Tragedy of the Commons Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The “tragedy of the commons,” probably the most common framework through which environmental issues are understood today, was made famous by biologist Garrett Hardin in a 1968 essay in Science. Hardin was specifically concerned with population growth and invoked the notion made popular by Thomas Malthus in 1798 that because population grows exponentially while food supply grows only linearly, population growth will lead inevitably to starvation, war, and disease, and eventually to a collapse in population levels. Hardin argued that population growth is a tragedy of the commons, which he explained with this image: “Picture a pasture open to all. It is expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons.” Every animal that is added contributes to pasture degradation, but this negative effect is shared by all of the herders. Each herder enjoys full benefits, however, from adding an additional animal to his own herd. Because each herder acts to maximize his or her own gain, more and more animals will be added. In the end, this leads to overgrazing and a tragedy of pasture degradation: “Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit-in a world that is limited…Freedom in the commons brings ruin for all.” Hardin argued that there are only two solutions to this problem. The first option is coercion, or control of each individual’s behavior by an outside agent, particularly the state. The second is to privatize the commons; only if the common pasture is divided up into privately owned parcels will individuals take care of the resource, and thus preserve it from overuse and destruction.

Though Hardin’s essay was focused on overpopulation, its broader legacy has been the idea that environmental resources held in common are naturally and inevitably subject to overuse and degradation. The metaphor of the “tragedy of the commons” has become conventional wisdom for understanding all kinds of environmental problems today, including: the depletion of ocean fisheries, hunting that led to the extinction of the American passenger pigeon, rangeland degradation, the overuse of national parks, and a variety of pollution problems.

Despite its popularity, Hardin’s tragedy of the commons is flawed in many respects. First, Hardin’s idea was modeled after an inaccurate understanding of the medieval English commons. Far from being completely unregulated and free for the taking, common pastures were available for the use only of specific villagers or individuals; even for them, there were often regulations including limits on the numbers of animals each tenant could put on the pasture. In other words, the model assumes that “commons” are in fact what is more accurately termed an “open access” situation, in which there are no rules and limitations whatsoever on the use of a resource.

The model also assumes that users do not have or develop social or cultural norms that might cause them to regulate their resource use, and that users are inherently selfish, have perfect information, and always seek to maximize their short-term gains. In other words, the model of the tragedy of the commons fails to take into account the specific historical, social, and cultural contexts of resource users.

To further understand this model, it is helpful to distinguish between the characteristics of a resource itself, and the characteristics of the system that governs resource management. Two key characteristics of resources in general are first, whether it is easy or hard to control access to the resource (excludability); and whether one person’s use of the resource takes away from another’s (subtractability; sunlight is an example of a nonsubtractable resource). Common property resources (sometimes called common pool resources) are those that are subtractable but not easily excludable; these include forests, pastures, fisheries, and sinks for various types of environmental pollution. Resources can be classified into those that are private (subtractable and easily excludable); common; public or state (nonsubstractable and difficult to exclude); and club or toll resources (easily excludable and nonsubtractable).

There is no necessary or automatic correspondence, however, between the type of resource and the management regime under which it is governed. One type of management regime is open-access, where there are no regulations and anyone can easily gain access to the resource. Another type is private property, where the right to use and exclude others is vested in an individual or legal individual (such as a corporation). Third, common property regimes are those in which there is an identifiable set of users who can exclude outsiders and who have legal or informal rules governing use. Finally, in public or state property, the government makes decisions about access to and use of the resource.

The resource overexploitation and degradation predicted by Hardin in the “tragedy of the commons” is indeed often seen in cases where resources are managed through an open access regime. Examples include the depletion of unregulated ocean fisheries, and the current unregulated emissions of carbon dioxide leading to anthropogenic global climate change. Where Hardin went wrong, however, were the assumptions that common property resources are always governed by open access regimes and that common property regimes never work.

In fact, case studies from around the world have shown that common property regimes often work quite well. Well-known cases include Native American hunting and fishing lands in James Bay, cooperative-based coastal fisheries in Japan, communal meadows and forests in the Swiss Alps, medieval irrigation systems in Spain, and contemporary lobster fishing territories in Maine.

Research on successful cases around the world has suggested a number of institutional factors which contribute to the success of common property management. Favorable factors include having clearly defined boundaries around both the users and the resource; ability to monitor resource use; mechanisms for conflict resolution, congruence between local conditions and rules; graduated sanctions; and the legal right to devise institutions and sustain ownership of the common property resource. When these conditions exist, the tragedy of the commons is likely to be averted.

Another flaw often arising from use of the tragedy of the commons model is the assumption that if commons are the problem, then conversely other forms of ownership will not lead to resource degradation. In fact, no type of resource or type of management regime is completely guaranteed in advance to be either sustainable or subject to degradation through overuse. The particular context is important in determining the outcome. As a model of resource degradation, the tragedy of the commons works in some cases, but is too over-simplified to accurately predict or explain the sustainability of resource use in general.

Bibliography:

Susan Buck Cox, “No Tragedy of the Commons,” Environmental Ethics (v.7, 1985);
Thomas Dietz, Elinor Ostrom, and Paul Stern, “The Struggle to Govern the Commons,” Science (v.302, 1912);
David Feeny, Fikret Berkes, Bonnie McCay, and James Acheson, “The Tragedy of the Commons: Twenty-Two Years Later,” Human Ecology (v.18, 1990);
Clark C. Gibson, Margaret McKean, and Elinor Ostrom, eds., People and Forests: Communities, Institutions, and Governance (MIT Press, 2000);
Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science (v.163, 1968);
Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London, 1798);
Bonnie McCay and James Acheson, eds., The Question of the Commons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources (University of Arizona Press, 1987);
Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990).