AUTHOR COPY. ACCEPTED AS A CHAPTER IN SHARING THE COSTS AND BENEFITS OF ENERGY AND RESOURCE ACTIVITY, L BARRERA-HERNÁNDEZ, B BARTON, L GODDEN, A LUCAS AND A RØNNE, EDITORS (OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2016). 1 2 Community and Sharing Barry Barton and Michael Goldsmith I. Introduction Community as a concept has attracted a great deal of attention in social science; indeed it is one of the basic concepts of sociology. It is notoriously difficult to pin down; Hillery found 94 definitions of it, the only common characteristic being that they all dealt with people. 1 But it has been a longstanding medium for examining the interactions between modernity and social solidarity. 2 Anthony Cohen observes that it has become a way of designating that something is shared among a group of people at a time when we cannot assume that anything is necessarily shared. 3 While he may have had broader shared attributes in mind, the phrasing takes us straight to the question of sharing the benefits and burdens of energy and resources development. Who do we share with? Our purpose, then, is to make a connection between the rich scholarship of the social sciences and the legal questions that arise in relation to community and the sharing of benefits and costs in relation to energy and natural resources projects. Doing so may provide some clarity in dealing with difficult and contested concepts. Ever since the nineteenth century, as Raymond Williams reminds us, 4 the term ‘community’ has enjoyed the sense of ‘immediacy or locality’ in contradistinction to more impersonal ideas of state and society. Not surprisingly, the development of this strongly ‘local’ image coincided with, and reacted to, the rise of large-scale industrial society and led to such famous antinomies as Henry Sumner Maine’s ‘status’ versus ‘contract’ 5 and Ferdinand Tönnies’s gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, generally translated as community and society, or left untranslated. 6 Gemeinschaft refers to groupings based on mutual bonds which are maintained and valued in themselves, such as in an extended family, village, or neighbourhood in a pre- modern society. Such communities maintain their cohesion not so much through explicit rules as internal social control, morals, desires to conform, and the possibility of excluding strangers. In contrast, gesellschaft relationships were impersonal individualist ones, such as in commercial relationships, paid employment, in a capitalist system and typically urban. The 1 G. A. Hillery, ‘Definitions of Community; Areas of Agreement’ (1955) 20 Rural Sociology 111. 2 V. Amit, ed, Realizing Community: Concepts, Social Relationships and Sentiments (2002). 3 A. P. Cohen, ‘Epilogue’ 165 in Amit (ed) above n 2. 4 R. Williams, Keywords (1976) ‘community’ 65-66. 5 H. S. Maine, Ancient Law ([1861] 1909, 16th ed. F. Pollock, ed,) 174; ‘the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract.’ Pollock comments at 185 that it is not clear how far Maine regarded the movement as a phase of the larger political individualism which prevailed in the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries. Maine’s insight was about the law of persons, and the ties of family, steadily replaced with relations arising out of the free agreement of individuals. 6 F. Tönnies, Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft) ([1887] trans C Loomis 1957).