Their rules.

In Alanya, the problem was not only how many fish remained. It was also who reached the best fishing sites first. Competition over those positions had led to fights and lost equipment. The coastal fishers responded with a rule that distributed space across the season: an initial lottery, daily movement between sites, and a reversal of direction when the fish migration changed. The rule did not create more fish. It changed who could fish where, and made it less worthwhile to fight over each location.

Elinor Ostrom presents this arrangement in Chapter 1 of Governing the Commons (1990), drawing on Fikret Berkes's study of Turkish coastal fisheries. The arrangement is not portrayed as an eternal custom or as a recipe imposed from outside. The fishers tried mechanisms for years before settling on rotation. At the start of each season, licensed fishers entered a lottery. Fishing sites were named and spaced so that a net in one location would not block fish from moving toward the next. The daily sequence followed the seasonal movement of the fish stocks. Fishers monitored and enforced the assignments themselves, and violations were discussed in the community coffeehouse.

This account is often read as proof that a community can govern a shared resource. That reading is true as far as it goes, but it leaves a decisive question open: what does “shared” mean here? If fish, fishing grounds, licenses, rules, and authority are treated as one thing, the case becomes a moral lesson. Separate them, and the rule begins to show what it solves and what it leaves untouched.

1. Two questions, four kinds of good

The first question is whether one person's use of a unit leaves less available to someone else. That is subtractability. The second is how costly it is to keep someone out, and who bears that cost. That is the cost of exclusion. These are not two ways of asking the same thing. A resource can be highly subtractable and difficult to fence off, or barely subtractable and easy to reserve for subscribers.

The matrix classifies each layer, not an entire organization. In Alanya's fishery, catching fish reduces what remains for others. Excluding everyone else from a commonly used coastal zone requires monitoring, recognized boundaries, and the ability to enforce them. This is high subtractability with costly exclusion: a common-pool resource. That does not make every part of fishing a CPR. A license is an access rule. A site is a position within the coastal area. A cooperative is an institutional arrangement. Each object needs its own questions.

The fish stock keeps its properties. Rotation changes who uses each site and in what order. The lottery and daily movement contain the race for the most advantageous position. Monitoring among peers makes violations visible without stationing a guard at every site. The coffeehouse offers a place to respond. Ostrom uses the case to show how rules reshape people's options and how clear assignments can reduce the costs of searching, competing, and fighting. The case alone does not prove that the fish stock recovered or that any community rule will work for any problem.

This precision separates appropriation from provision. Appropriation concerns the units people take. Provision concerns the system that makes those units available: here, the fishing grounds, information about sites, and rules that organize their use. The mechanism described for Alanya addresses the assignment of sites among fishers and leaves the amount harvested open.

2. The power contained in five rights

The word “property” often hides the difference between using something and deciding what others may do with it. Schlager and Ostrom (1992) break that word into a bundle of five rights. The first two are exercised while using a resource. The other three determine rules and who may act under them.

• Access: entering a defined physical property. In this case, eligible fishers enter their assigned fishing sites.
• Withdrawal: obtaining units of the resource. Catching and taking fish is different from having permission to enter a site.
• Management: regulating internal patterns of use and transforming the resource through improvements. Designing the assignment, changing its rules, or improving the fishery requires this collective-choice power.
• Exclusion: deciding who will have an access right and how that right may be transferred. It is not the physical ability to block someone. It is the authority to set access qualifications.
• Alienation: selling or leasing either or both collective-choice rights, management and exclusion. This is not selling fish. It is transferring authority over resource use or access.

The distinction changes what we see in Alanya. Rotation shows fishers exercising access and withdrawal under agreed conditions. The eligible list, lottery, and collective response to violations suggest de facto management and exclusion authority among participants.

The bundle helps distinguish positions. An authorized entrant can access but not withdraw. An authorized user has access and withdrawal. A claimant adds management. A proprietor adds exclusion. An owner holds all five rights, including alienation. These are analytical positions, not mandatory steps toward a “better” form of property. Schlager and Ostrom note that proprietors can sustain long-term investments without being able to transfer their rights. Alienation is not an automatic condition of good management.

This is why a resource and its regime are not synonyms. A CPR describes a combination of resource properties and the cost of exclusion. Common property describes a regime: a defined group with collective management and exclusion rights. A CPR can be governed under state, private, common-property, or open-access arrangements. Confusing the resource with its regime turns “community” into a label and obscures how authority is distributed.

3. What the case allows us to say

The RUC codebook makes this distinction operational in six steps: it defines the object and scale, separates layers, assesses subtractability and exclusion costs separately, maps rights by actor, derives the regime from that map, and evaluates design principles against evidence. It ends by asking which resources the system uses without providing and what externalities it creates. This is not a checklist for certifying that an organization is good. It makes disagreement locatable: if two researchers code differently, they should be able to point to the layer and cell where they diverge.

In Alanya, rotation distributes sites and turns according to their position and the fish migration. The passage describes that allocation but does not determine who could transfer management or exclusion rights.