enclosure dynamics: if the governance system’s structural arrangements have been shaped by institutionalized projective identification—if the system’s organization reflects the defensive needs of dominant actors rather than the governance requirements of the shared resource—the enclosure dynamics will be reproduced by new actors who occupy the structurally arranged positions that the system has created.
Bion’s (1961) analysis of basic assumption functioning in groups provides a complementary account of the collective dimension of this mechanism. Bion identified three recurring patterns of group behavior—dependency, fight-flight, and pairing—that emerge when a group is unable to maintain the work-oriented functioning that its task requires and instead organizes itself around shared unconscious assumptions that provide defense against the anxieties the task activates. In governance terms, the collective expression of the externalization mechanism produces characteristic group-level patterns: the governance group that cannot tolerate the anxiety of shared responsibility organizes itself around the dependency on a dominant actor who promises to take control and restore order; the governance group that cannot tolerate the anxiety of conflict organizes itself around the identification of an external threat that justifies fight or flight rather than the engagement with internal governance difficulty that the situation requires; and the governance group that cannot tolerate the anxiety of genuine collaboration organizes itself around the fantasy of a future governance solution that will resolve all difficulty without requiring the present engagement with constraint and imperfection.
These collective patterns are recognizable in commons governance situations that have been analyzed in terms of structural incentives alone—the group that surrenders governance authority to a single dominant actor who then appropriates shared resources, the governance group that responds to internal difficulty by identifying an external enemy responsible for commons failure, the governance group that defers engagement with governance difficulty by anticipating a future reform that will render present constraint unnecessary. The externalization mechanism and its collective expressions are not alternatives to the structural incentive analysis; they are the psychological substrate that shapes how structural incentives are experienced and responded to, and that determines whether governance responses to structural problems succeed or produce the escalation that unaddressed psychological defense typically generates.
VI. Why Feedback Feels Like Humiliation: The Governance of Shame
Among the most practically important consequences of the psychological dynamics analyzed in the preceding sections is the specific way in which governance feedback is received by actors whose constraint tolerance is inadequate and whose self-structure is insufficiently differentiated to maintain the distinction between information about behavior and judgment of identity. In these actors, governance feedback—the monitoring information, the sanction signal, the conflict resolution process that identifies their behavior as governance-problematic—is not received as information about the consequences of specific actions; it is received as a judgment about the adequacy of the self. The emotional experience activated is not the manageable discomfort of learning that one has been mistaken; it is the searing, reorganizing experience that Lewis (1971) termed shame: the global negative evaluation of the self as defective, inferior, and unworthy.
The distinction between guilt and shame is analytically important for governance theory, though it has not been developed in that context. Tangney and Dearing (2002) documented the behavioral consequences of this distinction with precision: guilt—the negative evaluation of a specific behavior—is associated with the motivation to repair the behavior, to apologize, and to change. Shame—the negative evaluation of the self—is associated with the motivation to hide, to deny, to attack others who are perceived as the source of the shaming experience, or to withdraw entirely from the situation in which the shaming occurred. The governance implications are direct: actors who receive governance feedback as guilt experience—as information that a specific behavior has had negative consequences for the shared resource or for other users—are motivated to modify the behavior. Actors who receive governance feedback as shame experience—as a global judgment on their adequacy and worth—are motivated to attack the feedback, deny its validity, escalate the very behavior that generated it, or withdraw from the governance system entirely.
The conditions under which governance feedback activates shame rather than guilt are substantially the conditions that the preceding sections have analyzed as identity fragility and inadequate constraint tolerance. When the self-structure is insufficiently differentiated—when behavioral adequacy and personal worth are not effectively distinguished from each other—any negative evaluation of behavior is experienced as a negative evaluation of self, and the motivational consequence is defense rather than learning. The governance system that issues monitoring information, applies graduated sanctions, or engages in conflict resolution is experienced by such an actor not as a system performing its proper governance function but as a system issuing a global condemnation of his adequacy as a person.
