Geographies of the pollinator commons

Abstract

The problem of insect pollinator declines and pollination scarcity is impacting food production and ecosystem integrity worldwide. The term “pollinator commons” has often been invoked in existing literature, but there is little actual evidence of collective action to manage pollinators, pollination services or foraging resources. This may be due to the availability of a technical fix to the problem of pollination scarcity in some places, or the purported lack of awareness and undervaluation of pollination services. Given the increasing extent of the problem, there may be some conditions under which collective governance of the pollinator commons could emerge. We predict that collective action to manage a pollinator commons is more likely to emerge among farmers: (a) whose farms are small, and livelihoods are dependent on high-value crops for which wild pollination services cannot be easily substituted; (b) whose neighbors are similarly dependent on pollinator-dependent crops; and (c) who are able to make reasonable cost-benefit determinations based on information about other farmers and pollinator status. Geographers are particularly well-positioned with the theoretical and methodological tools to engage with this important, yet under-explored system to understand the potential for collective action to manage pollinators as a common pool resource.

I Introduction

The problems of insect pollinator decline and pollination scarcity have been well recognized by scholars and policymakers around the world (IPBES 2017; Tylianakis 2013). Since pollinators are crucial for food production, a shortage of pollinators and pollination services impinge on farmer livelihoods, food security and ecosystem integrity (Garibaldi et al. 2009; Katumo et al. 2022; Klein et al. 2007). Spatio-temporal variations in insect pollinator declines notwithstanding (Ghazoul 2005), the problem has been attributed to local and global socio-environmental processes, climate and land use/cover change and agricultural intensification, particularly pesticide use (Kremen et al. 2007). This decline in pollination as a regulating ecosystem service has been proposed as a “tragedy of the commons,” addressing which requires some form of collective action and appropriate institutions (Lant, Ruhl and Kraft 2008). Various scholars have urged that we think about insect pollinators and pollination services as a common pool resource (Allen et al. 2012; Goldman, Thompson and Daily 2007; Niemiec, McCaffrey and Jones 2020), but very few have demonstrated the implications of that for management (Cheung 1973; Durant 2021; Faure, Mouysset and Gaba 2021; Lonsdorf, Koh and Ricketts 2020; Mouillard-Lample et al. 2022). Further, much of this scholarly work is focused on the collective management of managed hives and less on native or wild pollinators, a gap that is crucial considering the importance of the latter on long-term ecosystem health and agricultural production and that many smallholder farmers globally rely on wild pollinators exclusively (Garibaldi et al. 2013).

Geographers have long made crucial contributions to the study of common pool resources (CPRs), particularly because of the importance of geography to the commons and their governance (Giordano 2003; Miller 2021; Moss 2014; Turner 2017). Not only are key geographic concepts such as space, place, landscape and scale crucial for grappling with complex CPR problems, geographic modes of inquiry can also help to understand the nature of governance mechanisms for CPRs. A geographic perspective could thus also be a productive way to approach the question of pollinators as a CPR (henceforth, the “pollinator commons”). Pollinator communities are affected by landscape structure and composition at different scales (Betts, Hadley and Kormann 2019; Kremen et al. 2007; Steffan-Dewenter and Westphal 2008) but also by hyper-local practices by individual land users. Further, pollinators themselves are a highly mobile resource, and changing spatial relationships between resources and resource users impact the varying nature and complexity of the issue (Giordano 2003). Yet, there is surprisingly little existing work within the field of geography that grapples with the nature of the pollinator commons. In this paper, we probe the idea of a pollinator commons, and the complexities therein, in an attempt to set the stage for geographers writ large to engage with this important, yet under-explored system. We want to emphasize that we are concerned in this paper with insect pollinators in particular. There are significant pollination services provided to plants by other forms of life, such as birds and bats (Ratto et al. 2018), but the majority of pollination of commercial and subsistence crops comes from insects (primarily, although not exclusively, bees) (Klein et al. 2007; Matias et al. 2017).

In order to conceptualize the geography of the pollinator commons, we first need to clarify a few elements, namely: What is the resource in question and how are the characteristic CPR problems of excludability and subtractability manifested in its management? What is the evidence for pollinator and pollination resources being managed as commons by collective action institutions? Why have pollinators eluded collaborative governance? Finally, what conditions might enable the emergence of collective institutions for managing the pollinator commons? This paper proposes some tentative answers to these questions based on a cross-disciplinary review of existing literature on pollinators and commons scholarship.

Characteristics of a pollinator commons

The first key problem in conceptualizing the pollinator commons is to define the parameters of the resource itself—what are we talking about when we invoke the term “pollinator commons”? The nature of the problem varies, depending on how you conceptualize the key, common resource at hand. Different scholars have alternatively conceptualized the pollinators themselves (Cheung 1973; Durant 2021), the pollination services they provide (Allen et al. 2012; Goldman, Thompson and Daily 2007; Faure, Mouysset and Gaba 2021), and/or the foraging resources for pollinators (Cheung 1973; Durant 2021; Lonsdorf, Koh and Ricketts 2020; Mouillard-Lample et al. 2022) as common pool resources. Another key uncertainty we discovered in current scholarship on the subject is the lack of articulation of the inherent differences between wild and managed pollinators. In general, scholars who conceive of pollinators as a commons have been primarily focused on managed pollinators and have shown that collaborative governance that supports managed pollinators can result in benefits beyond individual farms (Cheung 1973; Durant 2021). Other scholars who are interested in wild pollinators have largely focused on their habitats and foraging resources (Goldman, Thompson and Daily 2007). There are also some scholars who have explicitly conceived of foraging resources as the commons for both wild and managed pollinators, the idea being that management of forage resources supports both (Durant 2021; Lonsdorf, Koh and Ricketts 2020), especially considering consistent declines in availability of these resources with changing land uses and agricultural practices (Durant 2019; vanEngelsdorp and Meixner 2010). The implications for the impetus for collective action, and the ultimate management, of the resource could be quite different depending on what the resource is.

