Abstract
The conventional sequence in commons discourse runs from empirical observation to moral judgment to policy prescription: commons fail, the failure is attributed to the irresponsibility of contributors, and enclosure or privatization is proposed as the rational corrective. This paper inverts that sequence and contests its empirical basis, arguing that moralization—the systematic attribution of commons failure to the character defects, irresponsibility, or incompetence of participants in shared governance—is not a response to commons failure but the primary mechanism through which enclosure acquires legitimacy before, during, and after the fact. Drawing on rhetorical analysis, the sociology of moral discourse, critical discourse analysis, and the political sociology of knowledge, the paper identifies a recurring grammar of enclosure justification organized around four primary rhetorical moves: the appeal to disorder, the moralization of contributors, the efficiency claim for private ownership, and the naturalization of enclosure as inevitable progress. It demonstrates that this grammar functions not to describe the reality of commons governance but to foreclose the alternatives that an accurate description would make visible, and that its deployment systematically precedes rather than follows the commons failures it purports to explain. The paper then develops a set of diagnostic instruments for detecting moralization in policy and institutional discourse—instruments designed to enable governance analysts and practitioners to distinguish between genuine governance diagnosis and the rhetorical production of consent for enclosure. It concludes that when the language of responsibility and disorder appears in commons discourse, the analyst’s first question should not be whether the claims are accurate but whose interests the moral framing serves, what alternatives it forecloses, and what governance conditions it obscures.
Keywords: moralization, enclosure, rhetorical grammar, commons failure, legitimation, critical discourse analysis, political economy, governance, ideology, responsibility discourse
I. Introduction: The Inversion Thesis
Every intellectual tradition has its canonical narrative of failure—the story it tells about why things go wrong, who is responsible, and what should be done in response. For commons governance theory, that canonical narrative has been remarkably stable across the five decades since Hardin’s (1968) formulation: things go wrong in the commons because people do not take responsibility for the shared resource, individual self-interest overrides collective obligation, and the irresponsibility of contributors makes shared governance unstable. The policy prescriptions that follow from this narrative—privatization, coercive state management, the conversion of common property into individual private property—acquire their authority from the moral diagnosis that precedes them. If the problem is irresponsibility, then governance structures that make individuals responsible for specific parcels of the shared resource are the rational response.
This paper’s central claim is that this narrative is not a description of commons failure but a technology of enclosure: a rhetorical and analytical framework whose function is not to explain why commons governance fails but to produce the conditions under which enclosure appears legitimate, necessary, and rational. The moralization of commons failure—the systematic attribution of governance failure to the character defects, irresponsibility, and incompetence of commons participants—is not the consequence of careful observation of how commons actually fail; it is the mechanism through which the interests served by enclosure are represented as the interests of good governance, and through which the alternatives to enclosure are made to appear naive, inefficient, or morally confused.
This is the paper’s inversion thesis: moralization is not a response to commons failure; it is the rhetorical precondition of enclosure. It functions not to describe what has happened but to authorize what is about to happen, to legitimate what is currently happening, and to retrospectively justify what has already happened. The temporal relationship between moralization and enclosure is the reverse of what the canonical narrative assumes: moralization precedes enclosure, enables it, and follows it as its vindication—not because the moral claims are accurate but because they are effective.
The evidence for this inversion is both historical and analytical. Historically, as Paper 1 of this series documented in detail, the English commons did not fail and then require enclosure; they were enclosed, and the moral narrative of irresponsible commoners and disordered commons was constructed to justify an enclosure that was driven by the interests of agricultural capital rather than by the governance failures it retrospectively claimed to address. Analytically, the rhetorical grammar of enclosure justification exhibits a formal consistency across historical periods, cultural contexts, and resource types that cannot be explained by reference to the variable empirical conditions of commons governance—conditions that vary enormously across the cases where the grammar appears. What does not vary is the grammar itself: the appeal to disorder, the moralization of contributors, the efficiency claim, and the naturalization of enclosure as progress. This consistency reveals a rhetorical technology whose function is independent of the empirical conditions it ostensibly describes.
The paper proceeds through eight sections. Section II develops the concept of rhetorical grammar as an analytical tool for the study of moralization in policy discourse. Sections III through VI analyze the four primary moves of the enclosure grammar in detail: the disorder premise, the responsibility moralization, the efficiency claim, and the naturalization move. Section VII examines the temporal claim of the inversion thesis—that moralization precedes rather than follows commons failure—and presents the evidence for it. Section VIII develops the diagnostic instruments that the paper’s analysis implies. Section IX concludes with a statement of the paper’s implications for commons governance theory and the broader political economy of shared life.
II. Rhetorical Grammar as an Analytical Category
The concept of rhetorical grammar, as this paper employs it, refers to a structured system of argumentative moves whose elements are regularly combined in characteristic ways to produce recognizable effects on an audience—in this case, the effect of representing enclosure as the rational and morally appropriate response to commons failure. The concept draws on rhetorical analysis in the classical tradition, on the sociology of moral discourse developed by sociologists including Boltanski and Thévenot (1991), and on critical discourse analysis in the tradition of Fairclough (1992) and van Dijk (1993).
A rhetorical grammar is distinguished from a collection of individual arguments by its structural character: the elements of the grammar are not deployed independently but in combination, with each element performing a specific function in the overall argumentative structure and deriving part of its persuasive force from its relationship to the other elements. The disorder premise establishes the problem; the responsibility moralization identifies its cause and locates it in the character of participants rather than in structural conditions; the efficiency claim identifies the solution and represents it as technically rather than politically motivated; and the naturalization move completes the structure by representing the enclosure that the preceding elements have argued for as the inevitable direction of progress rather than as a specific political choice that could have been made differently. Each element is analytically separable but practically interdependent: the disorder premise requires the responsibility moralization to establish causation, the efficiency claim requires both to establish the superiority of private management, and the naturalization move requires all three to represent enclosure as the conclusion toward which rational analysis inevitably tends.
The concept of rhetorical grammar is related to but distinct from several adjacent analytical concepts. It is related to ideology in the Althusserian sense—the system of representations through which individuals are positioned as subjects within particular social formations—but is more specific and more actionable: a rhetorical grammar can be identified, analyzed, and contested through the examination of specific argumentative patterns in specific texts and discursive contexts, where ideology in the Althusserian sense tends toward a level of abstraction that makes empirical analysis difficult. It is related to framing in the sociological sense of Goffman (1974) and Entman (1993)—the selection and salience of interpretive frameworks that organize experience and guide judgment—but is more analytically structured: the concept of grammar implies a systematic relationship among elements that the concept of framing does not require. And it is related to narrative in the sense of Hayden White (1987) and Paul Ricoeur (1984)—the emplotment of events within a story that gives them meaning and coherence—but is more rhetorical and less temporal: the enclosure grammar does not primarily tell a story but makes an argument, and its force is analytical and normative rather than narrative and identificatory.
