Shared Resilience Is a Commons Problem

Climate resilience is usually described as a question of protection. We build stronger infrastructure, improve forecasts, finance adaptation, strengthen institutions and try to reduce exposure. All of that matters. But the more I look at climate risk, the more I think resilience has another property that is easy to miss: it is often something that many actors depend on, but no single actor can produce alone.

That makes it look less like a product and more like a commons problem.

Elinor Ostrom spent much of her career studying exactly this kind of difficulty. Her work challenged the idea that shared resources must either be privatised or controlled from above. She showed that communities can sometimes govern common-pool resources effectively through rules, monitoring, collective choice, conflict-resolution mechanisms and institutions fitted to local conditions. Her larger point was not that communities always succeed, but that collective action is an institutional design problem rather than an automatic tragedy.

The analogy with resilience is not exact. A city’s resilience is not a fishery or an irrigation canal. But the underlying problem is similar enough to be useful.

Consider extreme heat. A worker’s safety depends partly on personal behaviour, but also on shade, water, working hours, health systems, electricity, building design, labour rules and early warning. A firm may invest in cooling, but it cannot control the city’s electricity supply. A municipality may create a heat action plan, but it cannot determine every employer’s behaviour. A health department can track illness but cannot redesign streets. Everyone contributes to the outcome, while nobody owns the whole outcome.

Flood resilience has the same structure. Households can raise possessions and buy insurance, but they remain exposed if drains fail, roads become impassable, electricity disappears, wetlands are destroyed or emergency finance arrives too late. The resilience of each actor partly depends on the behaviour of others.

This is what makes shared resilience different from individual resilience. It is not simply the sum of many people becoming more resilient. It is a condition produced by relationships among them.

Once you see the problem this way, several familiar climate frustrations become easier to understand. Why do good plans sit unused? Why do early-warning systems fail to produce early action? Why do strong projects remain isolated pilots? Why do cities repeatedly invest in assets while vulnerability continues to grow elsewhere?

Often the problem is not that nobody cares. It is that the outcome is shared while responsibilities, incentives and authority are fragmented.

Commons problems have exactly this character. The benefits of good stewardship are distributed, while the costs of acting are often concentrated. Everyone may benefit from a functioning watershed, but each actor has an incentive to protect its own immediate interest. Everyone may benefit from a flood-resilient city, but a developer can still profit from building in ways that increase runoff elsewhere. Everyone may benefit from heat-safe streets, but no single agency sees public shade as its core mandate.

The result is not always free-riding in the narrow economic sense. Sometimes it is simply institutional fragmentation. Each actor behaves rationally within its own mandate, while the system behaves irrationally as a whole.

This is where Ostrom’s work becomes more interesting than the slogan “local communities can manage resources.” Her deeper contribution was to show that durable collective action requires rules, boundaries, monitoring, mechanisms for resolving conflict, participation in rule-making and governance arrangements that operate at more than one level.

Climate resilience needs many of the same things.

It needs clarity about who is responsible for what. It needs shared information. It needs ways to see whether actors are doing what they agreed to do. It needs mechanisms for resolving conflicts over costs and benefits. It needs local knowledge to influence decisions. And because climate risk crosses neighbourhoods, cities, sectors and borders, it needs institutions nested across scales rather than one perfectly centralised authority.

Ostrom later used the language of polycentric governance to describe systems with multiple centres of decision-making operating with some autonomy but interacting across levels. In her climate work, she argued that complex environmental problems are unlikely to be solved effectively by waiting for one global authority; action at multiple scales can allow experimentation, learning and cumulative progress.

That idea fits adaptation particularly well.

A neighbourhood may know where water accumulates first. A city controls drainage and land-use rules. A national government controls major public finance. Insurers understand risk pricing. Utilities control electricity and water networks. Philanthropy may fund experimentation or coordination. Development finance can support large infrastructure. None of these levels can substitute for all the others.

The temptation is to call this “multi-stakeholder collaboration” and move on.

But collaboration is too soft a word for the problem.

Commons governance is about power, rules, obligations and repeated behaviour. The relevant question is not whether stakeholders were invited into the room. It is whether the system has institutions that make collective stewardship possible.

That distinction matters because participation can coexist with fragility. A community can be consulted repeatedly and still have no influence over budgets. Businesses can join a resilience coalition and continue making decisions that increase exposure. Government departments can attend workshops while protecting their individual mandates. A partnership can look inclusive while nobody has accepted responsibility for the shared outcome.

Research on urban commons makes a similar distinction. Studies of urban resilience argue that collective governance can build social capital, learning, joint ownership and adaptive capacity, but only when participation develops into more durable forms of co-management and collective action.

This is also where the commons lens needs caution.

Resilience is not automatically shared fairly.

People face very different risks and have very different capacities to act. A wealthy neighbourhood may protect itself by increasing costs or exposure elsewhere. A city can become more flood-resilient while informal settlements absorb displacement. A cooling strategy can protect commercial districts while outdoor workers remain exposed. Collective arrangements can also reproduce local inequalities; research on collective land tenure in Shenzhen, for example, shows that collective governance can generate both resilience benefits and unequal outcomes.

So “shared” cannot simply mean everyone is connected.

It has to include questions of power.

Who defines the risk? Who writes the rules? Who pays? Who benefits? Who carries residual risk? Who can challenge a decision? Who is visible to the system, and who is not?

These are not side questions to resilience. They determine what kind of resilience the system produces.

The commons framing also changes how we think about finance.

We often ask, “Who will fund resilience?” as though resilience were one investment waiting for a financier. But a commons problem usually contains many different financing needs. Public finance may fund drainage. Firms may fund workplace protection. Insurance may transfer residual risk. Philanthropy may support shared data, community institutions or the coordination that nobody else wants to finance. Concessional capital may help where benefits are public but costs are immediate.

The financing question therefore follows the governance question.

Before asking who pays, we need to understand what is being jointly maintained, what different actors are responsible for, and where the system will predictably underinvest because benefits spill across institutional boundaries.

This helps explain why some apparently minor things matter so much: shared heat thresholds, common data standards, trusted local organisations, cross-department protocols, project-preparation capability, standing coordination mechanisms. They are easy to dismiss as process. In practice, they may be the rules and infrastructure through which the commons is governed.

The deepest implication is that resilience may not be something governments deliver to passive beneficiaries.

Nor is it something markets can simply sell to individual consumers.

And it is not something communities should be expected to produce on their own because the state has withdrawn.

Shared resilience is produced through institutions that allow interdependent actors to maintain conditions they all rely on.

That is why the hardest climate question may not be, “What intervention works?”

It may be:

What institutions allow people who share a risk to govern the conditions of their resilience together?

If that is right, then resilience is not only an engineering problem, a finance problem or even an adaptation problem.

It is a commons problem.

Sources

Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Elinor Ostrom, Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems, Nobel Prize Lecture / American Economic Review, 2009–2010.

Elinor Ostrom, A Polycentric Approach for Coping with Climate Change, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 5095, 2009.

Arthur Feinberg, Amineh Ghorbani & Paulien Herder, Commoning toward urban resilience, Journal of Urban Affairs.

Elisabeth Schauppenlehner-Kloyber & Marianne Penker, Between Participation and Collective Action- From Occasional Liaisons towards Long-Term Co-Management for Urban Resilience, Sustainability, 2016.