If pollinators, pollination services and/or forage resources are a CPR, then we should see formal or informal institutions designed to address the problems of excludability and subtractability (or rivalry), as conceptualized by Ostrom (1990). A resource is deemed excludable if users can be prevented from using, harvesting or consuming it. A resource is deemed subtractable if one user's consumption necessarily diminishes another user's consumption of the resource. CPRs are those resources that are subtractable but not excludable, therefore CPR institutions are developed in order to coordinate these fundamental problems of resource use and access.

Durant (2021) argues that both pollinators and forage resources can be considered and acted upon as common pool resources in the sense that they exhibit these characteristic problems of excludability and subtractability. Yet, while pollinators are mobile, the floral resources that pollinators depend on for survival are sedentary. While foraging resources are tied to land, which may be subject to varied property rights claims, pollinators themselves are free to move across these boundaries and may thus be subject to implications of decision-making across multiple land holders and decision-makers (Kremen et al. 2007). If resource users’ perceptions and understandings of the resource system influence their optimal resource use rates (Giordano 2003), then the nature of collaborative governance structures for managing these different resources would need to be different to accommodate a sedentary versus a mobile resource. How do the problems of subtractability and excludability vary depending on how the resource is conceptualized? And how might these problems be coordinated if the resource in question is indeed managed as a CPR?

The mobility of pollinators makes it hard to exclude resource users. Pollinators travel within their foraging ranges, therefore honeybees housed in one farm can travel to adjacent farms and provide pollination services. Likewise, if a land manager decides individually to invest in improving on-farm habitat for wild and/or managed pollinators, thereby increasing their abundance or vigor, the benefits could be enjoyed by those on adjacent lands, via enhanced pollination services. Pollinators are also subtractable in that on-farm practices such as pesticide use on one farm can lead to pollinator loss whose effects will be felt on adjacent farms that are within their foraging ranges. Similarly, diseased honeybees may spread pathogens to hives on adjacent farms or even populations of non-honeybees (Andrews 2020; Tehel, Brown and Paxton 2016). If pollinators are the CPR, then we should see formal or informal arrangements between farmers regarding hive placement and hive density that address the problem of excludability of benefitting from pollination services provided by honeybees in managed hives. Or, perhaps in instances where reliance on managed hives is low, we should see coordination or agreements regarding fostering nesting and foraging habitat for native bees. With regards to subtractability, we should also see arrangements between farmers regarding pesticide use particularly if not all farms grow pollinator-dependent crops that require pollination services at the same time.

Forage resources are also potentially subtractable due to actions at multiple scales. Farmers can change land use/cover on their lands from pollinator friendly to non-pollinator friendly vegetation. Changes in landscape composition and configuration can deplete the availability of off-farm forage resources as well. It is also difficult, but not impossible, to exclude pollinators from available forage resources. If farm size is large enough for instance, farmers can reap private benefits from pollinator habitat enhancements on their lands. Smaller farmers will need to cooperate to invest in such enhancements for total costs to be outweighed by total benefits (Lonsdorf, Koh and Ricketts 2020). If forage resources are a CPR, then we should also see institutions designed to protect on-farm and non-farm pollinator habitats in order to address the problem of subtractability. We should also see coordination between farmers, particularly smallholders, to make or maintain habitat enhancements for pollinators in order to address the free-rider problem.

Evidence for the pollinator commons

To find evidence for the pollinator commons, we searched and reviewed papers from across multiple disciplines and ultimately find that, despite the frequent casual references to the idea of the pollinator commons, evidence for managing pollinators, pollination services, and/or pollinator foraging resources as common pool resources is scant. An excellent example of this comes from the recent IPBES special report on pollinator health (IPBES 2017). Citing empirical evidence from indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) systems, IPBES (2017, 319) concludes “Land tenure systems based on ILK are often complex, with overlapping rights enabling access to resources with sets of checks that contribute to ensuring that pollinators’ resources and pollination resources are not over-exploited.”

We argue that the existence of a pollinator commons here, and in much of the literature we reviewed, is assumed rather than demonstrated. This scarcity of evidence could be an artifact of researchers’ epistemological and methodological failures at documenting practices of commoning rather than an actual absence of collaborative institutions for managing the pollinator commons. Nonetheless, we did find a few papers that provide limited evidence of both wild and managed pollinators being managed as common pool resources through informal and formal rules and institutions.

In many of these cases, pollinator habitats, including forage resources, nesting sites, and other factors such as pesticide use that impinge on pollinator survival, are the focus of collective action practices. While we found varying levels of evidence that wild and domestic honeybees and wild pollinating insects more broadly are all being managed via collective action in some way for the provision of honey, and/or for pollination services (to both wild and domesticated plants), we did not find evidence for collective action for all possible combinations of these options. From our review, we conclude that while there is compelling evidence for domestic honeybees being managed collectively for the provision of pollination services, there is very limited evidence for wild honeybees or other pollinating insects being managed as a CPR for those services. In fact, while there is compelling evidence for wild honeybees being managed collectively for the provision of honey, there is no evidence for these insects being managed for pollination services.

In what follows, we summarize our review of this literature in three categories: wild honeybees, domestic honeybees, and other wild insect pollinators. We acknowledge that the use of the term “wild” could be contentious since even domestic honeybees are, as Andrews (2019: 891) eloquently describes, “part wild animal subject to environmental change, part industrial organism, embedded in circuits of migratory pollination,” and therefore the distinction between wild and domestic seems arbitrary (see also Cilia 2020). Yet, the distinction is an important one especially considering the long history of beekeeping as an industry, where significant investment and care has gone into domesticating them so that they can provide the services that we rely upon them for (Andrews 2020). Further, in most cases, the papers we review in this section rely on this terminology. Nonetheless, throughout this paper we use the terms domestic and managed interchangeably.