Boltanski and Thévenot’s (1991) sociology of justification provides the most directly applicable theoretical framework. Their analysis of the repertoires of justification—the orders of worth—that actors deploy when they are required to justify their actions or to contest the justifications of others, identifies several such repertoires, each of which organizes evaluation according to a different principle: the civic order (collective good), the market order (price), the industrial order (efficiency), the domestic order (tradition and loyalty), the inspired order (creativity and grace), and the fame order (renown). The enclosure grammar, as this paper analyzes it, draws primarily on the industrial and market orders—representing enclosure as efficient and price-rationally optimal—while deploying the civic order rhetorically to moralize commons participants and represent enclosure as the restoration of the collective good that irresponsible commoners have undermined.
This deployment of the civic order against commons participants while the market and industrial orders are deployed in favor of enclosure is a characteristic feature of the enclosure grammar that the sociology of justification helps illuminate: the grammar does not simply advocate for one order of worth against another but deploys multiple orders in a specific rhetorical sequence that makes its argument appear to transcend the particular interests it serves. The moral condemnation of irresponsible commoners draws on the civic order; the advocacy for privatization draws on the market and industrial orders; and the combination produces the appearance of a comprehensive analysis that is simultaneously morally serious and technically rigorous. It is this combination that gives the enclosure grammar its persuasive force and that makes its analysis as a unified rhetorical system, rather than as a collection of independent claims, analytically necessary.
III. The Disorder Premise: Commons as Inherently Unruly
The first and foundational move of the enclosure grammar is the disorder premise: the representation of the commons—shared space, shared resources, shared governance—as inherently disorderly, messy, contentious, and difficult to manage. This premise is the necessary starting point of the grammar because it establishes the problem that the subsequent moves will address. If shared governance were experienced as orderly, productive, and well-managed, the subsequent claims that its failures reflect participant irresponsibility and that privatization would restore order would have no purchase. The disorder premise prepares the argumentative ground by establishing that the commons is the kind of thing that tends toward disorder—that its disordered condition is a natural expression of what it is rather than the consequence of specific and alterable conditions.
The disorder premise is rarely argued for explicitly; it is typically presupposed. It appears in the casual observation that shared spaces are messy, that collective decisions are slow and contentious, that shared resources are poorly maintained, and that the commons lacks the crisp accountability that private ownership provides. These observations are not always false—shared governance is often slower and more contentious than individual decision-making, and shared spaces are often less consistently maintained than private ones—but they are systematically selected and interpreted in ways that make their negative features appear essential rather than contingent, and their positive features are systematically invisible within the grammar’s interpretive framework.
Torfing et al. (2012), in their analysis of collaborative governance, and Ansell and Gash (2008), in their examination of collaborative governance regimes, documented the conditions under which shared governance produces superior outcomes to either private management or hierarchical state management—conditions that include resource complexity that exceeds any single actor’s management capacity, interdependencies between resource users that make coordinated management necessary, and knowledge distribution across the user community that centralized management cannot access. These conditions are common precisely in the kinds of resource systems—forests, fisheries, water systems, atmospheric commons—where the disorder premise is most frequently deployed to justify privatization or state centralization. The disorder premise systematically misrepresents the governance situation by representing the messiness of coordination under these conditions as evidence of commons incapacity rather than as evidence of the complexity that makes commons governance necessary.
The concept of irreducible complexity—the characteristic of governance problems that cannot be solved by simplification without losing what is most important about them—is directly relevant here. Rittel and Webber’s (1973) analysis of wicked problems—problems whose complexity, interdependency, and contestedness make them resistant to the linear analysis and solution that technical approaches to governance assume—applies precisely to the governance situations where the disorder premise is most frequently invoked. The messiness of shared governance is often not evidence of governance failure; it is the appropriate expression of genuine complexity that no governance form can eliminate without losing the complexity-sensitive responsiveness that makes governance adequate to the problem it addresses.
Edelman’s (1977) analysis of political spectacle is relevant to the disorder premise’s rhetorical function. Edelman argued that political language does not primarily describe political reality but constitutes it—that the representation of political situations as disordered, threatening, or requiring expert management is itself a political act that serves specific interests by creating the demand for the interventions that those interests advocate. The disorder premise in the enclosure grammar is precisely such a constitutive political act: by representing the commons as inherently disordered, it creates the perceived need for the order that enclosure promises to provide, and it makes the messiness of shared governance appear as a problem requiring solution rather than as a feature of legitimate complexity requiring navigation.
The disorder premise also performs a specific epistemic function: it establishes the evaluative standard against which shared governance will be measured. By invoking the image of private property’s clean accountability—a single owner who is clearly responsible, clearly incentivized, and clearly capable of making decisions without the contentious deliberation that shared governance requires—the disorder premise establishes private ownership as the implicit norm against which shared governance is judged deficient. This normative move is rarely made explicit; the comparison between the messiness of shared governance and the clean accountability of private ownership is typically presented as an observation rather than a comparison, because making the comparison explicit would require justifying why private ownership’s specific form of accountability—concentrated, exclusive, and oriented toward the owner’s private interest—should be the standard against which shared governance is evaluated rather than one governance form among others, each with its characteristic strengths and limitations.
The disorder premise is particularly effective when combined with aesthetic and affective dimensions that the explicitly argumentative presentation of the enclosure grammar tends to suppress. The shared space that is described as messy is not merely analytically deficient; it is viscerally unappealing—cluttered, unkempt, lacking in the visual order that private property’s boundary markers, maintenance standards, and aesthetic coherence provide. This aesthetic dimension of the disorder premise activates affective responses that are more immediate and less subject to rational scrutiny than the argumentative content of the premise, and it connects the governance critique of the commons to embodied experiences of disorder and cleanliness that carry substantial psychological and cultural weight. Lamont and Molnár (2002) documented the cultural significance of symbolic boundaries—the lines that distinguish the clean from the dirty, the orderly from the disorderly—and their role in legitimating social hierarchies and exclusions; the aesthetic dimension of the disorder premise mobilizes this cultural significance in the service of the enclosure argument.
