Environment and Society. Paul Robbins

that:

       Many environmental problems appear intractable because they are prone to problems of collective action.

       Coordination around such problems fails owing to the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a metaphor describing the tendency of individuals to rationally seek their immediate gain at the expense of greater gains that might have been made through cooperation.

       Such failure to cooperate around environmental problems typically leads to a “Tragedy of the Commons” where collective goods (e.g. air, water, biodiversity) are degraded.

       Evidence exists from around the world, however, that people succeed at cooperating to preserve common property.

       Theories of common property have therefore emerged, which stress that Hardin’s tragedy might occur where there are absolutely no owners or responsible parties, but most commons are owned and controlled by groups as common property.

       By crafting and evolving social institutions that direct cooperative behavior on common property, communities can overcome commons tragedies.

       Barriers to institutional formation and collective action emerge from social, political, and economic inequities, which make cooperation difficult or impossible.

      Questions for Review

      1 Review the Prisoner’s Dilemma. What assumptions does the scenario make? What conditions must prevail so that the outcome is bad for both hypothetical prisoners? How might the assumptions be changed so that the outcome is better for both?

      2 What is the inevitable and “tragic” behavior exhibited by the herdsmen in Hardin’s hypothetical grazing commons?

      3 For Hardin, what are the only two options for averting “tragedies of the commons?” Which option does Hardin prefer, and why?

      4 In a valuable ocean fishery, how can well-crafted boundaries help create a manageable res communes (while keeping it from degenerating into an unmanageable res nullius)?

      5 Why might the atmosphere stand as the most difficult to manage of all imaginable common property resources?

      Exercise 4.1 Enclosure and Technology

Proponents of the “Tragedy of the Commons” suggest attempting to “enclose,” privatize, or make exclusive the rights to access and use what had been freely or openly available resources. Sometimes this is difficult owing to the physical character of the resource, like a large shared open pasture or a cache of electronic information available to anyone on the web. Technology can sometimes be used to help limit access to commons and make it easier to distribute property rights, as barbed wire fences did by cheaply dividing up the vast cattle pastures of the US West in the nineteenth century. Describe three resources that have been made more divisible by use of new inventions and technologies. What resources continue to elude technological solutions to enforcing property rights?

      Exercise 4.2 Are Commons Overexploited Everywhere?

      List ten real-world common property resources with which you are familiar. Describe an example of one of these common property resources that is not (tragically) overexploited (use the term “institution/s” in your discussion).

      Exercise 4.3 Institutions Nearby

      Name a common property resource to which you have access. This might be an environmental resource (a local park) or a shared good (a computer network). With whom is access to this resource shared? What risks are there to depletion, overuse, problems, or degradation from failures of cooperation or collective action? Is there a tacit set of norms or rules governing the use of the resource? Could these rules or systems of management be improved by application of the principles of institutional analysis? What barriers are there to improving the way the resource is used or shared?

      References

      1 Ciriacy-Wantrup, S.V. and Bishop, R.C. (1975). Common property as a concept in natural resources policy. Natural Resources Journal 15: 713–727.

      2 Ostrom, E. (1992). Crafting Institutions for Self-Governing Irrigation Systems. San Francisco, CA: Institute for Contemporary Studies.

      3 Ostrom, E. (ed.) (2002). The Drama of the Commons. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

      4 Poundstone, W. (1992). Prisoner’s Dilemma. New York: Anchor Books.

      5 Turner, B.L., II. and Brush, S.B. (eds.) (1987). Comparative Farming Systems. New York: Guildford Press.

      Suggested Reading

      1 Benjaminsen, T.A. and Sjaastad, E. (2008). Where to draw the line: mapping of land rights in a South African commons. Political Geography 27 (3): 263–279.

      2 Commons, J.R. (1934). Institutional Economics. New York: Macmillan.

      3 Community Economies Project (2005). Community economies. http://www.communityeconomies.org (accessed 17 March 2020).

      4 Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science 162: 1243–1248.

      5 Kropotkin, P. (1888). Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. Boston, MA: Porter Sargent.

      6 Mansfield, B. (2004). Neoliberalism in the oceans: “rationalization,” property rights, and the commons question. Geoforum 35: 313–326.

      7 Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

      8 Ostrom, E. (2005). Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

      9 St. Martin, K. (2001). Making space for community resource management in fisheries. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91 (1): 122–142.

      10 Tucker, C.M., Randolph, J.C., and Castellanos, E.J. (2007). Institutions, biophysical factors and history: an integrative analysis of private and common property forests in Guatemala and Honduras. Human Ecology 35: 259–274.