Wild honeybees

Wild honeybees are collectively managed by Indigenous communities around the world (IPBES 2017; Lyver, Perez and Carneiro da Cunha 2014) where local knowledge systems and practices have cultural taboos, rules governing the assignment of access rights, and collective landscape management practices that protect foraging resources and nesting habitats. In forest communities in Indonesia where honey from wild Asian giant bees (Apis dorsata) is harvested, access to hive bearing trees is governed by local rules (Lyver, Perez and Carneiro da Cunha, 14). The Berawan of Malaysia also have taboos restricting the felling of the Tanying tree, the preferred nesting site for Apis dorsata (Franco, Ghani and Hidayati 2014). Among the Ogiek peoples of Kenya, cultural taboos prevent the cutting of trees that provide crucial foraging resources for honeybees (Lyver, Perez and Carneiro da Cunha 2014).

Much of this literature is focused on collaborative governance mechanisms that have existed or are emerging around protection of wild honeybees, specifically for the production of or access to honey. In these cases however, the resource being managed is an insect that is valued for its honey-producing abilities rather than its pollination services per se, even though undoubtedly honeybees do provide valuable pollination services as well. In fact, much of this literature makes merely casual reference to the pollination services provided by these insects, focusing their discussion almost exclusively on how they are managed for their highly valued honey production services.

Domestic honeybees

While the examples above pertain to management for wild honeybees, there is also evidence for collaborative governance involving managed hives of domesticated honeybees among farmers, between farmers and beekeepers, and among beekeepers. The earliest evidence we reviewed comes from Cheung (1973), who has shown how farmers in the state of Washington followed social custom in their decision to keep or rent hives at a particular density on their farms in order to avoid the free-rider problem. Each farmer reciprocated by maintaining a similar hive density on their farm as their neighbors.

When farmers rely on professional beekeeping services, they enter into formal contractual relationships with beekeepers who bring bees to their farm. But this formal contract between two individual parties, over privately held resources, fundamentally changes the nature of the resource from one of the commons to one of private property. The need for collaborative governance can still arise over the use of pesticides on the farm. Cheung (1973) documented that farmers agree to keep beekeepers informed before spraying pesticides and this system typically works when an area is dominated by crops that bloom at roughly the same time. But in areas where farmers grow different crops over a large geographic area and pollination services are not required at the same time, cooperation between farms is needed to avoid loss of pollinators due to pesticide use on adjacent farms. Cheung (1973) found such an arrangement between farmers and beekeepers in one context (cranberries) but not another (red clover). The reason for the differences in the emergence of cooperation between the two was largely due to the spatiality of the two crops. While cranberry farms are clustered, red clover is grown in areas where neighboring farms grow crops that do not require pollination services. The cost of reaching an agreement between beekeepers and farmers outweighs the benefits in the case of cranberries but not in the case of red clover.

While beekeepers are keenly aware of the environmental conditions necessary for their hives to thrive, and of the necessity of cooperation among neighboring beekeepers to keep their hives healthy (Andrews 2020; Maderson 2023), there is little evidence of collective action among them. Cheung (1973) also provides some evidence of collaborative governance of non-farm forage resources among domestic beekeepers in Washington state, where keepers contract with landowners for the access to private forests where they place their hives. Beekeepers are in competition with each other over fireweed nectar on these forested lands. While no beekeeper is granted exclusive foraging rights and neither do they seek to exclude other beekeepers, they “seek a mutual division of the total area to avoid chaotic hive placement” (Cheung 1973, 32). Similarly, honey production in forest trees in Ethiopia is governed through customary kobo rights to either forest plots or specific trees for hanging beehives (Wiersum and Endalamaw 2013). Such customary kobo arrangements in Ethiopia not only restrict access and tree use but also extend to measures for controlling bushfires and for forest conservation and regeneration. And in Tanzania, community managed bee reserves protect forest resources crucial for beekeeping activities (Hausser and Mpuya 2004).

Since Cheung's (1973) work, pollination markets around the world have proliferated (Rucker, Thurman and Burgett 2012). Governments at many levels have since regulated the use of pesticides in an effort to protect pollinators through outright bans on certain kinds of pesticides such as neonicotinoids and requirements for farmers to inform beekeepers before applying pesticides (European Commission 2021; Pollinator Health Task Force 2015). Such efforts have been described by Durant (2021, 2) not as a true commons but as a “pseudocommons,” because they are often implemented “through top-down mechanisms (rather than emerging from a collaboration between beekeepers and farmers).” Moreover, efforts such as Honey Bee Best Management Practices have been criticized on the grounds that they provide a technical “fix” to the problem of pollination scarcity in agricultural production through a focus on managed hives, rather than helping stabilize or encourage wild pollinator communities (Durant 2021; Ellis et al. 2020).