IV. The Moralization of Contributors: Responsibility as a Weapon
The second move of the enclosure grammar—the moralization of contributors—is the most analytically important and the most difficult to contest, because it deploys the most powerful resource available in any argumentative system: moral language. When the failure of commons governance is attributed not to structural conditions or formative deficits but to the irresponsibility, laziness, selfishness, or incompetence of commons participants, the enclosure argument acquires a moral urgency that structural or economic arguments alone cannot generate. It also acquires a specific argumentative asymmetry: those who contest the enclosure argument must either defend the character of the participants who have been moralized—a defensive posture that concedes the moral framing—or contest the moral framing itself, which is rhetorically difficult precisely because the moral language has been deployed to represent the interests of enclosure as the interests of good governance.
The moralization of contributors takes several characteristic forms that are worth distinguishing analytically even though they frequently appear in combination.
The first form is the irresponsibility attribution: the claim that commons participants do not take adequate responsibility for the shared resource, that they exploit it without contributing to its maintenance, and that this free-riding is the proximate cause of commons degradation. This attribution is not always empirically false—free-riding does occur in some commons governance situations—but it is characteristically deployed without the kind of empirical investigation that would distinguish cases where free-riding is a significant governance problem from cases where it is not, and without attention to the structural and formative conditions that produce free-riding where it occurs. The irresponsibility attribution treats free-riding as a character trait—something that irresponsible people do—rather than as a response to specific governance conditions that the analysis of those conditions could address.
The second form is the competence imputation: the claim that commons participants lack the technical knowledge, managerial capacity, or governance sophistication to manage shared resources effectively, and that this incompetence makes professional management, state oversight, or private ownership necessary to prevent the degradation that amateur governance would produce. This form of moralization is less explicitly moral in its language than the irresponsibility attribution—it speaks of capacity rather than character—but it performs the same argumentative function: it locates the failure of commons governance in the attributes of participants rather than in the structural and formative conditions of the governance system, and it represents the displacement of participant governance by external management as a technical rather than a political intervention.
Chambers’s (1983, 1997) extensive documentation of rural people’s knowledge—the detailed, locally specific, and ecologically sophisticated knowledge of commons users in diverse cultural and resource contexts—provides the most systematic empirical refutation of the competence imputation. Chambers demonstrated that commons users frequently possess knowledge of local resource conditions, seasonal variation, and management requirements that external managers—state agencies, NGOs, private management firms—do not and cannot acquire without extended engagement with the local community. The competence imputation misrepresents this knowledge asymmetry as a capacity deficit: what is in fact a distributional asymmetry—knowledge held by local commons users that external managers lack—is represented as a directional asymmetry, in which external managers are more competent than local users. This misrepresentation serves the interests of the external managers and privatizing interests that the enclosure grammar advocates for, but it is empirically inverted: on the dimensions of knowledge most relevant to sustainable commons management, local users are typically more competent than the managers who are proposed to replace them.
The third form of contributor moralization is the ingratitude narrative: the representation of commons participants as ungrateful beneficiaries of shared resources who contribute less than their share to the collective goods they consume. This form is most visible in contemporary welfare state politics—where welfare recipients are systematically represented as ungrateful dependents who consume common social resources without adequate reciprocal contribution—but it appears in commons governance contexts as well, where the participants who use shared resources without formal participation in governance processes are represented as free-riders whose behavior disqualifies them from the moral standing that would make their interests relevant to governance decisions. The ingratitude narrative performs the double function of moralizing specific participants and delegitimating their standing as claimants in the governance system: the ungrateful, irresponsible, or incompetent contributor has forfeited the standing that legitimate participation would have provided, and the enclosure that removes his access is therefore not an injustice but a restoration of the proper relationship between contribution and entitlement.
Scott’s (1998) analysis of the legibility imperative—the drive of modern states to make complex social and environmental systems legible to centralized management by simplifying them in ways that destroy what made them work—provides an important complement to the moralization analysis. Scott demonstrated that the attribution of incompetence to indigenous and local resource management systems frequently reflected not the actual incompetence of those systems but their illegibility to the centralized management frameworks through which external authorities evaluated them. What appeared as disorder or irresponsibility to the outside observer was often a complex, locally adapted management system whose sophistication was invisible to standardized evaluation frameworks—a point that directly parallels the analysis of the disorder premise in Section III. The moralization of contributors and the disorder premise operate together as a system of legibility distortion: what cannot be made legible to centralized management frameworks is represented as disorderly and irresponsible, and this misrepresentation provides the moral justification for the simplification that makes legibility possible at the cost of the system’s actual governance capacity.
Bourdieu’s (1991) analysis of symbolic power—the power to impose the legitimate vision of the social world, to make particular representations of reality appear natural, universal, and self-evident—provides the deepest theoretical account of why the moralization of contributors is so rhetorically effective and so difficult to contest. Bourdieu argued that symbolic power operates through misrecognition: the interested representations of the world that it produces are not recognized as interested but as accurate, not as political but as technical, not as the expressions of specific social positions and interests but as the neutral descriptions that any careful observer would produce. The moralization of commons contributors is a paradigm case of symbolic power operating through misrecognition: the moral language of irresponsibility and incompetence appears to describe the attributes of specific persons—attributes that anyone could observe—when it is in fact imposing a specific interpretive framework whose function is to legitimate the interests of those who benefit from enclosure.
V. The Efficiency Claim: Private Ownership as Technical Solution
The third move of the enclosure grammar—the efficiency claim—performs a crucial rhetorical function: it converts the political argument for enclosure into a technical argument, representing the displacement of shared governance by private ownership not as a choice among governance alternatives, each with its characteristic advantages and limitations, but as the conclusion toward which any technically rigorous analysis of governance efficiency must tend. The efficiency claim is the grammar’s most consequential move because it is the most difficult to contest: while moral claims can be contested on moral grounds, and disorder premises can be contested by pointing to functioning commons, the efficiency claim operates in a domain—technical economic analysis—where contestation requires fluency in a technical language that many governance participants and policy audiences do not possess, and where the appearance of technical authority is itself a rhetorical resource that the enclosure argument deploys against its critics.
