Governing the commons, from Garrett Hardin to Elinor Ostrom
Biologist Garrett Hardin deserves credit for opening the way to the commons framework, showing that not only human arrangements could end up promoting secession and defection but that, moreover, they could lead to collective ruin. In 1968, Hardin published a resounding article in which he deplored the “tragedy of the commons” at work in the world. His reasoning is apparently convincing: The “invisible hand” imagined by Adam Smith13 – according to which, in a market economy, individuals must be concerned only about their personal interests without ever worrying about the fate of others – leads in environmental matters not to the “wealth of nations” promised by Smith but to the ruin of citizens.
The allegory chosen by Hardin is that of shepherds exhausting the pasture they share without owning it, for lack of distributing its use effectively. The logic of Hardin’s demonstration resembles Mancur Olson’s “free rider” problem: If each farmer intends to privatize his gains (the sale of well-fed cows on the market) while socializing its costs (grass consumption), the pasture will be rapidly exhausted (the “invisible hand” ransacking the common resource). Breeders, along with their animals, will soon wither away. Since “injustice is preferable to total ruin” it is wise, according to Hardin, to institute a “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.” In other words, to resort to a central authority able to impose its choices on individuals for their own good.
The revolution of the commons, that will give back hope in self-organized efficient cooperation, was born out of a major flaw in the reasoning of Hardin. Hardin evokes a tragedy of the commons, but the illustration he gives rather evokes what we would now call “open access resources.” Common resources, or commons, are resources held under the regime of common property by a human group (a category distinct from both private and public property), while free access resources are non-exclusive, meaning that no one can be stopped from consuming them (see Chapter 6). For example, access to the open sea is free, as too are the fishing areas that are there. This explains why fish stocks are subject to a “tragedy of free access” or even a “tragedy of self-service”: In the last twenty-five years, while ships became increasingly powerful (their fishing capacity increasing considerably), they have returned to their nets fewer and fewer fish simply because stocks are running out (90% of commercial fish stocks are already fully exploited or over-exploited). Like in a Greek tragedy, even though this situation is known to all, fish and fishermen disappear inexorably, year after year.
Hardin’s pasture is thus not a common, and if it were one, it would probably not be over-exploited. It is what Elinor Ostrom has attempted to demonstrate throughout her academic career, which started with the study of water management in California. This inaugural work echoes that of another famous economist among the too-rare women of this discipline, Katharine Coman, published in the first issue of the American Economic Review, in 1911. (Coman highlighted the economic problems posed by irrigation systems, that can be solved by resorting to commons.)
Ostrom will gradually expand her topic to systematically analyze the institutions that allow (or do not allow) sustainable exploitation of natural resources. How do Maine lobster fishermen in the United States distribute fishing rights equitably while taking care of their resource, which is also the source of their sustained livelihood? That’s what Ostrom’s work seems to clarify.
Hardin predicted that individuals’ pursuit of their personal interest would lead to collective impoverishment and that only an outside authority was able to produce and impose standards to bend these behaviors and rescue collective prosperity from individual greed. Ostrom’s masterpiece (1990)14 will demonstrate, conversely, that institutions invented by human communities can themselves foster preservation through cooperation. It is therefore a double invalidation of Hardin’s hypothesis: Efficient cooperation is possible and it is self-determined.
Ostrom starts from a fundamental discovery: In the so-called “public goods” game, individuals cooperate much more than what by standard theory assumes, especially if they have the opportunity to punish free riders. This game is based on a somewhat complex setting. The organizers explain to the participants that, during several consecutive rounds, they will be associated with other players anonymously, each being endowed with a starting bet, say twenty euros. In each round, all players are confronted with two options: either to put their money in a common account or deposit it in a personal account, knowing that the gains of the common account are repaid on each individual count at the end of each round in proportion to the contributions. However, the common account yield is lower than that of personal accounts, so that its profitability depends on the cooperative goodwill of the players (the higher the contributions to the joint account are, the more it will bring back to each player). The profitability results of the common account are announced at the end of each round of play, which allows each player to guess the decisions of others and to adapt his own accordingly for the following turn.
In such a game, the logic of individual interest and uncertainty about the cooperative ability of other players should induce individuals not to cooperate, that is never to contribute to the common account. Reality is strikingly different: Players start by investing on average half of their endowment on the common account. The willingness to cooperate is thus much stronger than expected, especially if players are given the means to punish the non-cooperators (for instance through financial fines imposed on those who never contribute to the common account).
Ostrom will go on to verify this theoretical intuition throughout the world and will make an even bigger discovery: In hundreds of meticulously documented cases, humans are able to avoid the “tragedy of the commons” by building collective rules whose pillars are reciprocity and trust. The “public good” is no longer an abstract common account, but, very concretely, rivers that should be preserved from pollution, forests that must be reasonably exploited, fish that must be harvested with moderation to allow them to reproduce. From Swiss forests to Japanese pastures, irrigation systems in Spain to irrigation systems in Nepal, Ostrom shows that humans are able to cooperate for preserve, conserve, and prosper.
From her field observations, Ostrom will draw core principles for a sustainable management of common resources. These principles, eleven of them, can be simply understood as the rules of the game of human environmental cooperation (see Box 3.2).
Box 3.2 the rules of the game of environmental cooperation
1A. User boundaries: Clear and locally understood boundaries between legitimate users and nonusers are present.
1B. Resource boundaries: Clear boundaries that separate a specific common-pool resource from a larger social-ecological system are present.
2A. Congruence with local conditions: Appropriation and provision rules are congruent with local social and environmental conditions.
2B. Appropriation and provision: Appropriation rules are congruent with provision rules; the distribution of costs is proportional to the distribution of benefits.
3. Collective choice arrangements: Most individuals affected by a resource regime are authorized to participate in making and modifying its rules.
4A. Monitoring users: Individuals who are accountable to or are the users monitor the appropriation and provision levels of the users.
4B. Monitoring the resource: Individuals who are accountable to or are