Scheff’s (1988) analysis of shame and the social bond provides a further dimension of this dynamic. Scheff argued that shame—the experience of being negatively evaluated by significant others—is the primary social emotion: the emotion whose presence or absence most fundamentally determines the quality of the social bond and the individual’s capacity to participate in social life. Unacknowledged shame—shame that is experienced but not recognized as such, and therefore not engaged and processed—produces what Scheff termed shame-rage spirals: the escalating sequences of shame activation, rage response, further social rupture, and further shame activation that characterize the most destructive interpersonal and intergroup conflicts. The governance expression of the shame-rage spiral is recognizable: the actor who receives governance feedback as shame responds with rage—expressed as escalating extraction, aggressive moralization of other participants, or direct attack on the governance process—which produces further governance response, which is experienced as further shaming, which produces further rage, in a sequence that the governance system’s normal mechanisms are poorly equipped to interrupt.
The practical implications of this analysis are significant. Governance systems designed on the assumption that participants receive monitoring information as data and sanction signals as rational incentives are designed for actors whose self-structure is adequately differentiated to maintain the distinction between behavioral feedback and personal judgment. When a significant proportion of governance participants cannot maintain this distinction—when governance feedback reliably activates shame rather than guilt in a substantial subset of the user community—the governance mechanisms that the institutional design literature recommends may produce the opposite of their intended effects: escalating rather than moderating the behaviors they are designed to address, because those behaviors are expressions of defensive response to shame rather than of strategic resource maximization.
This does not mean that monitoring, sanctioning, and conflict resolution should be abandoned; it means that their design must take account of the psychological dynamics through which they are experienced by participants whose formative history has not produced adequate differentiation between behavioral feedback and personal judgment. Governance systems that provide monitoring feedback in ways that support the distinction between behavior and person—that communicate consequences clearly while explicitly separating the evaluation of specific behaviors from the evaluation of the actors who engage in them—are more likely to produce the learning responses that governance designers intend. Governance systems that employ sanctioning in ways that engage the graduated escalation principle Ostrom identified—beginning with the mildest sanction that can communicate the governance message and escalating only when milder sanctions prove inadequate—are more likely to avoid activating the shame responses that produce escalation rather than compliance. And governance systems that employ conflict resolution processes designed to maintain the dignity and legitimate standing of all participants—to engage with the behavioral content of governance conflicts without issuing global judgments on the persons involved—are more likely to support the constructive engagement with governance difficulty that sustained commons governance requires.
VII. Formation Failure and Character Failure: A Critical Distinction
The analysis of constraint intolerance, the sovereignty fantasy, identity fragility, and the externalization of internal disorder through enclosure behavior is vulnerable to a misreading that the paper must explicitly address: the misreading that treats this psychological account as a form of character indictment—as a claim that enclosers are bad people, psychologically defective, or morally culpable in ways that require therapeutic rather than governance responses.
This misreading is not only theoretically incorrect; it is practically dangerous. A governance framework that identifies enclosure behavior as evidence of character defect produces exactly the kind of moralization that Paper 4 of this series analyzes as an instrument of enclosure itself: the attribution of governance failure to the moral inadequacy of specific persons rather than to the formative and institutional conditions that have produced the governance-relevant capacities or incapacities of those persons. Character indictment of enclosers provides neither an explanation of enclosure behavior nor a practically useful framework for addressing it; it provides only the satisfaction of a verdict that, like all moral verdicts on complex behavioral phenomena, generates more heat than light.
The distinction between formation failure and character failure is the conceptual tool that the paper’s analysis requires and that governance theory has lacked. Formation failure refers to the failure of the developmental, relational, and institutional processes through which the capacities for shared governance are normally developed—the failure to provide the holding environment that develops constraint tolerance, the failure to provide the social practices that form externality awareness, the failure to provide the governance institutions that build role containment and tolerance of imperfect coordination. Character failure refers to a different kind of assessment: the moral judgment that a person has failed to exercise the agency available to him in the direction of right action—that he has chosen badly when better choices were available.
The distinction matters because it determines the appropriate governance response. If enclosure behavior is the expression of character failure—of deliberate choice to appropriate shared resources against the actor’s better moral knowledge—then the appropriate governance response is moral: sanction, exhortation, and the expectation of better choices in the future. If enclosure behavior is the expression of formation failure—of the absence of capacities for shared governance that the actor’s developmental and social history has not produced—then the appropriate governance response is formative: the design of governance environments that develop these capacities, the creation of relational contexts that provide the holding environment that formation requires, and the institutional support for the practices through which constraint tolerance, externality awareness, and boundary discipline are cultivated over time.
