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The myth of the tragedy of the commons
Ian Angus, MR-Zine
Will shared resources always be misused and overused? Is community ownership of land, forests, and fisheries a guaranteed road to ecological disaster? Is privatization the only way to protect the environment and end Third World poverty? Most economists and development planners will answer “yes” — and for proof they will point to the most influential article ever written on those important questions.
Since its publication in Science in December 1968, “The Tragedy of the Commons” has been anthologized in at least 111 books, making it one of the most-reprinted articles ever to appear in any scientific journal. It is also one of the most-quoted: a recent Google search found “about 302,000” results for the phrase “tragedy of the commons.”
For 40 years it has been, in the words of a World Bank Discussion Paper, “the dominant paradigm within which social scientists assess natural resource issues” (Bromley and Cernea 1989: 6). It has been used time and again to justify stealing indigenous peoples’ lands, privatizing health care and other social services, giving corporations “tradable permits” to pollute the air and water, and much more.
… Given the subsequent influence of Hardin’s essay, it’s shocking to realize that he provided no evidence at all to support his sweeping conclusions. He claimed that the “tragedy” was inevitable — but he didn’t show that it had happened even once.
Hardin simply ignored what actually happens in a real commons: self-regulation by the communities involved.
… A summary of recent research concludes:
[W]hat existed in fact was not a “tragedy of the commons” but rather a triumph: that for hundreds of years — and perhaps thousands, although written records do not exist to prove the longer era — land was managed successfully by communities. (Cox 1985: 60)
Part of that self-regulation process was known in England as “stinting” — establishing limits for the number of cows, pigs, sheep, and other livestock that each commoner could graze on the common pasture. Such “stints” protected the land from overuse (a concept that experienced farmers understood long before Hardin arrived) and allowed the community to allocate resources according to its own concepts of fairness.
(25 August 2008)
This is the impression I had of “Tragedy of the Commons” – that it is more ideology than science. It’s amazing how many theories and predictions are based on this rather flimsy foundation. -BA
UPDATE (Aug 30) SEB writes:
It stuns me that Bart Anderson says the idea of the tragedy of the commons is more ideology than science. What about the commons of the earth’s atmosphere? What about the commons that the world’s oceans constitute? We are polluting our atmosphere to our own demise, and polluting the oceans to their deaths. Isn’t that enough evidence? What do you want?
BA:
I should clarify. The issue here is NOT whether the oceans, atmosphere, etc. are in trouble now. Many people agree on that point, me included. Hardin’s claim is much more specific and controversial. He asserts that the Commons by its very nature is doomed to fail, and that this is true across cultures and time periods — a sweeping generalization which requires evidence from history and social science. (By the way, the controversy over Hardin dates back to 1968 when he first published “Tragedy of the Commons.”)
One problem for Hardin is that his background was in biology, whereas here he was dealing with social systems. The reaction of an anthropologist/archaeologist friend of mine is typical: (paraphrasing) “The generalization doesn’t make sense. Different cultures have handled the Commons in different ways, some wisely, some not.”
Hardin’s thesis is not satisfying for me because it discourages looking closely at other cultures for clues about living sustainably. For example, the Chinese have had a continuous civilization for several thousand years – how did they do it? One way: recycling wastes in agriculture (Farmers_of_Forty_Centuries). Or consider Japan’s sustainable society in the Edo period (1603-1867). The point is that all cultures have both trends that weaken the Commons and counter-trends that preserve it.
Hardin’s thesis is also not very helpful for understanding how the Commons are under attack now. Leftists point out the deleterious effects of consumerism and capitalism. I think the problem is more general – due to industrialism, cheap fuel, and the societies that arise as a result of them. Opinions can differ, but it I think it’s a dead end to ascribe our problems to “human nature” and stop further investigation.
A second problem with Hardin is that his work has been used to justify highly political projects, such as privatization. Hardin himself advocated Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor.
More writings by Garrett Hardin are available at The Garrett Hardin Society. Ian Angus, the author of this piece, is currently writing Part 2, focusing on Hardin’s views on population, genetics, etc.
Against all the odds, the world is becoming a happier place
James Randerson, Guardian
Over the past 25 years, economic growth in developing countries has translated into big increases in happiness, but people in richer countries have seen much more modest improvements
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Despite deepening economic gloom and impending climatic destruction the world is becoming a happier place, according to an analysis of quarter of a century of data on wellbeing from 45 countries around the globe. The finding goes against the received wisdom that a country’s economic advances do not translate into increased wellbeing among its citizens.