Wild pollinators (including honeybees)

There is limited evidence for collective management of wild pollinators. Farmers in Rosalgen, Sweden restrict cutting trees that flower in early Spring when foraging resources for bumblebees are scarce, recognizing the pollination services provided by bumblebees (Tengö and Belfrage 2004). There are also some examples of collective management of entire landscapes. In a heavily fragmented agricultural landscape in Madagascar, local taboos protect forest habitat patches that are essential for the provision of crucial pollination services (Bodin et al. 2006). Native American tribes in the western United States used fire as a forest management tool potentially benefiting pollinator communities by increasing the abundance of preferred herbaceous flowering species (Charnley and Hummel 2011). There is also some evidence for floral resources themselves as the commons coming from individual and collective action for managing pollinator habitats in urban and suburban areas (Hall et al. 2017; Knezevic and Marshman 2021). But in these urban and suburban contexts, habitat provision for pollinators has been described as a continuous public good collective action problem in the sense that the effect of one “individual's contribution to the public good is not influenced by how many others also contribute” (Niemiec, McCaffrey and Jones 2020). This is in stark contrast to farm settings where an individual contribution to the public good, such as through curbing pesticide use or adjusting hive density, is contingent on the degree to which others are contributing (Cheung 1973). Rural farmers must grapple with the problem of subtractability in much more material ways than urban and suburban residents who are not dependent for their livelihoods on crops that require pollinators or pesticides.

Overall, there is significantly less evidence of collective action for management of communities of wild pollinator insects for pollination services (with exception of Tengö and Belfrage 2004). And, in the case described by Tengö and Belfrage (2004), the focus is on protecting a single pollinator species and certain types of foraging resources they rely on rather than entire communities of wild pollinators and their habitats. Even in cases where habitat patches and landscapes are managed for supporting pollinator communities more generally (Bodin et al. 2006; Charnley and Hummel 2011), the evidence that these collective practices are designed for enhancing pollination services is scant. For instance, Bodin et al. (2006, 440) note that the taboo system that protects forest patches contributes to the provision of pollination services “indirectly and unintentionally.”

From this review, we conclude that there is significantly more evidence for honeybees (wild or domestic) being managed as CPR than for wild insect pollinators more generally, and more evidence of management for the provision of honey, than for the provision of pollination services, even indirectly via practices targeting floral resources. The following section explores the reasons for a general dearth of literature on collaborative governance of wild pollinators.

Why we haven’t seen the emergence of a pollinator commons

As demonstrated above, while the idea of pollinators as a commons is often invoked, we did not find overwhelming evidence of the collaborative governance that we would expect for a CPR; much of what we found was equivocal or missing. While this silence could be attributed to an “analytical absence” (Blomley 2008, 322) and not an actual one, it is at least theoretically possible that an epistemological condition reflects an ontological one. It may be the case that pollinators are not recognized and/or valued, and therefore not managed as such. Or, the inherent nature of pollinators has in some way hindered the emergence of collective governance of this resource. If this is the case, then at least two related questions need to be answered. First, to what extent do farmers “know” and/or value pollinators and pollination services? Second, what are some potential reasons why farmers may not “know” and/or value pollinators and pollination services? And to what extent does this knowledge deficit and/or undervaluation of pollinators and pollination services relate to the lack of emergence of collaborative governance institutions?

People's knowledge and valuation of pollinators and pollinator services have been explored in literature on ILK systems as well as more industrialized production systems, and neither provides a clear sense of the extent to which these systems writ large value pollinators and pollination services. On one hand, studies that highlight the importance of ILK systems about pollinators and pollination around the world have noted that in such systems, “pollination processes are often understood, celebrated and managed holistically in terms of maintaining values through fostering fertility, fecundity, spirituality and diversity of farms, gardens, and other habitats” (IPBES 2017, 278; see also Hill et al. 2019; Lyver, Perez and Carneiro da Cunha 2014; Malmer et al. 2019; Tengö et al. 2017). By contrast, a number of studies have attempted to document farmers’ knowledge of pollinators and pollination in a range of different contexts, with mixed results. While some of these studies have found that farmers were generally unaware of the importance of pollinators for crop productivity (Ali et al. 2020; Dorji et al. 2022; Kasina et al. 2009; Mpondo, Ndakidemi and Treydte 2021; Sawe, Nielsen and Eldegard 2020; Smith et al. 2017; Umeh et al. 2022), others found that farmers are well aware of the benefits of pollinators (Cerdán et al. 2012; Hanes et al. 2015; Hevia et al. 2021; Osterman et al. 2021; Park et al. 2020; Tarakini, Chemura and Musundire 2020).

Going beyond awareness, there is evidence that even when farmers were aware of native pollinators’ importance in general (e.g., for ecosystem health, biodiversity, etc.), they were uncertain about the degree to which wild pollinators actually contribute to crop pollination (Hanes et al. 2015; Park et al. 2020). Farmers are less likely to be able to identify non-honey bee pollinators (Smith et al. 2017; Tarakini, Chemura and Musundire 2020), they underestimate bee diversity (Park et al. 2020), and are also sometimes unable to differentiate between beneficial and harmful insects (Dorji et al. 2022; Smith et al. 2017). Thus, the lack of collective action for the management of wild pollinators may stem from the fact that farmers in some regions are not able to sufficiently identify them nor their relative contribution to crop success.

Another potential explanation for the lack of the emergence of collaborative governance could be simply that farmers undervalue pollinators and pollination services. Roberts and Emel's (1992) investigation of the problem of groundwater depletion rooted it in the dynamics of production; they found that the threat that forestalled water conservation efforts was not a free rider problem but that for farmers, the resource (water) itself would lose its value for irrigation in the future. They assert that the problem of groundwater depletion is not a problem of the commons rooted in property rights externalities or a lack awareness among farmers but a “normal, predictable consequence” of “natural resource appraisals that arise from capitalist processes of uneven development” (Roberts and Emel 1992, 263, 268).