In practice, most enclosure behavior is the expression of both formation failure and character failure in varying proportions that are difficult to disentangle from the outside and that may not be fully knowable from the inside. A person whose formative history has produced inadequate constraint tolerance nevertheless retains moral agency: the constraints of one’s formative history do not eliminate the capacity for choice but they substantially shape the range of choices that feel available, the cognitive and emotional resources that are accessible for making those choices, and the interpretive frameworks within which the choices are understood. Governance responses that address only the character failure dimension—that issue moral demands for better choices without attending to the formative conditions that shape the range and quality of choices available—will predictably fail, because they demand from actors capacities that their formative history has not equipped them to reliably exercise.
Governance responses that address only the formation failure dimension—that design formative environments without maintaining any expectation of moral agency—will predictably produce a different failure: the removal of the accountability that shared governance requires, and the implicit message that actors with inadequate constraint tolerance are not responsible for their behavior in ways that would make accountability meaningful. The appropriate governance response to the reality of both formation failure and character failure is neither pure sanction nor pure therapeutic intervention but a governance framework that maintains accountability—that makes clear that enclosure behavior has consequences for the governance system and for other participants—while attending simultaneously to the formative conditions that would develop, over time, the capacities for shared governance that accountability assumes.
This two-dimensional governance response is more complex and more demanding than either the purely structural approach of the rational choice tradition or the purely therapeutic approach that a misreading of the psychological account might suggest. It requires governance practitioners to attend simultaneously to the institutional design of accountability mechanisms and to the formative design of the social practices and relational contexts within which governance participants develop their governance capacities. It requires the ability to maintain accountability without moralizing—to communicate that specific behaviors have specific consequences without issuing global judgments on the persons who engage in them. And it requires the tolerance of complexity and ambiguity in the assessment of governance participants that the formation account demands: the recognition that the same person can be simultaneously a moral agent whose choices matter and a product of formative conditions whose consequences he did not choose and cannot easily overcome.
This tolerance of complexity is itself a governance competency—a form of the tolerance of imperfect coordination that Paper 5 identifies as the most demanding of the four governance competencies that commons governance requires. The governance practitioner who can maintain this complexity—who can hold both the accountability and the formative account of enclosure behavior without collapsing into either pure sanction or pure exculpation—is a practitioner who has developed, in relation to governance participants, something analogous to what Winnicott required of the good-enough parent: the capacity to maintain appropriate expectations while providing the holding environment that development requires.
VIII. Implications for Governance Theory and Practice
The psychological account of enclosure behavior developed in this paper has implications for governance theory and practice that extend beyond the specific analysis of the sovereignty fantasy, identity fragility, and the externalization mechanism. Several of the most significant implications deserve explicit statement.
The problem of governance capture by formation failure. The institutional design literature has analyzed governance capture—the appropriation of governance institutions by the interests of powerful actors—primarily in terms of structural incentives and power asymmetries. The psychological account adds a dimension that structural analysis cannot see: the way in which governance institutions can be progressively reorganized by the defensive needs of actors whose formation failure produces the sovereignty fantasy in response to shared governance conditions. The actor in the grip of the sovereignty fantasy does not merely extract more than his share of the resource; he reorganizes the governance system’s social arrangements to accommodate his defensive needs—creating monitoring systems that function as instruments of his surveillance, sanction mechanisms that function as instruments of his authority, and conflict resolution processes that function as arenas for his dominance. This psychologically driven governance capture produces institutional pathology that is more durable and more resistant to structural intervention than capture driven by straightforward material interest, because the defensive needs it serves are more fundamental to the actor’s psychological functioning than material interest.
The timing problem in governance intervention. The standard governance design literature focuses primarily on the design of governance institutions at inception: the specification of design principles that characterize successful governance systems from their beginning. The psychological account suggests that the most critical governance moments are not at inception but under stress: the moments when governance systems face resource scarcity, internal conflict, external threat, or the perception of non-reciprocity that activates the shame-rage spiral in actors with inadequate constraint tolerance. These are the moments when the sovereignty fantasy is most likely to be activated, when externalization of internal disorder is most likely to be displaced into governance domination, and when the governance system’s resilience depends most heavily on the constraint tolerance, boundary discipline, and tolerance of imperfect coordination of its participants. Governance design that attends only to the structural conditions of inception without attending to the psychological conditions of stress will produce governance systems that function adequately under favorable conditions and collapse under the conditions that test governance resilience most severely.