The efficiency claim has several characteristic forms. The most basic is the incentive argument: private ownership creates the incentive for sustainable management because the owner internalizes both the costs and benefits of resource use, while shared governance externalizes costs and produces the tragedy that Hardin described. This argument is the economic translation of the irresponsibility attribution: private ownership makes people responsible by making them self-interested, and self-interest under private ownership produces efficiency. The argument is not without substance—the internalization of externalities is a genuine governance problem, and property rights can contribute to its solution in some contexts—but it is deployed in the enclosure grammar without the qualifications that would make it empirically accurate: without attention to the conditions under which private ownership actually internalizes rather than externalizes costs, to the conditions under which self-interest in private ownership produces sustainable management rather than maximally rapid extraction, or to the conditions under which commons governance successfully internalizes externalities through non-property mechanisms.
Heller’s (1998) analysis of the tragedy of the anticommons—the situation in which the excessive fragmentation of property rights into too many private hands produces underuse and governance failure rather than efficient management—demonstrates that private ownership does not inherently solve the problems that the efficiency claim attributes to it, and can produce its own characteristic form of governance failure that the commons governance framework handles more effectively. Heller’s analysis received less attention than Hardin’s despite its comparable rigor, a discrepancy that itself reflects the ideological asymmetry that the enclosure grammar produces: arguments for the governance advantages of private ownership are more readily received and more widely disseminated than arguments for its governance limitations, because the institutional and political economy of academic and policy discourse is not neutral between them.
The productivity argument is a second characteristic form of the efficiency claim: private ownership produces greater output per unit of resource input than shared governance because private owners have stronger incentives to invest in resource improvement and stronger incentives to prevent resource degradation. This argument has historical applications—the enclosure of English common fields was frequently justified by contemporary commentators and later by economic historians on grounds of agricultural productivity improvement—that have been substantially contested by the historical scholarship. Allen’s (1992) careful analysis of the productivity effects of English agricultural enclosure demonstrated that the productivity gains attributed to enclosure were modest, unevenly distributed, and often achievable through alternative governance mechanisms that the enclosure framework excluded. More fundamentally, Clark (1998) demonstrated that the common field system was more productive than contemporary enclosure advocates and many later economic historians assumed—that the productivity comparison was framed in ways that systematically disadvantaged the commons by measuring outputs that private cultivation optimized while ignoring outputs that commons governance provided: the subsistence security, risk distribution, and ecological resilience that the commons offered to its participants and that private enclosure destroyed.
The transaction cost argument is the third characteristic form: private ownership reduces the transaction costs of resource governance—the costs of negotiation, coordination, monitoring, and enforcement—by concentrating governance authority in a single owner whose decisions do not require the agreement of multiple participants. This argument draws on the institutional economics of Coase (1960) and Williamson (1985) in ways that those authors did not specifically intend and that their frameworks do not consistently support. The transaction cost framework is a tool for analyzing the comparative efficiency of different governance forms under specified conditions; it does not support the general conclusion that private ownership is more efficient than shared governance, because the comparative transaction costs of different governance forms depend on the specific conditions—number of parties, frequency of interaction, complexity of the resource system, availability of information—that vary across governance situations in ways that sometimes favor shared governance and sometimes favor private ownership.
The efficiency claim performs its most important rhetorical function not through any of these specific arguments but through the meta-claim that efficiency is the appropriate criterion for evaluating governance alternatives—that governance forms should be chosen on the basis of their efficiency in producing specified outputs rather than on the basis of the distribution of their benefits, the range of values they serve, the relational and formative conditions they create, or the governance legitimacy they provide to participants. This meta-claim is not a technical conclusion; it is a political choice about what governance is for—a choice that systematically advantages the interests of those whose primary stake in commons governance is productive output over those whose stakes include the subsistence security, relational community, cultural continuity, and democratic participation that commons governance has historically provided. By representing this political choice as a technical conclusion, the efficiency claim converts what is a contestable value judgment into an apparent terminus of rational analysis that those who disagree with it appear to be rejecting in favor of sentimentality or ideology.
VI. The Naturalization Move: Enclosure as Inevitable Progress
The fourth move of the enclosure grammar—the naturalization of enclosure as the inevitable direction of development, modernization, and progress—performs the function of foreclosing alternatives by representing enclosure not as a political choice that could have been made differently but as the expression of forces—market development, technological progress, institutional evolution—that are too powerful and too rational to be effectively resisted. The naturalization move converts enclosure from a contingent outcome of specific political and economic choices into a natural process whose inevitability is itself evidence of its rationality: that which survives is fit, and that which is fit is efficient, and that which is efficient is right.
The Darwinian resonances of this move are not accidental. The application of evolutionary language to institutional change—the representation of private property as more evolved than common property, of market governance as more advanced than community governance, of commercial agriculture as more developed than subsistence farming—is a characteristic feature of modernization discourse that has provided intellectual cover for enclosure processes across multiple continents and centuries. The language of evolution and development is particularly effective as a naturalization device because it places the enclosure process in a temporal framework that makes it appear as a direction rather than a choice: what is evolving cannot be stopped without opposing progress itself, and those who oppose it appear to be defending backwardness against the inevitable march of rationality.
Ferguson’s (1994) analysis of the development apparatus—the network of institutions, discourses, and practices through which development interventions in the global South are designed, implemented, and evaluated—demonstrated that development discourse systematically represents the complex, historically specific conditions of governance in the societies it addresses as deficiencies relative to a developmental norm that is implicitly identified with the governance forms of the industrialized North. The naturalization move in the enclosure grammar is the micro-level expression of this macro-level development discourse: just as development discourse represents the governance forms of the global South as premodern deficiencies awaiting the development that will bring them into modernity, the enclosure grammar represents commons governance as a premodern governance form awaiting the development—privatization, market integration, professional management—that will bring it into the present.
Polanyi’s (1944) analysis of the great transformation provides the most historically comprehensive account of the naturalization of market enclosure. Polanyi demonstrated that the self-regulating market—the institutional form that the naturalization move represents as the inevitable destination of economic development—was not a natural outgrowth of economic progress but a deliberately constructed political project that required the sustained effort of states, legislatures, and intellectual advocates to establish and maintain against the resistance of the communities it disrupted. The naturalization of market enclosure was itself a project: the representation of a politically constructed outcome as a natural process was necessary precisely because the political construction was so extensive and so disruptive that its representation as natural required continuous effort. As Polanyi put it, laissez-faire was planned—and the naturalization move is the rhetorical dimension of that planning.
