Tragedy of the Commons

Alan RudyISS 310 – Spring 2002Thursday, February 28

Small Group Question…

Do you think that privatizing resources leads to more or less ecological degradation?– What are your reasons?– Choose an instance, one way or the other, and

play it out showing how privatization did or didn’t lead to more resource depletion, degradation or pollution.

Garrett Hardin

“We want to maximize good per person; but what is good?… wilderness? ski lodges? estuaries? factory land? Comparing one good with another is, we usually say, impossible because goods are incommensurable… but in real life incommensurables are comparable. Only a criterion of judgment and a system of weighing are needed. In nature the criterion is survival…. Man must imitate this process.” (p.1244)

Hardin II

“natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial” (p.1244) “The pollution problem is a consequence of population.” (p.1245) “The laws of our society follow the pattern of ancient ethics, and therefore are poorly suited to governing a complex crowded, changeable world.” (p.1245)

Hardin III

“To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of action.” (p.1246)“If we love the truth, we must openly deny the validity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights…” (p.1246)

Hardin IV

“We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust – but we put up with it because we are not convinced… that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.” (p.1247)

Hardin V“First we abandoned the commons in food gathering, enclosing farm land and restricting pastures and hunting and fishing areas…. Somewhat later we saw the commons as a place for waste disposal would also have to be abandoned…. In a still more embryonic state is our recognition of the evils of the commons in matters of pleasure…. Every new enclosure of the commons involves the infringement of somebody’s personal liberty.” (p.1248)

Hardin VI

Hardin suggests that there is an turning point at which an individual's marginal gain from adding one more animal to his herd – as it feeds on the commons -- is no longer greater than the marginal costs; however, this point is far beyond that of the maximum sustained yield or the sustainable productivity of the system.

Hardin VII

For Hardin, “the tragedy of the commons” is inevitable, unless someone or something (typically governments, police, or armed militaries -- “mutual coercion mutually agreed upon”) intervene.

Abating the tragedy from occurring requires that people act collectively to preserve the commons.

Hardin VII

But, if individuals are self-interested, by nature – as Hardin argues – and have the freedom to use, misuse, and abuse common property resources, there will be many free riders - individuals who will use the good but do not pay for its upkeep. The question is how to minimize or eliminate free riding.

Hardin IX

The only option – according to Hardin -- is for the land (or water, or air, or resource) to be transformed from common to private property.

If Hardin is right…

How did the earth and its natural resources survive up until the present?How common has private property in land been in history?Does it make sense that people in the past DID regulate access to “the commons?”How might they have done this?

Does it make a difference if…

…we are talking about the global commons, as opposed to local commonses?For example, what’s the difference between “regulating” collective access to local resources and things like greenhouse gas emissions?Should we privatize the atmosphere? The oceans? All the worlds fresh water? The ozone layer?

Furthermore…

… who should the key players be in the control, individual and collective of common or private property?… to what social institutions would people appeal to if someone abused their private property in such a way as to cause environmental degradation of social health problems “downstream?”

Also…

… how would the bidding on the privatization of resources be done? … would people of great (or normal) intelligence, but limited resources, have their bids pro-rated so that they might be competitive,… or would the already powerful run the show largely in their own interest?

What kinds of property are there?

Open Access – very rareUsufruct – historically, very commonPrivate Property – Individual ExcludabilityCommunal Property – Communal Excludability, Open Access w/in groupState Property – Gov’t determines access/use – Do they do so Democratically?– Do they do so Bureaucratically?– Do they do so Judicially?

Historically…

… our economic interests have contradicted ecological sustainability, esp. re: long-maturing or non-local/not-our resources… multiple property rights regimes almost always overlap… people spontaneously generate cooperative methods of resource utilization… displacement into the future or onto someone else’s home, land, resources, etc. has been most common

Most People and the Commons

Most people (like me and most of you) own no substantive amount of productive resources… what are their responsibilities to be?These same people, along with private owners of natural resources, rely not only on natural commons but also on social common resources for life…– highways, schools, the military and police,

regulatory bureaucracies, etc.

Are markets a common resource?

If so, should we privatize them?Remember the Progressives from the lecture on Samuel P. Hays and “scientific management?”The Progressives understood that the privatization of markets, via monopolies, and the destruction of the land, by small land-owners (and powerful monopoly producers) was exactly what was wrong at the turn of the 20th century… they wanted public, expert-led, scientific regulation and policy.

Michael Goldman*

Hardin’s ideas have led to a “search for the holy grail of successful commons models. Whether implicit or explicit, their prescriptions are meant for the ubiquitous professional-class “we,” recommending that development professionals get investment portfolios right, for the benefit of development’s alleged client, the world’s commoners.” (p.2)

* (1997) "'Customs in Common': The Epistemic World of the Commons Scholars." Theory and Society 26, 1, Feb., 1-37.

Goldman II – 3 kinds of players

“The Human Ecologists, I argue, demonstrate the complexity of the commons from the local culture- and territory-based perspective; the Development Experts… show how to restore the degraded commons, strengthen weakened social institutions, and ‘modernize’ the Third World poor; and the Global Resource Managers explain how the commons are not just local or the problem of the poor, but contribute to global ecological crisis.” (p.4)

Goldman III

“For development experts (of all three types – APR) to assert that they have a game plan for making productive relations on common property ‘better,’ ‘more efficient,’ and ‘sustainable,’ they have first to construct a world of values and property relations that befits an imagined reality. To do so, they must agree to a definition of property however far removed these definitions are from the irreducible material activities of resource-dependent communities.” (pp.12-13)

Why all this focus on the commons?

The crisis of developing the commons “has ignited social movements that threaten the workings of development, state and economic institutions (SOCIAL – APR), and second, the rapid and large-scale degradation of the world’s air, water, forest, and biogenetic resources (ECOLOGICAL – APR) threatens the reproduction of capital (ECONOMIC – APR).” (Goldman, p.23)

What kinds of solutions are there?

Given what I’ve said throughout the semester, what do you think?

Open up the process to include local folks, experts, policy makers, etc. and get to the hard work of learning 1) why things are the way they are, 2) where the collective group thinks the project should be headed and 3) what it’ll to take to get there by fair and reasonable, ecologically-sound means.