The limits of monitoring and transparency. The design principle of effective monitoring—making the state of the shared resource and the behavior of users visible to governance participants—is empirically well-supported as a characteristic of successful governance systems. The psychological account identifies a limit of this principle that structural analysis alone cannot see: that monitoring and transparency activate shame rather than guilt in actors with inadequate self-differentiation, and that this activation produces escalation rather than compliance. The implication is not that monitoring should be abandoned but that its design must attend to the psychological dynamics of how monitoring information is received, and that governance systems that employ monitoring without attention to these dynamics are systems that will produce the escalation responses that unaddressed shame reliably generates in governance contexts.
The formative function of governance participation. If the psychological capacities required for shared governance are formed through practice in appropriate social contexts, then governance institutions are not merely the arena in which formed capacities are exercised; they are among the most powerful formative environments available for the development of those capacities. The design of governance institutions therefore has formative consequences that are distinct from—and in some cases more important than—their structural incentive consequences. Governance systems that provide genuine participatory engagement, that require actors to attend to the resource state and to the claims of other users, that engage actors in the construction and modification of governance rules, and that provide the conflict resolution processes within which governance disagreement can be engaged rather than avoided, are governance systems that form their participants in the competencies that shared governance requires. The formative function of governance participation is not supplementary to governance design; it is one of the most important functions that governance design serves.
IX. Conclusion: Enclosure as Defense
The argument of this paper can be stated with the precision that its length and complexity are designed to support. Enclosure behavior—the progressive appropriation of shared resources, governance authority, and spatial control that commons governance theory has analyzed primarily in terms of structural incentives and character defect—is better understood as a psychological defense: a way of reorganizing the experience of constrained shared life that converts the intolerable internal experience of limitation into the more manageable, if still anxious, experience of contested sovereignty.
This understanding does not eliminate the structural and character dimensions of enclosure analysis; it provides the psychological substrate within which those dimensions operate. The structural analysis of commons failure identifies the incentive conditions under which enclosure behavior is reinforced; the character analysis identifies the moral agency through which actors remain responsible for the consequences of their choices; and the psychological analysis identifies the formative conditions under which the capacities for shared governance are developed or withheld, the defensive dynamics through which their absence produces enclosure, and the governance responses that address those dynamics rather than merely the behavioral surface that they produce.
The central practical implication of this paper is not therapeutic: it is not that governance systems should provide psychological treatment for enclosers rather than structural accountability for enclosure. It is diagnostic: that governance interventions designed on the assumption that enclosure is purely a rational strategy of resource maximization will systematically fail to address the cases where enclosure is primarily a psychological defense, and that the failure of those interventions will be most visible at precisely the moments—under stress, resource scarcity, and perceived non-reciprocity—when governance resilience is most needed. Diagnosis is prior to intervention: the governance practitioner who can identify the sovereignty fantasy, the externalization mechanism, and the shame-rage spiral in the governance situations she faces is a practitioner who can design interventions that address the actual dynamics of those situations rather than the idealized dynamics of rational choice theory.
Commons are made, as the prolegomenon to this suite argues, through the work of formation. The psychological account of enclosure developed in this paper specifies what that work must address: not merely the structural design of incentive systems and monitoring mechanisms, but the developmental and social conditions through which human beings acquire the constraint tolerance, externality awareness, and boundary discipline that make shared governance possible—and the governance consequences of their failure to do so. Formation failure is the proximate cause of commons collapse that the structural analysis identifies as its target but cannot, from its own resources, explain. The explanation requires the psychological account that this paper has attempted to provide.
Notes
Note 1. The concept of the sovereignty fantasy as developed in this paper is a theoretical construction derived from convergent themes in the clinical, developmental, and social psychology literatures rather than a term in established use in any single tradition. Its closest analogues in the existing literature are Fromm’s (1941) authoritarianism, Kernberg’s (1975) narcissistic personality organization, and Kohut’s (1977) account of the grandiose self. The paper’s construction differs from each of these in specific ways noted in Section III, and readers familiar with any of the three traditions should resist the temptation to identify the sovereignty fantasy with the specific clinical or theoretical concept from which they are reading. The sovereignty fantasy is a governance-specific theoretical construction designed to capture a recognizable behavioral pattern that each of the source traditions illuminates partially without capturing fully.