We might be encountering a similar dynamic in the case of pollinators. Farmers are subject to a host of constraints, including chaotic market fluctuations that determine the prices of farm inputs and outputs, and global climate change that continually adds uncertainty to production. For farmers of pollinator-dependent crops, climate change impacts the diversity and abundance of pollinators and plant-pollinator interactions (e.g., phenological asynchrony) further increasing uncertainty. Yet, even for those farmers, pollinators are just one input into the production process among many. And that input can be substituted, however unreliably, with managed hives (Durant 2021; Nimmo 2022; Rucker, Thurman and Burgett 2012). Even if farmers might express the need to protect wild pollinators, understandably their priority is a healthy and viable crop and thus they may be perversely incentivized to, i.e., spray to protect fruit, at the expense of future fruit set. Further, for farmers, the cost-benefit considerations underpinning reciprocal cooperation may be particularly difficult in the case of pollinators, as they themselves are not the actual resource to be harvested, per se, and there is no clear use-depletion link as with other resources that are managed as a commons. Beekeepers might be similarly structurally constrained, choosing technoscientific solutions such as better hive management practices, that continue to provide the short-term technical fix to a larger, ecological problem (Cilia 2019, 2020). This is not to suggest, however, that farmers are only driven by economic motivations in their farming practices, as indeed much literature has shown the importance of extra-economic motivations that underpin farming and beekeeping practices (Burton et al. 2021; Velardi et al. 2021). Instead, we are merely trying to point to the structural constraints that may limit farmers’ valuation of pollinators and pollination services, and the purchase of technoscientific solutions to the problems of pollination scarcity.

A shared understanding of the resource system is considered a precondition for collective action (Ostrom et al. 1999; Adams et al. 2003). As a way to address the problem of pollinator decline, scholars often conclude that lack of awareness of the value of pollinators is a crucial problem that can be addressed through education and outreach activities aimed at behavior change (Ali et al. 2020; Dorji et al. 2022; Hevia et al. 2021; IPBES 2017; Kasina et al. 2009; Sawe, Nielsen and Eldegard 2020; Tarakini, Chemura and Musundire 2020; Umeh et al. 2022). We argue that while farmers’ knowledge of the importance of pollinators and their pollination services might be necessary in some cases, it is not a sufficient condition for the emergence of a pollinator commons. Regardless of whether or not they know of and value pollinators and pollination services, farmers might not be able to afford to worry about them. In that case, awareness generation is unlikely to achieve the results that the literature purports it can.

Further, while the presence of awareness is no doubt a good thing, a lack of awareness does not necessarily negate collective action. Agrawal (2005) suggests that attitudes and beliefs do not necessarily have to fundamentally change, in order for actions to occur. Rather, resource users may be convinced to act environmentally in order to secure their own interests in the short term, but over the longer term they may begin to align with beliefs or identities that justify their actions. Through the process of interacting with their networks and communities, as well as simply interacting with and observing the resource itself, knowledge and attitudes can change (Agrawal 2005; Luthra et al. 2023; Riley 2016; Wynne-Jones 2017). Thus, it is possible that even in cases where there is low awareness of pollinator declines, and/or a low sense of urgency about mitigating those losses, the desire to act can build over time in response to changing conditions.

Another potentially important reason that we have not witnessed the emergence of pollinator commons might have to do with the history of the problem of pollination scarcity. Common pool resource management institutions develop and evolve over long periods of time (Ostrom 1990). The problem of pollination scarcity however is a relatively recent one. For instance, a “pollinator crisis” was recognized by the scientific community only in 1996 (Althaus et al. 2021), and the severity of the decline likely varies depending on the location and landscape context (Ghazoul 2005). If the problem of pollination scarcity is a relatively recent one, then it is certainly plausible that collaborative governance has not had the time to develop. It may behoove us then, to examine what the existing CPR theory predicts about how and why collective institutions for managing a pollinator commons might emerge in light of pollinator declines. But before we do so, we need to clearly define the resource in question.

Enabling conditions for the emergence of institutions to govern a pollinator commons

Part of the challenge in defining the resource in question stems from the fact that within existing literature, the three resources often invoked in discussions of the pollinator commons (pollinators, pollination services, and the foraging resources that pollinators depend on) are intertwined and often conflated, at least rhetorically. If pollination services are privileged as the CPR to be managed, in communities with a high dependence on managed hives, collective action arrangements might focus on hive placement and density, maintaining their health (disease control and restrictions on pesticide use) and providing adequate forage. These actions may, intentionally or unintentionally, enhance habitat for wild pollinators, or increase competition between wild and managed bees (Iwasaki and Hogendoorn 2022). At the same time however, in heterogeneous agricultural landscapes with a mix of large and small farms with crops with varying levels of pollinator dependence, conflicts between farmers and between farmers and beekeepers could arise. In the cases described by Cheung (1973) and Durant (2021) where honeybees are collaboratively governed for their pollination services, the bee itself is the (private) resource that is being sold (rented). Most beekeepers do not make the bulk of their income from honey production, but rather from providing the bees and their pollination services. In this case, then, the pollinator is not a common resource, in the truest sense, but rather a private good; albeit one that is mobile and can only be partially controlled to minimize free-riding through strategic hive placement. This solution, at least theoretically and in certain instances, can be a private one that may not necessitate collective action. Large farmers in need of pollination services can either rent or own managed hives and place them strategically such that they primarily deliver services on their own farms. However, for pollination services to be realized in heterogeneous agricultural landscapes, wild and managed pollinators will both need to be collectively governed.

Floral resources appear to be a compelling CPR as their provision enables both wild and managed pollinators to survive, especially in light of the declining availability of adequate foraging resources and increasing conflicts between beekeepers and land managers (Durant 2019; vanEngelsdorp and Meixner 2010). Indeed, habitat enhancements are frequently recommended as a solution to the problem of lack of year-round forage availability for pollinators (Heller et al. 2019, Potts et al. 2003, Timberlake, Vaughan and Memmott 2019). Yet, here again, large farms can make and reap the benefits of such enhancements without cooperative engagement with surrounding farms (Lonsdorf, Koh and Ricketts 2020). Any collective action to manage floral resources is ultimately aimed at managing the pollinators and collaborative governance around the management of these resources alone ignores other crucial constraints faced by pollinator communities, such as pesticide use. The positive effects of increasing the availability of forage resources will not counter the negative effects of pesticide use on pollinator health. Conceiving of insect pollinators as the resource to be managed allows us to think more broadly about pollinator insects’ needs in terms of nesting sites, foraging resources, and the toxic effects of pesticide use.

