In post-industrial rural economies, people, not natural resources, are the scarce resource.

Evidence

In ‘modern’ rural peripheral economies, commoning processes may consequently not necessarily be prompted by natural resource scarcity or resource dependence for sustaining rural livelihoods. Most people in Ängersjö earn their living from the nearby township (Sveg) and their main sources of income do not any longer accrue from the adjacent natural resources. People are mainly involved in their local commons as part of their spare time activities. In Ängersjö, as in many other peripheral rural economies across Europe, it is people who constitute the ‘scarce resource’ rather than natural resources per se. In a way one might say that the commoning processes in Ängersjö have solved problems associated with labour scarcity, while at the same time being the unifying adhesive that constitutes a community. — Emil Sandström and Ann-Kristin Ekman and Karl-Johan Lindholm, Commoning in the periphery – The role…, 89

Categorization

• XREF: Inverts Ostrom’s resource-scarcity framing of commons; connects to the reader’s broader questions about what binds a community when livelihoods detach from the land. — connects to: Most scarcity is socially defined rather than intrinsic to resources — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 387; Capital confers power over workers only when workers lack land alternatives — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 254
• corroborated: 5 independent passages support this claim — Emil Sandström and Ann-Kristin Ekman and Karl-Johan Lindholm, Commoning in the periphery – The role…, 89

Related

• Commons function as social resources binding communities together, not just property rights. (similarity 0.81)
• Contemporary common goods extend beyond natural resources into digitally and urbanly produced domains. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Most scarcity is socially defined rather than intrinsic to resources #expands (0.85) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 387
• Capital confers power over workers only when workers lack land alternatives #exemplifies (0.75) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 254