Note 2. The distinction between guilt and shame developed in Section VI draws primarily on the work of Lewis (1971), who introduced the distinction in a clinical context, and Tangney and Dearing (2002), whose empirical research documented its behavioral consequences. The governance application of this distinction is the paper’s own development and does not appear in either source, though the behavioral implications that Tangney and Dearing documented—guilt associated with repair motivation, shame associated with attack, denial, or withdrawal—translate directly into governance contexts with a fidelity that suggests the distinction is capturing something real about the phenomenology of governance feedback reception. Scheff’s (1988) work on shame and the social bond, and particularly his analysis of shame-rage spirals, provides the most developed account of the collective and relational dynamics of unacknowledged shame and is the most directly applicable to the governance situations this paper analyzes.
Note 3. Bion’s (1961) analysis of basic assumption functioning, discussed in Section V, is drawn from his experience as a group therapist rather than from organizational or governance research. The application of his framework to commons governance situations requires the kind of analogical reasoning that is always potentially treacherous in interdisciplinary work. The specific claim being made is not that commons governance groups are therapeutic groups but that the basic assumption patterns Bion identified—dependency, fight-flight, and pairing—are expressions of the same underlying dynamic that produces enclosure behavior in individual actors: the defensive reorganization of the governance situation around the management of anxiety rather than the performance of the governance task. Whether this claim is defensible in the specific governance contexts to which it is applied is an empirical question that the paper does not resolve, and readers should engage it as a theoretically productive hypothesis rather than an established finding.
Note 4. The Kleinian framework of projective identification, used in Section V to analyze the mechanism of externalization, is among the most contested concepts in psychoanalytic theory. Klein (1946) introduced the concept to describe an intrapsychic process; subsequent theorists—particularly Bion (1962) and Ogden (1979, 1982)—developed it into an account of an interpersonal and intersubjective process in which the projection involves an actual (rather than merely imagined) impact on the person or environment onto whom projection occurs. The paper employs the concept in the interpersonal and organizational sense developed by Bion and Ogden, applying it to the governance context in which the shared governance system and its participants become the recipients of projected internal disorder. This application is interpretive rather than strictly derived from the source literature, and readers trained in the Kleinian tradition may have legitimate reservations about the scope of the concept’s application that the paper cannot fully address within its compass.
Note 5. The formation failure versus character failure distinction developed in Section VII is the paper’s most significant practical contribution, and it is also the most vulnerable to misappropriation. The risk is that the formation failure account will be used to eliminate rather than contextualize moral accountability—that actors who engage in enclosure will invoke their formative history as a complete exculpation of their governance behavior. The paper explicitly rejects this use. Formation failure contextualizes moral accountability without eliminating it: a person whose developmental history has produced inadequate constraint tolerance nevertheless retains moral agency, and the governance system is right to maintain accountability for the behavioral consequences of the choices that agency makes. What formation failure analysis adds is the recognition that accountability interventions alone—without attention to the formative conditions that would develop the capacities for better choices—will reliably underperform, and that the governance design implications of this recognition require attention to formative conditions as well as to accountability mechanisms.
Note 6. The relationship between the psychological account of enclosure developed in this paper and the neurobiological literature on self-regulation, threat response, and social cognition deserves acknowledgment. Research on the amygdala’s role in threat detection and the prefrontal cortex’s role in self-regulation (LeDoux, 1996; Sapolsky, 2017), on oxytocin and the social brain (Zak, 2012), and on the default mode network and social cognition (Lieberman, 2013) provides biological substrate for several of the psychological dynamics analyzed in this paper—particularly the analysis of constraint as activating threat responses that interfere with the self-regulatory and social-cognitive capacities that shared governance requires. The paper has not incorporated this literature for reasons of scope and focus, but the neurobiological dimension of constraint intolerance and externalization is a direction that subsequent research in this area should explore.
Note 7. The paper’s analysis of the collective dimension of enclosure dynamics—the institutionalization of projective identification through organizational structures that protect the appropriations of dominant actors—has direct relevance to the political economy of enclosure at the civilizational scale addressed in Paper 6 of this series. The biblical prophets’ identification of the corruption of judicial and commercial institutions by the interests of the economically powerful—Amos’s indictment of the bribed gate, Isaiah’s analysis of the structural conditions of accumulation—can be read as exactly the kind of institutional projective identification that this paper analyzes at the organizational level: the conversion of shared governance institutions into vehicles for the defensive needs of dominant actors rather than for the governance functions they were designed to serve. The convergence between the psychological and the theological analyses at this point is not coincidental; both are tracking the same underlying dynamic at different scales and through different analytical frameworks.