Ultimately, the selection of the resource to be managed as a CPR will depend on a community's needs and priorities. Here, we have tried to lay out some of the consequences of and tradeoffs between those choices. While it appears, thus far, that there is little evidence for situations in which groups are managing and negotiating around pollinators via collective action institutions, this may pose a unique opportunity, rather than a dead end. Given the wealth of scholarship around the functioning and mechanisms for management of other CPRs, and the mounting pressures on existing pollinator populations, there is perhaps a great opportunity for new collective action initiatives to emerge. However, despite the significant literature on the characteristics of and changes in natural resource governance institutions, there is little scholarship on the processes by which new institutions form or emerge around novel commons (Cumming et al. 2020). Rather, most work has described the conditions underlying existing institutional arrangements for established commons. Agrawal (2001) synthesized the enabling conditions for collective action on CPR into a list of some thirty conditions, acknowledging that it is unlikely that all of these would apply to every resource use case.

There is an implicit assumption within the field that successful community-based, bottom-up governance of the commons requires the integration of some minimum number of these conditions (Cox et al. 2016). The exact number and combination of those principles that are sufficient for success is difficult if not impossible to test empirically (Cox et al. 2016; Gutiérrez, Hilborn and Defeo 2011). Here, we outline a set of conditions that may be necessary (although not necessarily sufficient) to spark the emergence of collective action institutions for a pollinator commons. We are not in a position to identify these enabling conditions with certainty, not least because of the dearth of research on pollinator commons within this framework. Neither can we prescribe particular institutional arrangements or the characteristics of institutions that might be best suited to manage a pollinator commons most sustainably. That is beyond the scope of this article and the theory of pollinator commons is too immature for us to try to do so. Rather, here we put forth our predictions for the kinds of situations where collective action around pollinators would be more likely to emerge.

Here, we are interested particularly in the conditions that would allow for the emergence of collective action institutions to manage wild pollinators among farmers whose livelihoods are dependent on pollinator-dependent crops. While some existing research has focused on the importance and current collective practices of wild pollinator conservation in cities (Hall et al. 2017; Knezevic and Marshman 2021), the subjects of collective action of interest to this paper are those whose livelihoods are inextricably connected with wild pollinator health– farmers who grow pollinator-dependent crops. As laudable and necessary as urban pollinator conservation is, pollination scarcity is not a material concern that immediately impacts the livelihoods of those who engage in these efforts.

The past three decades have seen the burgeoning of a vibrant literature on farming as well as CPRs governance, that contests the assumption of economic rationality, instead urging scholars to pay attention to subjectivities, the symbolic importance of behaviors, and structural factors that constrain motivations (Agrawal 2005; Burton 2004; Burton et al. 2021; Wynne-Jones 2017). In what follows, we attempt to account for economic and socio-cultural drivers of motivations and behaviors that might allow for the emergence of collective action institutions designed to govern a novel commons.

We predict that collective action to manage wild pollinator commons would be more likely to emerge among farmers: (a) whose farms are small, and whose livelihoods are highly dependent on high-value pollinator-dependent crops for which wild pollination services cannot be easily substituted; (b) whose neighbors are similarly dependent on pollinator-dependent crops; and (c) who are able to make reasonable cost-benefit determinations based on information about other farmers and pollinator status.

Livelihood dependence, wild pollination substitutability, and farm size

The degree of dependence on a resource influences resource users’ motivations to act collectively (Wade 1988). We predict that collective action for the pollinator commons is more likely to emerge in cases where the users have a high dependence on pollinator-dependent crops for their livelihoods, production is declining due to pollinator scarcity, and there is limited or no substitutability for wild pollinators, such as for crops (e.g., tomatoes, blueberries, cranberries, passionfruit and cucurbits) where wild bees are more effective pollinators than managed bees (Chrobak 2023; Khalifa et al. 2021), and in areas where managed bees have become increasingly scarce and can no longer be relied upon for delivering pollination services (Kremen, Williams and Thorp 2002). All three conditions are present in landscapes containing smallholder farms which are often highly dependent on wild pollinators (Garibaldi et al. 2016). Further, supplanting visitation by wild pollinators for managed hives of honeybees can be prohibitively expensive and risky in terms of their susceptibility to diseases and low adaptive capacity for diverse ecological contexts (Mashilingi et al. 2022). For smallholders, these costs and risks can be particularly high (Ellis et al. 2020).

Given the economic constraints discussed in the previous section, there is likely not a simple linear relationship between willingness to engage in collective action and degree of pollinator-dependence. Rather, we might expect low willingness to participate in collective action at levels of low and high dependence and the highest incentives at the middle ranges. As an example, collective action might emerge in cases where farmers are secure enough to weather short-term losses that they may incur, either because of the size of their operation or crop diversification. This factor may preclude the smallest and most precarious producers from being able to take that gamble. It may also limit risk-taking by single crop farms; as Park et al. (2020) note, willingness to risk inadequate pollination decreases as a highly pollinator-dependent crop becomes a greater source of one's income. Regardless, the relationship between farm characteristics, farmers’ degree of livelihood dependence on pollinator-dependent crops, and their willingness to take risks and engage in collective action, is an open question that remains to be empirically investigated.

