The Widening Ingenuity Gap

Since the Industrial Revolution, communities' ability to manage their use of the environment has lagged behind their growing impact on the environment, leaving the human-environment interface precariously coupled. Traditions and customs that regulate use of the environment are deteriorating as new economic incentives and technologies emerge.

Uses exceed carrying capacity, causing collapse of the primary resources along with myriad consequences that may not be apparent at the time. Eventually, slow-moving interventions are imposed to sustain what's left of the primary resource, but the next streams of change are already flowing. Still worrying about implementing this first set of protections, we are slow to mobilize a response to the latest changes, amplifying what Tad Homer-Dixon calls the "Ingenuity Gap."

How the Commons Gets Smarter

We can move a commons toward a "Smart Commons" by using what Ashoka founder Bill Drayton calls a mosaic. Like the multi-colored and carefully-aligned pieces of tile from Roman times that are only meaningful when viewed from afar, a mosaic collects and positions partial solutions being tested globally to reveal broader patterns.

The Smart Commons Mosaic hinges on the basic premise that all societies move along a similar trajectory of development: from stable, traditional societies to more complex and dynamic ones with greater economic output. Historically, environmental outcomes have deteriorated in lockstep with economic growth, until citizens demand environmental goods like clean air and water. Ingenuity and innovation then kick in and prosperity is delinked from a deteriorating environment. Figure 1 (below) offers a graphical representation of this standard trajectory of development and its environmental consequences.

The mosaic matches this historic trajectory of development with each of the world's seven major ecosystems – urban, agriculture, grazing, desert, mountain, forest, and navigable waters. A third variable, the array of policy options available (from basic contract law through to more sophisticated mechanisms including tradable emissions permits), then organizes responses that have worked at each human-environment interface. Figure 2 (below) captures how these three dimensions fit together. But this creative alignment only comes alive when we start to plot solutions on the mosaic.

With a critical mass of data in place, communities can use the mosaic to scour systematically for the best ways to confront existing challenges as well as a sense of what challenges may emerge. At a beginner's level, communities can find the human-environment interface that most closely parallels their challenges and unearth the range of solutions that work at this particular intersection of intensity of use and ecosystem.

But this isn't merely a navigation aid. Using the mosaic at more advanced levels, communities can focus on one stage of development and search across the seven ecosystems to develop a sense of the widest distribution of responses to a more narrow set of development challenges. Alternatively, communities can look to later stages of development to preview what the future may portend. Ultimately, after some initial success, the hope is that people will mine the data within the mosaic for wider patterns and opportunities.

By offering leverage over the voluminous record of past efforts, the mosaic encourages communities to think broadly and creatively about the best ways to move forward, thereby supporting all three processes of the Smart Commons. The mosaic's scope forces the type of dialogue that connects previously isolated community segments. Simultaneously, it offers insight into the right negotiating framework and enables systematic and efficient scouring for appropriate solutions.

Water, Water Everywhere, But Still No Water to Wash My Hair

The Smart Commons Mosaic can be applied to all aspects of the human-environment interface. But to generate solutions in a timely manner, we must focus on a single area that brings the Smart Commons and the mosaic's capabilities into full relief.

We have selected water: present nearly everywhere and essential to life, it's an easy choice. Ensuring there is an adequate water for a healthy drinking supply, other community needs, and a healthy environment is an emerging central challenge of sustainable development as human demands ratchet upward. Therefore, communities are already generating a large number of solutions. This idea flow will certainly accelerate as the water-focused Millennium Development Goals – halving the number of people without safe drinking water and sanitation by 2015 – push more resources and public attention into this issue area.

To flesh out the Smart Commons concept and to offer a sense of the mosaic's functionality, we've populated a mosaic with 12 innovative water management stories from around the world. (We've hidden the third dimension – the array of policy options – for now to make the narratives and the mosaic more accessible.) These "microcases" are distributed across a broad range of human-environment interfaces and are led by Ashoka's social entrepreneurs, other citizen sector organizations, governments, and businesses – sometimes working alone, but most often working in partnership. You can also view them by their location on a world map.

Each narrative moves closer to the Smart Commons vision of multiple human uses optimally paired with environmental resources at hand. Each narrative also captures at least one of the three key elements of the Smart Commons process: linking previously disconnected stakeholders, creating the right negotiating framework, and enabling communities to use this negotiating framework to find and launch appropriate solutions to fluid challenges.

Scanning the mosaic offers glimpses of the Smart Commons. At the intersection of deserts and light intensity, customs and religion are leveraged to support effective water harvesting schemes in Rajasthan, despite a policy vacuum. Community councils established through these efforts are now credible and effective enough to address upstream challenges like squatting in riparian zones.

Moving to an urban-heavy intensity interface, we see the City of New York saving billions of dollars earmarked for a new filtration plant by making side deals with upstream landowners and land management agencies to ensure safe drinking water. This negotiating framework has become sufficiently robust to guarantee the flow of money to the Catskills and, in return, the flow of clean water to New York City.

In the floodplains of Bangladesh – where agriculture meets medium intensity – an innovative financing scheme is building partnerships that cut across sectors to get water to citizens safely and efficiently. This integrating approach also sets the broad terms of the negotiating framework.

Working through the microcases on the mosaic will offer a more concrete sense of the Smart Commons and, perhaps, ignite thinking about the broader applicability of these solutions. Where else might an ecosystem services scheme like New York's work? How can other financing structures be tweaked to ensure effective dialogue across sectors?

As more vignettes are positioned on this mosaic, the partial solutions will aggregate to an even richer image of the Smart Commons.

Narrowing the Ingenuity Gap

This water mosaic is a first step. It's a great laboratory where the Smart Commons can be tested and refined.

But the challenge is broader and more complex. Water is just one crosscutting dimension of the human-environment interface. A deeper and more rigorous investigation of the intervention alternatives (the third, currently hidden axis) is needed. A process for the systematic collection of experiences from around the world must be established and widely practiced. There is, no doubt, much unfinished business.

Yet, as the gap between change and response widens, the Smart Commons stands as an alternative model that rides this change. Mediating dynamic human demands and a fluid environment is an ongoing balancing act, requiring communities to work in integrated fashion, under the right ground rules, and with a efficient way to find and implement the right solutions.