Note 8. Readers working in conflict resolution and restorative justice contexts will find resonances between the paper’s analysis of shame-governance dynamics and the extensive literature on shame in restorative justice processes, particularly the work of Braithwaite (1989) on reintegrative shaming. Braithwaite’s distinction between stigmatizing shame—which excludes the offender from the community and produces the defensive responses analyzed in Section VI—and reintegrative shame—which addresses the behavior while maintaining the offender’s membership in the community—is directly relevant to the governance context and provides a partially worked out framework for the kind of accountability processes that the paper’s analysis implies. The application of restorative justice frameworks to commons governance is an underdeveloped direction that the present analysis suggests could be productive.
References
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.
Baumeister, R. F., & Tierney, J. (2011). Willpower: Rediscovering the greatest human strength. Penguin Press.
Benjamin, J. (1988). The bonds of love: Psychoanalysis, feminism, and the problem of domination. Pantheon Books.
Berkes, F. (Ed.). (1989). Common property resources: Ecology and community-based sustainable development. Belhaven Press.
Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in groups and other papers. Tavistock Publications.
Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from experience. Heinemann.
Bowles, S. (2016). The moral economy: Why good incentives are no substitute for good citizens. Yale University Press.
Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development. Basic Books.
Braithwaite, J. (1989). Crime, shame and reintegration. Cambridge University Press.
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
Erikson, E. H. (1963). Childhood and society (2nd ed.). Norton.
Fehr, E., & Gächter, S. (2002). Altruistic punishment in humans. Nature, 415(6868), 137–140. https://doi.org/10.1038/415137a
Ferenczi, S. (1933). Confusion of tongues between adults and the child. In M. Balint (Ed.), Final contributions to the problems and methods of psycho-analysis (pp. 156–167). Hogarth Press.
Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from freedom. Farrar and Rinehart.
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
Kernberg, O. F. (1975). Borderline conditions and pathological narcissism. Jason Aronson.
Kernberg, O. F. (1980). Internal world and external reality: Object relations theory applied. Jason Aronson.
Klein, M. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.
Kohut, H. (1971). The analysis of the self. International Universities Press.
Kohut, H. (1977). The restoration of the self. International Universities Press.
LeDoux, J. (1996). The emotional brain: The mysterious underpinnings of emotional life. Simon and Schuster.
Lewis, H. B. (1971). Shame and guilt in neurosis. International Universities Press.
Lieberman, M. D. (2013). Social: Why our brains are wired to connect. Crown Publishers.
MacIntyre, A. (1981). After virtue: A study in moral theory. University of Notre Dame Press.
McCay, B. J., & Acheson, J. M. (Eds.). (1987). The question of the commons: The culture and ecology of communal resources. University of Arizona Press.
Menzies-Lyth, I. (1960). A case-study in the functioning of social systems as a defence against anxiety: A report on a study of the nursing service of a general hospital. Human Relations, 13(2), 95–121. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872676001300201
Mischel, W. (2014). The marshmallow test: Mastering self-control. Little, Brown and Company.
Ogden, T. H. (1979). On projective identification. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 60, 357–373.
Ogden, T. H. (1982). Projective identification and psychotherapeutic technique. Jason Aronson.
Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press.
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. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. Simon and Schuster.
Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst. Penguin Press.
Scheff, T. J. (1988). Shame and conformity: The deference-emotion system. American Sociological Review, 53(3), 395–406. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095647
Stern, P. C., Dietz, T., Dolsak, N., Ostrom, E., & Stonich, S. (2002). Knowledge and questions after 15 years of research. In E. Ostrom, T. Dietz, N. Dolsak, P. C. Stern, S. Stonich, & E. U. Weber (Eds.), The drama of the commons (pp. 443–489). National Academy Press.
Tangney, J. P., & Dearing, R. L. (2002). Shame and guilt. Guilford Press.
Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of emotional development. International Universities Press.
Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. Tavistock Publications.
Zak, P. J. (2012). The moral molecule: The source of love and prosperity. Dutton.