North’s (1990) institutional economics provides an interesting case of naturalization within an analytical framework that is not primarily rhetorical. North’s account of institutional evolution—the representation of institutional change as a path-dependent process in which efficient institutions progressively displace inefficient ones—is not designed as a legitimating framework for enclosure, but it performs that function in contexts where it is applied without the qualifications that North himself insists on. The representation of institutional change as an efficiency-selecting evolutionary process naturalizes whatever institutional form has emerged as the one that the process has validated, and this naturalization is available for deployment in the enclosure grammar as evidence that the displacement of commons governance by private property is the expression of an evolutionary dynamic rather than a political choice.
Cronon’s (1991) environmental history of the American West provides an illuminating case study of the naturalization move in operation. Cronon documented the way in which the transformation of the American West from indigenous commons governance to private property and market integration was narrated—by settlers, boosters, politicians, and eventually historians—as the story of nature being brought under productive management: wilderness converted to cultivated land, savage commons converted to civilized private property, waste converted to wealth. This narrative naturalized enclosure by representing it as the conversion of nothing into something—as the creation of value where value had not previously existed—and thereby made invisible the commons governance systems that had sustained indigenous communities in the converted territories for thousands of years. The naturalization move operated precisely through this invisibilization: what could not be seen within the evaluative framework of the settler colonial discourse was represented as not there, and what was represented as not there could be enclosed without injustice because there was nothing to enclose.
VII. Moralization as Pre-emptive: The Temporal Argument
The temporal claim of the inversion thesis—that moralization precedes rather than follows commons failure—is the paper’s most empirically testable claim, and it requires the most careful argumentation. The claim is not that moralization always precedes commons failure in every case; commons can and do fail, and moral analysis of the conditions of that failure is both appropriate and necessary. The claim is that when the enclosure grammar is operative—when moralization is functioning as an enclosure technology rather than as a genuine governance diagnosis—the moral characterization of commons participants and commons governance precedes the failures it is deployed to explain, because its function is not to explain those failures but to authorize the enclosure that is already intended.
The historical evidence from the English enclosure movement is the most thoroughly documented case for this temporal claim. Thompson (1991) and Neeson (1993) both documented the way in which the moral characterization of English commoners as idle, dissolute, and resistant to productive employment preceded and enabled the parliamentary enclosure acts rather than following from the observed failure of common field governance. The contemporary literature of improvement—the agricultural writings of Arthur Young, William Marshall, and their contemporaries—represented commoners as forming bad habits, living in indolence, and resisting the incentives to productive labor that private employment would have provided, at a time when the common field system was, by most measures, functioning adequately as a governance system and providing the subsistence security of its participants. The moral characterization was not a response to observed governance failure; it was the discursive preparation for an enclosure that served the interests of agricultural improvement and capital accumulation, and that required the moral delegitimation of commoners to appear as something other than the seizure of their resources that it in fact was.
Neeson’s (1993) analysis is particularly detailed on this point. She documented the way in which parliamentary enclosure commissioners were frequently appointed from among the improving landlords who stood to benefit from enclosure—a structural conflict of interest that the moral language of improvement and responsibility obscured by representing enclosure as governance reform rather than as the redistribution of resources from commoners to landlords. The moralization of commoners—their representation as ungrateful, irresponsible, and resistant to the improvements that would benefit them—was the rhetorical mechanism through which this redistribution was represented as governance correction: the commoners were receiving what their irresponsibility had earned, and the landlords were receiving what their responsible management deserved.
Contemporary resource governance provides multiple cases that exhibit the same temporal structure. The privatization of water systems in developing countries in the 1990s and 2000s—a process extensively documented by Goldman (2005) and Bakker (2010)—was preceded in most cases by representations of public water management as corrupt, inefficient, and irresponsible that were produced by the international financial institutions and consulting firms that stood to benefit from privatization, rather than by independent governance assessments that found public management to be failing. The moralization of public management preceded the privatization that it was deployed to justify, and the governance failures that it attributed to public management were in most cases either exaggerated, misattributed, or the consequence of the underfunding that the same financial institutions had imposed as conditions of structural adjustment loans—underfunding that had itself produced the conditions the moralization described.
Fairclough’s (1992) concept of synthetic personalization—the rhetorical technique through which institutional communications address their audiences as individuals with specific moral attributes rather than as members of social categories with structural positions—is relevant to the pre-emptive character of moralization in contemporary governance discourse. The language of responsibility, independence, and active citizenship that characterizes contemporary welfare state reform, housing policy, and environmental governance consistently addresses its audiences as moral agents whose choices are the primary determinants of governance outcomes—a framing that pre-emptively moralizes participants before any governance failure has occurred, by establishing individual moral agency as the framework within which governance outcomes will be evaluated and governance failure will be assigned. The pre-emptive moralization of the irresponsible welfare recipient, the irresponsible homeowner, and the irresponsible environmental consumer establishes the interpretive framework within which future governance failures will be attributed to character rather than to structure, and within which enclosure—in the forms of welfare retrenchment, housing market deregulation, and the privatization of environmental commons—will appear as the rational response to the moral failures that the pre-emptive moralization has already identified.
Harvey’s (2005) analysis of neoliberalism as a political project—the organized effort to restore the conditions of capital accumulation and the power of economic elites through the institutional restructuring of economies, states, and social relations—provides the broadest analytical framework for understanding pre-emptive moralization as a political technology. Harvey argued that neoliberal policy was not primarily driven by its own theoretical commitments—the actually existing evidence for the efficiency advantages of market governance was too thin to account for the policy program’s adoption—but by its utility for the restoration of class power that the mid-century social settlement had constrained. The pre-emptive moralization of welfare recipients, public sector workers, commons users, and other beneficiaries of social-democratic governance provided the legitimating discourse for a policy program whose actual driver was the redistribution of resources and power from the poor and working class to capital, and whose adoption required the discursive construction of a governance crisis that the available evidence did not straightforwardly support.
VIII. Diagnostic Instruments: Detecting Moralization in Governance Discourse
The analysis of the enclosure grammar and its components developed in the preceding sections is not merely theoretical; it has practical implications for governance analysts, practitioners, and participants who encounter the grammar in policy discourse, institutional communication, and the everyday talk of governance situations. This section develops a set of diagnostic instruments—questions, criteria, and analytical procedures—designed to enable the detection of moralization when it is functioning as an enclosure technology rather than as a genuine governance diagnosis.
The instruments are organized around three diagnostic questions, each of which addresses a different dimension of the moralization phenomenon and each of which can be applied to any governance discourse in which the language of responsibility, disorder, and efficiency appears.
