Associations and other options for organising your Common

Governance: Options to Organise your Common 

There are a range of structures your common can adopt to govern management and delivery of a stewardship or environmental land management agreement for delivering public goods.

These include:

A. A Commons Association with elected Officers

B. A Commons Group with an appointed Administrator

C. A Limited Company

Taking each in turn:

• A. Commons Association with elected Officers:

  An Association is the most commonly adopted structure. An association is not a legal entity but a non-incorporated group of individuals whose governance is set out in a Constitution and has a number of elected Officers to govern the membership of the Association.

• B. Commons Group with an appointed Administrator

  Where there are five or fewer parties involved in the management of the common and or benefiting from the payments an Administrator can be appointed to govern the agreement on behalf of the Group’s members. It is important that the Administrator is independent and not conflicted by acting for individual parties whether the owner or the commoners.

  Provision for appointment and removal of the Administrator by the Group’s members is required.

• C. Limited Company

  Some Commons create a Limited Companies to hold the agreement on behalf of the commoners and owner. This has some advantages in that the Group is a legal entity and majority voting is therefore easier to enforce. The advantages are not as great as at first glance because the limited company does not own the common rights and so any single commoner can resign from the company and not be bound by the rules of the Company.

For more information about deciding upon a management model for your common, click here.