Spillovers, farm configuration, and spatial scale

In a highly general sense, resource users are confronted with the problem of reducing or eliminating externalities (or spillovers) (Agrawal 2005; Ostrom 1990). The nature of the spillovers, however, varies by the characteristics of the resource and resource users. We predict that the likelihood of collective action for pollinators will vary depending on the nature of the land use in a given region, and on the size of individual operations. Agriculture-dominated landscapes of small scale farms would be more likely to see the emergence of collective action than regions with large-scale operations due to the likelihood of spillover effects from practices on adjacent farms (Lonsdorf, Koh and Ricketts 2020). For instance, pesticide use on one farm could negatively impact production on another, but improvement in nesting habitat or provision of additional floral resources could have positive spillover impacts on a neighbor's production. In these contexts, land managers may be incentivized to act as a group in order to minimize negative and maximize positive spillover effects. Further, the specific spatial configuration of farms in an agricultural landscape also matters crucially. Clustered farms growing similar crops are much more likely to engage in collective action than farms that are spatially spread out and/or do not grow crops with temporally similar pollination needs (Cheung 1973).

Thus we might expect collective action to manage the pollinator commons to emerge in heterogeneous agricultural landscapes of smaller-scale users, growing a diversity of pollinator-dependent crops with different flowering phenologies, such that actions on one farm have a high likelihood of influencing the ability of adjacent and nearby farms to access the resource. Farms that grow a single pollinator dependent crop are more likely to rely on managed hives and only worry about pollinator health during the flowering time of that crop. Farms that grow a range of pollinator dependent crops, on the other hand, are likely to worry about year-round pollinator health. Spraying pesticides on one farm could help ensure higher fruit production of the current crop (especially if the crop is not highly pollinator-dependent), by reducing the abundance of harmful insects that could damage young fruit, but impact the ability of adjacent farmers to realize a crop that blooms later if it kills the potential pollinators. The costs of not spraying (in terms of potential lost income) are only outweighed by benefits at the landscape scale, just as the cost of pollinator habitat enhancements are only outweighed by overall benefits at the landscape scale. Theoretical modeling has found that landscape scale management approaches for pollinators are most appropriate when the private net benefit is negative, but the total net benefit (at landscape scale) is positive (Lonsdorf, Koh and Ricketts 2020). However, the scale at which collective action for managing pollinators might emerge is likely to vary across socio-ecological contexts, and remains to be studied empirically.

Socio-spatial boundaries, and information availability and sharing

The issues of subtractability and excludability are often mitigated via clearly defined boundaries around the resource and the users, both spatially and socially (Ostrom 1990). Past work has demonstrated that collective action to manage a resource is more likely in cases where physical boundaries of the common resource and social boundaries of the resource users involved in governance institutions are clearly articulated (Cox et al. 2016). But delineating the physical resource boundary is particularly difficult in the case of mobile resources (Brewer 2012; Giordano 2003; Miller et al. 2020). And this mobility of the resource also complicates the problem of delineating the social boundary.

CPR theory suggests that institutions emerge to coordinate the use of common resources in situations where the incentives for individual use are not aligned with those of the group but where individuals will continue to cooperate as long as benefits outweigh the costs (Cox et al. 2016; Ostrom 2005). But in order to assess costs and benefits, users need to have access to information on other users who have access to and use the common resource, spatio-temporal variations in resource availability, market conditions, access, monitoring and enforcement rules, and the history of conflicts over resource use and their resolution (Ostrom 2005). Some of these information needs are directly related to the delineation of the resource's social boundary, as knowledge of who is “in” the group would impact this accounting.

In the case of wild pollinators, a mobile resource, many of these elements are difficult to determine, thus making an individual resource user's ability to make cost-benefit determinations difficult, if not impossible. It is difficult for any individual to monitor “use” of mobile pollinators, or to police the actions of others (inside or outside the group) that may be detrimental to pollinator health, as the insects may be impacted by actions at multiple scales. The probability that an individual farmer's crop receives sufficient pollination could be influenced by on-farm practices, those of neighboring farms, and also potentially those farther afield. There is also an aspect of temporal scale to be considered when assessing cost; both short-term and longer-term costs and benefits must be weighed, which contributes to uncertainty. In the short-term, there are immediate costs to implementing an intervention (such as planting additional, non-crop floral resources), but no immediate benefits. Over the long term, the potential cost of lost yield if nothing is done, and spraying pesticides continues, may or may not balance out the potential increased yield, over time, if rules are put in place against spraying. Further, while the costs of participating in collective action remain at the individual level, the benefits can spill over to those on adjacent lands, who may not be participants in the group.

Strong social networks facilitate communication, which could entail both sharing information on pollinator status as well as best practices. Social networks also promote coordination of activities and actions, give individual farmers confidence in participation, and facilitate the employment of sanctions, due to lowered transaction costs. Individuals and families that have shared history and social networks and groups of people who know each other are more likely to engage in reciprocal cooperation to manage a resource (Ostrom et al. 1999). Even where social cohesion might be high, it does not necessarily imply that those communal relations could be leveraged for the collective governance of any and all resources (Riley 2016; Wynne-Jones et al. 2020). Any successful collective action institution around pollinators would need to grapple with how to define both the resource and its social boundaries, and the specific contexts in which “fit” might be achievable. Thus, emergence of collective action institutions for pollinator commons may also be more likely in situations where social networks are strong.