Diagnostic Question 1: Whose interests does the moral framing serve?
The first diagnostic question is the most fundamental: when the language of responsibility, disorder, or efficiency appears in commons discourse, who benefits from the framing, and who would benefit from alternative framings that the moral language forecloses?
This question is not a counsel of suspicion toward all moral language in governance discourse; it is a methodological directive to pursue the analysis of interests that the moral language does not perform. Moral language does not automatically serve the interests of those who deploy it or automatically harm the interests of those it targets—there are genuine cases where the attribution of irresponsibility to commons participants is accurate, where the disorder of shared governance reflects genuine governance failure, and where private management would produce better outcomes for a broader range of stakeholders than the commons governance it displaces. The diagnostic question does not assume that these cases do not exist; it requires that the interests at stake be examined before the moral claims are accepted as accurate descriptions of governance reality.
The examination of interests requires attention to several specific factors. Who is making the moral claims, and what institutional position do they occupy relative to the enclosure that the claims support? What would they gain from enclosure and what would they lose from the maintenance of commons governance? Who is being moralized, and what is their relationship to the resources at stake? What alternative governance frameworks would the moral claims make difficult to advocate for, and what interests would those alternatives serve? The answers to these questions do not determine the accuracy of the moral claims—accurate moral claims can serve particular interests, and inaccurate moral claims can be made in good faith by actors without material stake in their outcome—but they establish the context within which the accuracy of the claims can be evaluated without naively accepting the framing that the grammar provides.
Lukes’s (1974) three-dimensional theory of power—which distinguishes between the exercise of power through decision-making (first dimension), through agenda-setting that determines what questions are decided (second dimension), and through the shaping of preferences and perceptions that determines what alternatives are imaginable (third dimension)—provides the theoretical framework within which this diagnostic question is most productively pursued. Moralization in the enclosure grammar operates primarily at the third dimension of power: it shapes the perceptual and evaluative framework within which commons governance is assessed, making enclosure appear as the rational conclusion of any competent analysis and making the alternatives to enclosure appear as the expressions of irrationality, sentimentality, or special pleading. Detecting this third-dimensional power exercise requires attending not only to the claims that governance discourse makes but to the claims it makes impossible—the alternatives it forecloses by establishing the evaluative framework within which governance is assessed.
Diagnostic Question 2: Does the moral framing precede or follow the conditions it describes?
The second diagnostic question addresses the temporal structure of moralization: does the moral characterization of commons participants and commons governance appear before or after the governance failures it purports to explain? If moralization precedes commons failure, the temporal analysis supports the inversion thesis—the moralization is functioning as a technology of enclosure rather than as a response to observed governance failure. If moralization follows commons failure, the temporal analysis is consistent with genuine governance diagnosis—though it does not exclude the possibility that the diagnosis is nonetheless distorted by the interests it serves.
The temporal diagnostic is most productively applied through the examination of the institutional and discursive context within which moralization appears. Who produced the moral characterization, when, and in relation to what governance process? Was the moral characterization produced by actors with a stake in enclosure before governance failure was observable, or by actors without such a stake after careful observation of governance conditions? Was it produced in the context of a governance reform process that had already determined enclosure as its destination, or in the context of a genuine diagnostic inquiry whose outcome was genuinely uncertain?
The identification of pre-emptive moralization is complicated by the fact that governance discourse rarely announces its temporal relationship to the conditions it describes. The improving landlord who characterized commoners as idle and dissolute did not preface his characterization with the acknowledgment that it preceded any observed change in commoner behavior; the international financial institution consultant who characterized public water management as corrupt and inefficient did not note that her assessment preceded the independent governance review that might have confirmed or contested it. The temporal analysis requires reconstruction from institutional and historical context rather than from the explicit claims of the discourse itself.
Diagnostic Question 3: What governance alternatives does the moral framing foreclose?
The third diagnostic question is the most practically consequential: what governance alternatives does the moral framing make difficult or impossible to advocate for, and what would governance analysis look like if those alternatives were available for consideration?
Moralization in the enclosure grammar forecloses alternatives not by explicitly prohibiting their discussion but by establishing the evaluative framework within which governance alternatives are assessed in ways that systematically disadvantage commons governance. The representation of commons governance as inherently disordered forecloses the alternative of reformed commons governance—the governance of shared resources through improved institutional design—by establishing disorder as an essential feature of shared governance rather than as a contingent feature of specific governance designs. The moralization of commons contributors forecloses the alternative of formation-based governance intervention—the development of the competencies that shared governance requires through appropriate institutional and social design—by representing the inadequacy of commons participants as a character attribute rather than as a formative deficit. And the efficiency claim forecloses the alternative of governance criteria other than efficiency—the assessment of governance forms by the range of values they serve, the relational and formative conditions they create, and the democratic legitimacy they provide—by establishing efficiency as the only criterion that technical analysis can recognize.
The diagnostic procedure for this question involves counterfactual analysis: what would governance policy look like if the disorder premise were replaced by an accurate characterization of commons governance as variable in quality depending on specifiable institutional conditions? If the moralization of contributors were replaced by a formation-based account of governance incapacity as the product of specifiable developmental and institutional conditions? If the efficiency claim were replaced by a pluralist account of governance values that included relational, formative, and democratic dimensions alongside productive efficiency? The answers to these counterfactual questions reveal what the enclosure grammar forecloses—the governance alternatives that an accurate and comprehensive analysis of commons governance conditions would make available—and thereby identify the ideological work that the grammar performs.
Consolidated Detection Criteria
The three diagnostic questions can be consolidated into a set of detection criteria for moralization in governance discourse. The presence of three or more of the following features in a governance discourse suggests that moralization is functioning as an enclosure technology rather than as a genuine governance diagnosis:
The moral characterization of commons participants or commons governance is produced by actors with a material stake in enclosure. The characterization precedes rather than follows observable governance failure. The characterization employs global attributions—irresponsibility, incompetence, disorder—that apply to the governance form as such rather than to specific, remediable features of specific governance situations. The characterization forecloses formation-based and institutional reform alternatives by representing governance incapacity as essential rather than contingent. The characterization deploys efficiency as the exclusive governance criterion while representing other governance values as naïve or impractical. The characterization presents enclosure as the inevitable destination of rational governance analysis rather than as one governance alternative among others. And the characterization is resistant to empirical refutation—governance evidence that contradicts the moral claims is dismissed as exceptional, ideologically motivated, or irrelevant to the essential truth of the characterization.