The researchers who compiled the data believe increasing levels of happiness were not picked up until now because studies have tended to focus on rich countries where increases in wealth make little difference to their citizens’ satisfaction with life.
“The classic view, which we are not disputing, is that there are diminishing marginal returns to economic development,” said Roberto Foa at Harvard University. “So for initial levels of economic development people are escaping subsistence poverty and people’s subjective levels of happiness will increase.”
Once their basic needs have been fulfilled – having shelter, enough food to eat and so on – then further economic development doesn’t lead to more happiness in a straightforward linear way, said Foa. Social scientists call this the “hedonic treadmill” – like the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, you keep running but don’t make any progress.
(27 August 2008)
Lessons from Climate Camp
Uri Gordon and Lucy Michaels, Haaretz (Israel)
NORFOLK – Camping in a field, in the rain, in the shadow of a coal-fired power station in southern England, is probably not most people’s idea of a fun holiday excursion. This description, however, belies the excitement of becoming part of the United Kingdom’s newest and most rapidly growing social movement.
At first sight, the Camp for Climate Action, which took place earlier this month in Kent, seemed like a festival of activism, with over 3,000 participants and dozens of workshops, political demonstrations, music, films and a level of discussion that one British MP on hand described as “more sophisticated and informed than the Houses of Parliament.” Yet what the Climate Camp really represented was a glimpse at the kind of egalitarian social relations, small-scale technologies and fundamental change of attitudes toward energy use that may well be our only way to avert dangerous climate change and to cope with the recent peak in oil production.
The grass-roots climate movement in the U.K. is in part an expression of frustration with the British government’s lack of meaningful action.
… Meanwhile, Israel is also applying the same short-term and irresponsible thinking in giving the go-ahead for a new coal-fired power station in Ashkelon, without even the false promise of CCS.
This wide gap between the rhetoric and reality of climate change highlights the difficulty that most governments struggle with in addressing the trade-off between economic growth, climate change and peak oil. The general attitude in most of the developed world – Israel included – is that increases in energy demand are a given. All we need to do is throw enough money at new technologies, and human ingenuity will somehow enable us to carry on with our over-consumption of energy without destroying the conditions for our existence on this planet. However, the reality of climate change and peak oil is that we cannot simply continue with business as usual. …
Uri Gordon, the author of “Anarchy Alive!” (Pluto Press), teaches at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies. Lucy Michaels is a doctoral researcher at the Institute for Desert Research in Sde Boker.
(28 August 2008)
The fastest way to put the brakes on global heating (it’s not George Monbiot’s)
Jan Lundberg, Culture Change Letter #196
The fastest way to put the brakes on global heating is to embrace the peaking of world oil extraction and the implications of petrocollapse. As long as we deny there’s a terminal outcome for our petroleum-based infrastructure — and therefore society as we know it — we will keep dancing around the crisis of climate change. Precious time is being lost while feedback loops strengthen greenhouse gas output. Embracing collapse sounds crazy and, as we all would prefer, hopefully unnecessary. But what if that’s your only ticket out of the burning theater and the rafters are about to come down?
Let’s get our priorities straight. Is the economy a sacred cow? Is maintaining it along with its institutions of government and corporations the only way greenhouse gases will be slashed, and quickly enough to stave off climate hell? Writer George Monbiot is so certain that the answer is “yes” that he may have forgotten that direct action steps on certain toes.
I think the answer to those questions is emphatically “No!” Trusting the continuation of the economy and its self-serving components of Earth’s destruction includes their assuring first their own self-preservation — as if they were divine creations of Mother Nature to be loaded onto a Noah’s Ark to save the world. No, thank you. There’s another way, but many of us of a conventional bent are loathe to make the leap — even if it would be off a burning precipice to safety within reach. When will we do it, when our neck of the woods becomes uncomfortable?
A “leftist” “green” activist response to climate change has buzzed into the online world that fits into the “economic growth mongering” apologism that my Culture Change column identified on Aug. 22. George Monbiot is a UK commentator who can really dish out the criticism when it comes to government policies such as biofuels, bicycling, and the like. Here’s what he wrote on Aug. 22, in his column titled “Identity Politics in Climate Change Hell”, wherein he accuses a climate activist named Ewa of playing politics when she wrote a Guardian newspaper column titled “Time for a revolution”.
(28 August 2008)
What Jan recommends: 10 vital steps to slow global warming and climate destabilization
He writes:
This essay might reinforce our previous post announcing our 20th anniversary which was by necessity a fundraiser.