In addition to information about group resource use, users must also be able to access information on pollinator status and change over time in order to perform even informal cost-benefit assessments of interventions, and be motivated to act. Many insect pollinators are solitary, particularly in the case of bees, and cryptic, which makes detection and assessment difficult for non-experts. So, even in highly networked communities, it may be difficult to develop effective, reliable monitoring of the resource status. This suggests a potential role for external institutions, such as non-profits or extension offices, to monitor and supply information. Rather than thinking of these institutions as top-down enforcers, which could in fact impede the impetus toward collective action (Gibson, Williams and Ostrom 2005), or undermine existing informal institutions (Brewer 2012), there may be a role for external institutions on the periphery as information sources. Further, the flows of information should not be imagined only as one-way or top-down where farmers are passive recipients of scientific conservation knowledge; horizontal exchanges between farmers are in fact what may allow them to engage in conservation practices (Riley 2016). This could perhaps be tested empirically by tracking the evolution of collective action across different communities with differing degrees of institutional interventions.

What geography can offer

Twenty years ago, Giordano (2003) laid out the compelling case for the contributions that geographers could make to the study of the commons, emphasizing the utility of an explicitly geographic approach to address the spatial relationships between the natural resource and the resource users. Indeed, geographers have long made crucial contributions to studies of various kinds of commons (Miller 2021; Moss 2014; Turner 2017). For the pollinator commons, questions of scale, spatial variation and spatial context–concepts central to geographic inquiry–emerge as particularly important. In this manuscript we have attempted to lay out the current state of knowledge about pollinators as a CPR. In this section, we present some opportunities for paths forward for geographic theorizations and empirical investigations of a pollinator commons.

We started by assessing the suitability of pollinators and their pollination services as an environmental commons and determined that this resource does display the characteristics of a CPR due to the inherent challenges of subtractability and excludability, which manifest rather differently depending on what the resource being managed is. We then explored the history of evidence and arguments for the pollinator commons. We find that the literature is sparse and rather dated, and perhaps more pertinently, lacks clarity on the nature of the resource in question, and argue that while the selection of a resource to be managed as a commons ultimately depends on a community's needs and priorities, consequences of, and tradeoffs between choices need to be carefully considered. Collective management of managed hives alone may not be an appropriate solution in heterogeneous agricultural landscapes with crops with a range of dependence on wild and managed pollinators. Additionally, commoning floral resources exclusively does not obviate the need for additional action around other on-farm practices such as pesticide use that are detrimental to pollinators. Yet, as geographers have long pointed out, “resources can be defined only with respect to a particular technical, cultural, and historical stage of development, and that they are, in effect, technical and cultural appraisals of nature” (Harvey 1974, 272). The challenge for geographers interested in theorizing a pollinator commons is to account for the changing spatio-temporal contexts within which pollinators emerge as a resource.

We then reviewed the scant existing literature on the pollinator commons and proposed the possibility that a dearth of literature does not necessarily imply that pollinators have not been or are not being managed as a commons. Rather, this epistemological deficit might be because scholars have not asked the right kinds of questions in the right kinds of ways. Here, geographers grappling with questions of indigeneity and decolonization (see for instance, Radcliffe 2017) and rural geographers paying attention to plurality of farming knowledge systems (see for instance, Burton et al. 2021; Maderson and Wynne-Jones 2016; Riley 2011), might provide insight not only into the reasons for an apparent lacuna, but also paths forward that account for epistemological pluralism related to knowledge about pollinators (Cilia 2019, 2020; Maderson 2023). Another reason we proposed for the lack of literature on the pollinator commons has to do with the nature of pollinators themselves, which makes them particularly difficult to “manage” as manifested in their mobility (Kremen et al. 2007) and their general invisibility (Hall and Martins 2020). Posthumanist scholarship in geography might offer ways to theorize human-bee entanglements for those interested in examining the pollinator commons (Gunderman and White 2021; Marshman 2019).

Further, this lack of inquiry into the idea or reality of the pollinator commons may be because they are not, in fact, being widely managed as such to date. Since collaborative institutions take time to evolve, and the problem of pollination scarcity is a relatively recent one, it is likely that institutions to govern the pollinator commons have not yet had sufficient time to develop. However, the current precarity of pollinator populations suggests a need for the emergence of novel institutions. In general, there is a “demand for an improved theoretical understanding of the processes by which institutions emerge, change, and influence environmental outcomes” (Cumming et al. 2020, 28), particularly for novel commons such as pollinators discussed in this paper. This presents opportunities for future geographic work that is engaged with the development and functioning of collective action around pollinators. Rather than just hindsight explorations of the dynamics of current (or historical) resource management institutions, future work could develop insights for understanding how and why new institutions form to govern novel pollinator commons.

Finally, if insect declines are emblematic of the urgency of the Anthropocene (Wagner 2020), then geography as a discipline is particularly well placed to examine the entanglement of social and biophysical systems and processes that impact pollinator communities, food production, and ecosystem health more broadly (Biermann, Kelley and Lave 2021; Luthra et al. 2023). Changes by humans to the physical landscape directly impact the viability of both wild and domestic insect pollinators (Kremen et al. 2007). And fluctuations in the abundance and diversity of pollinators can have real, material impacts on humans (Mitchell et al. 2013). Any attempt to grapple with the pollinator crisis thus requires engaging with it as a socio-ecological system (SES), as some scholars have already started to do (see for instance, Matias et al. 2017; Saunders et al. 2016; Sponsler et al. 2019). In this paper, we have laid out our hypotheses for the particular conditions under which collective action would be most likely to emerge to manage wild pollinator CPRs. An SES framework offers several tools such as experimental games and simulations that could be used to explore the varied conditions under which collaborative action emerges, as has been done in the case of many other commons problems (Ostrom 2009). Tools such as agent based models could be a useful approach to simulate futures based on empirical evidence in the field. Following Turner (2014), we suggest that a theoretical and empirical investigation of a pollinator commons is a particularly fertile ground for collaboration between the social and the natural sciences more generally, and human and physical geography more specifically.