Our Common Commons: Policies for Sustaining Volunteer Energy

Abstract

Brudney and Meijs (2009) conceive of volunteer energy as a social resource that constitutes the basis for (organizationally based) volunteering. They show that volunteer energy can be compared to a human-made, renewable resource that can be grown and recycled - but likewise one that is subject to misuse and misappropriation that can imperil the vitality of the resource. They explain that to a certain extent, volunteer energy is a common pool resource with free access for all volunteer-involving organizations, especially given the trend that people are less committed to one organization. As a consequence, volunteer-involving organizations must be collectively interested in making more volunteer energy available, now and in the future. As with other resources, sustaining the volunteer resource is becoming an issue. Thus, the need arises to develop an approach to the collective challenge of governing the volunteer energy commons. To this challenge we apply the design principles of Elinor Ostrom (1990) for robust governance of the common pool resource.