These criteria do not constitute a definitive test; the presence of several of them is suggestive rather than conclusive, and their application requires contextual judgment that no algorithmic procedure can substitute for. But they provide a systematic starting point for the kind of discourse analysis that the detection of moralization as an enclosure technology requires.
IX. The Moralization of the Moralization Critique
Before proceeding to the conclusion, the paper must address a reflexive difficulty that the analysis of moralization generates: the possibility that the critique of moralization as an enclosure technology is itself a form of moralization—an attribution of bad faith, strategic deception, or ideological motivation to the actors who deploy the enclosure grammar. This possibility is not merely abstract; the charge that critics of privatization and enclosure are engaged in ideological special pleading—defending the inefficiency of commons governance for sentimental or political reasons—is a standard feature of the enclosure grammar’s defensive repertoire, and the critique of moralization must be able to respond to it without either accepting its terms or reproducing its logic.
The response has two components. The first is methodological: the analysis of moralization as an enclosure technology does not require the attribution of conscious bad faith to the actors who deploy the enclosure grammar. The grammar can be deployed sincerely by actors who genuinely believe that commons governance is disordered, that commons participants are irresponsible, and that private ownership is the efficient and rational corrective. Sincere deployment of the grammar does not make it accurate; the accuracy of the grammar’s claims is an empirical question independent of the sincerity of those who advance them. The analysis of whose interests the grammar serves, whether it precedes or follows the conditions it describes, and what alternatives it forecloses is not an attribution of bad faith; it is a structural analysis of the grammar’s function that is independent of any assessment of the motives of individual actors.
The second component is substantive: the critique of moralization as an enclosure technology is not itself moral in the same sense that the enclosure grammar is moral. The enclosure grammar moralizes—it attributes governance failure to the character defects, irresponsibility, and incompetence of commons participants. The critique of the enclosure grammar does not respond by attributing character defects to enclosers; it analyzes the rhetorical structure and ideological function of the grammar without claiming that those who deploy it are personally dishonest, malicious, or morally deficient. The distinction between structural analysis and moral attribution is precisely the distinction between formation failure and character failure that Paper 2 of this series developed: the analysis of the enclosure grammar as a structural phenomenon does not require and should not produce a moral indictment of the individual actors who deploy it.
This reflexive self-awareness is not merely a rhetorical courtesy; it is the analytical integrity that distinguishes genuine governance diagnosis from the moralizing that the paper analyzes. The critique of moralization that itself moralizes—that responds to the enclosure grammar by attributing bad faith, greed, or moral failure to enclosers—has reproduced the logic it set out to contest, and has thereby provided the enclosure grammar’s advocates with the target they need to deflect the structural critique onto the motives of the critics. The analysis of moralization as an enclosure technology must be conducted with the same methodological discipline that the paper demands of governance discourse generally: attending to structural function, institutional context, and the interests served by specific framings, without defaulting to the character attributions that moralization always finds more satisfying than the structural analysis it forecloses.
X. Conclusion: The First Question
The argument of this paper has developed a systematic account of moralization as an enclosure technology—a structured rhetorical grammar whose function is not to describe commons governance accurately but to produce the conditions under which enclosure appears legitimate, necessary, and rational. The grammar’s four primary moves—the disorder premise, the moralization of contributors, the efficiency claim, and the naturalization of enclosure as progress—work together as a structured argumentative system that systematically forecloses the alternatives to enclosure while representing enclosure as the conclusion of any competent governance analysis. The grammar’s temporal structure—its tendency to precede rather than follow the commons failures it purports to explain—reveals its function as a technology of authorization rather than a tool of description.
The diagnostic instruments developed in Section VIII provide the practical tools for detecting the enclosure grammar in policy and institutional discourse: the questions of whose interests the moral framing serves, whether it precedes or follows the conditions it describes, and what governance alternatives it forecloses provide the analytical entry points for governance discourse analysis that the detection of moralization requires.
The paper’s concluding claim is the one stated in the abstract and in the paper’s framing: when the language of responsibility and disorder appears in commons discourse, the analyst’s first question should not be whether the claims are accurate but whose interests the moral framing serves and what alternatives it closes off. This is not a counsel of permanent skepticism toward moral language in governance discourse—accurate moral claims have an important place in governance analysis, and the paper does not deny that commons can fail, that participants can be irresponsible, or that governance reform is sometimes necessary. It is a counsel of analytical order: the accuracy of moral claims in governance discourse should be investigated, not assumed, and that investigation requires attending to the structural function of those claims before accepting their descriptive content at face value.
The commons governance literature has largely accepted the descriptive content of the enclosure grammar at face value—has treated the disorder premise, the moralization of contributors, and the efficiency claim as descriptions of governance reality rather than as the components of a rhetorical system whose function is to authorize enclosure rather than to explain governance failure. This acceptance has produced a governance analysis that is systematically unable to see what is happening when the enclosure grammar is operative—that treats the pre-emptive moralization of commons participants as evidence of genuine governance failure, the efficiency claim as a technical finding rather than a political choice, and the naturalization of enclosure as an observation about the direction of history rather than as an ideological construction designed to make resistance appear futile.
The recovery of analytical clarity about moralization as an enclosure technology is not a peripheral refinement of commons governance theory; it is a prerequisite for governance analysis that can accurately describe the conditions of commons failure and commons success, identify the genuine governance interventions that the formation-based account this suite proposes, and resist the rhetorical foreclosure of those alternatives that the enclosure grammar is designed to produce. Commons governance theory that cannot detect moralization when it is operating will consistently misdiagnose commons failure—will treat the political outcomes of enclosure as the natural consequences of commons inadequacy, will treat the formative and institutional failures that produce genuine governance incapacity as the character failures that the grammar attributes to irresponsible participants, and will treat the political choices that produce enclosure as the technical conclusions that any rational analysis must reach. The recovery of analytical clarity is the recovery of governance theory’s capacity to see clearly what is happening in commons governance situations—to distinguish genuine diagnosis from rhetorical authorization, accurate description from ideological production, and the first question of structural analysis from the premature moral conclusion that the enclosure grammar is designed to deliver before the first question can be asked.
