Tragedies and comedies of the commons in Higher Education: Institutional arrangements for effective use of communities of practice to enhance academic engagement

Synopsis

The term ‘communities of practice’ has become a familiar part of the vocabulary of engagement in global Higher Education. However, the literature on the development and use of communities of practice suggests that evidence for their success in improving academic engagement may be ambiguous at best. This paper analyses the use of communities of practice in Higher Education in juxtaposition to another influential body of work on community engagement, the theorisation of commons and effective arrangements for management of common property resources. The application of Ostrom’s (1990, Governing the Commons) rules for common property resource management to the analysis of communities of practice provides new ways to understand their successes and failures in Higher Education. Following Ostrom, I argue that, ‘Instead of presuming that optimal institutional solutions can be designed easily and imposed at low cost by external authorities’, we should recognise that, ‘“getting the institutions right” is a difficult, time-consuming, conflict-invoking process.’ This paper examines what we must get right institutionally if we are to make effective use of communities of practice for academic engagement.

Professor Mike Wilmore