Notes
Note 1. The concept of rhetorical grammar employed in this paper is related to but distinct from the concept of discourse in the Foucauldian tradition. Foucault’s (1972) analysis of discourse as a system of statements that produces the objects it purports to describe, operating through epistemic rules that determine what can be said, thought, and known within a given historical period, is relevant to the analysis of moralization as an enclosure technology but operates at a level of abstraction that makes empirical analysis of specific texts and discursive contexts difficult. The concept of rhetorical grammar is more specific and more tractable: it refers to a structured system of argumentative moves that can be identified, analyzed, and traced in specific texts and governance discourses, and whose function can be assessed through the diagnostic procedures developed in Section VIII. The relationship between the two concepts is one of level of analysis rather than theoretical incompatibility.
Note 2. The analysis of the disorder premise in Section III should be distinguished from the claim that shared governance is never disorderly or that commons governance failures never reflect genuine governance problems. The point is not that commons governance is uniformly successful or that its difficulties are always artifacts of misrepresentation; it is that the disorder premise in the enclosure grammar represents disorder as essential to commons governance—as a feature of what shared governance is—rather than as the contingent result of specific and alterable governance conditions. The distinction between essential and contingent disorder is the analytically important one: essential disorder cannot be addressed by governance reform and therefore implies that enclosure is the only solution, while contingent disorder can be addressed by governance reform and therefore makes enclosure one option among several rather than the necessary destination of rational governance analysis.
Note 3. Boltanski and Thévenot’s (1991) sociology of justification, on which Section II draws, is primarily a sociology of moral discourse in interpersonal and organizational contexts. Its application to the analysis of political and governance discourse requires some extension of the framework’s original scope, and readers familiar with the source literature should note that the application in this paper is interpretive rather than strictly derived. The extension is justified by the structural parallels between the justification repertoires that Boltanski and Thévenot identified in interpersonal disputes and the argumentative structures of the enclosure grammar—parallels that suggest that the grammar is drawing on the same cultural repertoires of justification that Boltanski and Thévenot’s framework describes, even if in a political rather than an interpersonal context.
Note 4. The analysis of Scott’s (1998) legibility imperative in Section IV is particularly relevant to contemporary digital governance, where the legibility requirement takes the form of data standardization, algorithmic classification, and the reduction of complex social behaviors to quantifiable metrics that centralized platforms can process and monetize. The moralization of users who resist this legibility—who refuse to provide personal data, who use privacy tools, who engage in behaviors that resist algorithmic classification—follows the same pattern as the moralization of commons contributors in the enclosure grammar: the illegibility of their behavior to the platform’s management framework is represented as irresponsibility, opacity, or resistance to the terms of a bargain that the platform claims to offer in good faith. The digital enclosure of attention, data, and communicative commons is enabled by a moralization grammar whose structure is identical to the one this paper analyzes in relation to physical and natural resource commons.
Note 5. Harvey’s (2005) analysis of neoliberalism as a political project is one of several competing accounts of neoliberalism’s character and origins. Readers should note that Harvey’s emphasis on class power restoration as the primary driver of neoliberal policy is contested by scholars who emphasize the role of ideas (Blyth, 2002), institutional path dependence (Streeck, 2014), or the specific political coalitions that produced neoliberal policy in different national contexts (Crouch, 2011). The paper does not depend on Harvey’s specific account of neoliberalism’s origins; it draws on his analysis of the discursive function of pre-emptive moralization in governance reform as an analytical framework for understanding the temporal structure of moralization that the inversion thesis claims. Readers who find Harvey’s political economy analysis contentious can engage the temporal argument of Section VII independently of the neoliberalism analysis that provides its contemporary illustration.
Note 6. The diagnostic instruments developed in Section VIII are offered as analytical starting points rather than as definitive algorithms for the detection of moralization. Their application requires contextual judgment—attention to the specific institutional context, the specific actors and interests involved, the specific historical conditions of the governance situation—that cannot be reduced to the application of formal criteria. The instruments are designed to structure this judgment rather than to replace it, and governance analysts who apply them should treat the detection criteria as questions to be investigated rather than as findings to be confirmed. The most common failure mode in the application of these instruments is the premature conclusion that moralization is operating—the attribution of enclosure-enabling rhetorical function to moral language that is actually performing genuine governance diagnosis—and the diagnostic procedure should include explicit attention to the evidence that would disconfirm the moralization hypothesis as well as to the evidence that would confirm it.
Note 7. The paper’s analysis of the naturalization move in Section VI is implicitly indebted to Barthes’s (1972) concept of myth as the conversion of history into nature—the rhetorical process through which historically contingent social arrangements are represented as natural, inevitable, and self-evident features of reality that only ideology or sentiment would contest. Barthes’s semiotic analysis of myth provides a theoretical framework that is complementary to the rhetorical grammar analysis of this paper: where the rhetorical grammar analysis attends to the argumentative structure through which naturalization is produced, Barthes’s analysis attends to the semiotic mechanism through which the historical is converted into the natural. The two analyses illuminate different dimensions of the same phenomenon and are more complementary than competing as frameworks for the analysis of naturalization in governance discourse.
Note 8. The relationship between the moralization analysis of this paper and the prophetic material examined in Paper 6 of this series deserves explicit acknowledgment. The Hebrew prophets’ analysis of the rhetorical strategies through which enclosure acquires legitimacy—the way in which the accumulation of nachalah is moralized as good management and the resistance of dispossessed commoners is moralized as ingratitude—anticipates the structure of the enclosure grammar that this paper analyzes with remarkable precision. Amos’s analysis of the judicial corruption through which enclosure was legitimated, Isaiah’s identification of the self-justifying narrative of the accumulator, and Micah’s account of the planning and execution of enclosure as a deliberate governance strategy all exhibit the analytical structure that this paper develops through the sociology of moral discourse and critical discourse analysis. The convergence between prophetic and sociological analysis at this point suggests that the enclosure grammar is not a specifically modern phenomenon but a recurring feature of the governance of shared resources wherever accumulative interests seek legitimacy through the moralization of those whose entitlements they are appropriating.
Note 9. Readers interested in the application of this paper’s analysis to contemporary environmental governance will find Prudham (2004) and McCarthy and Prudham (2004) valuable extensions. Their analyses of the way in which neoliberal environmental governance deploys the language of market efficiency, individual responsibility, and participatory governance to legitimate the enclosure of environmental commons demonstrate the enclosure grammar in operation in a specific governance domain with a precision that this paper’s more general analysis does not provide. The literature on payment for ecosystem services—the conversion of ecological functions into market commodities whose provision is compensated through financial transactions—is a particularly rich site for the analysis of the efficiency claim and naturalization move in contemporary environmental governance discourse.
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