Tragically difficult: the obstacles to governing the commons.

AuthorThompson, Barton H., Jr.
  1. INTRODUCTION

    In 1968 Garrett Hardin published his famous and oft-cited article "The Tragedy of the Commons," examining the overuse of commonly shared resources.(1) Hardin chose his title well. The problem of the tragedy of the commons has been recognized since at least the days of Aristotle.(2) But Hardin gave the problem a vivid and visceral name that quickly captures our attention and tells us much of what we need to know.

    Anyone who has studied the environment for very long understands the tragedy of the commons. When a resource is freely available to everyone in common, everyone has an incentive to take as much of that resource as they want, even though the collective result may be the destruction of the resource itself. Society as a whole would be better off restraining consumption and preserving the resource. But the rational action for each individual is to consume to her heart's content. Because no one can bind anyone else's actions, not consuming simply makes one a patsy. To each individual, moreover, her own actions seem insignificant. Holding back will lead to a marginal improvement, if any, in the condition of the resource. Even those who recognize and bemoan the oncoming tragedy of overuse will often conclude that it makes no sense not to join others in depleting the resource. The high road leads nowhere. The cumulative result of reasonable individual choices is collective disaster.

    Most of the recent academic literature on the tragedy of the commons examines why some commons do not lead to tragic consequences. Elinor Ostrom and others have shown that local communities throughout the world sometimes have been able to avoid the tragedy through the development of local management institutions.(3) Psychologists also have conducted experiments to determine which conditions maximize the chances that individual resource users will limit their consumption even when trapped in the logic of the commons. These experiments suggest that resource users are more likely to restrict their consumption when they receive prompt feedback on the impact of their extractions, when their behavior is visible to others, when they can communicate with their fellow resource users, and when the users share a group identity.(4) The message of both fieldwork and experimental commons is that tragedy is not inevitable. With the right conditions, resource users can avoid depleting the resource.

    My interest, however, is not with the success stories, but with the pathology of the failures. Tragedy may not be inevitable in the commons, but unfortunately tragedy remains the predominant outcome. My interest, moreover, is not why commons typically lead to tragedy. Hardin and others have done an excellent job explaining the process by which resource users, left to individual choices, are driven to overuse the resource.(5) My interest is why it has proven difficult for governments, communities, and other institutions to adopt and implement solutions to common dilemmas--and, even more troubling, why resource users often have been the most vociferous opponents of solutions.

    Academics not only have explained the structural fabric of the tragedy of the commons, but also have identified a number of workable solutions. One frequently promoted solution is to privatize the commons. Both field investigations and social science experiments have shown that privatization, when possible, is typically a particularly effective solution to the tragedy of the commons.(6) When a resource can be privatized, the resource owners will incur the entire cost of overuse and thus carefully husband the resource. A related solution is to unitize the resource: organize a single operator to manage exploitation of the resource and divide any profits among the community of resource users or owners.(7) When privatization or unitization is not possible--and frequently such solutions are not workable for technological or cultural reasons--government or community regulation can limit overuse of the commons.(8) The government can restrict the total number of cattle being grazed in the common pasture, cap extractions of petroleum, or control discharges of pollutants into a surface stream. Local communities can establish and enforce informal rules.(9)

    Despite multiple workable solutions to the tragedy of the commons, however, governments and other institutions have found it extremely difficult to address many of the most important commons dilemmas facing the world today. Resource users, moreover, have typically been the most vociferous critics of proposed solutions. In a number of important commons contexts, resource users have vehemently denied that there is a problem (despite relatively substantial evidence that a serious problem exists), argued that intervention by the government or other outside institutions is unnecessary (despite repeated failures by the community of resource users themselves to voluntarily or collectively limit resource use), and opposed suggested solutions as unfair and unwise. The question that impels this Essay is why it has proven so difficult to implement effective solutions and, more specifically, why resource users have proven not only unreceptive, but affirmatively hostile, to such solutions.

    One should not expect that solving the tragedy of the commons will be easy. Just as the tragedy of the commons presents a collective action problem, so do attempts to solve the problem. Solving the tragedy of the commons is an example of a public good because all users of the commons benefit from a solution. No individual resource user may see why it is in her particular advantage to rush out and spend political and other resources trying to solve the tragedy. Let Joe take the lead, Jill thinks. But of course the problem is that Joe, in turn, waits for Jill to take the lead, and both wait for Bob. The result, according to political economists, is that everyone holds back and nothing gets done.

    Many resource users, moreover, might conclude that they are better off in a commons free-for-all than in a world constrained by property rights, unified management, or regulation. Some resource users might decide that they enjoy special advantages over other users in the race for the resource. For example, a particularly expert fisherman might believe that he is likely to land far more fish in an unrestricted fishery before the fishery is exhausted than he would be permitted to land under an imposed allocation. Or a resource user might receive a great deal of psychic value from the competitive character of an unconstrained commons. A fisherman, for example, might enjoy the contest of finding and catching fish before other fishermen do.

    Even resource users who favor constraining overall depletion of the commons might conclude that there is no practical means of policing any solution. A characteristic of many of the most perplexing commons dilemmas, such as world fisheries is the difficulty of determining how much any particular resource user is tapping the commons. The opacity of user behavior is one of the factors thai: contribute to the tragedy; unable to gauge others' behavior, each user feeds on the fear that others are maximizing their consumption and, therefore, increases his or her own consumption.(10) The same opacity makes agreed-upon restrictions difficult, if not impossible, to enforce. And resource users are likely to advocate solutions only if they are enforceable.(11)

    But some people are willing to take the lead in resolving commons problems, even when others share the benefits. And ending the tragedy will be in the clear interest of many resource users. Absent a solution, the resource that the users' livelihoods, and in some cases their lives, depend upon may be destroyed.(12) Even if a resource user believes that he enjoys a comparative advantage in a race for the resource, races are exhausting and typically require a greater expenditure of resources. Balancing the benefits and costs of an unconstrained commons, thus, should lead many resource users to want a solution.

    Moreover, the factors that undermine peoples' incentive to reduce theft individual use of an unrestricted commons should not undermine their incentive to support a collective solution that constrains everyone's use of the commons.(13) A resource user trying to decide whether to support a collectively mandated solution, for example, does not have to worry about becoming a patsy, because everyone will be bound by the same solution. Nor will resource users be deterred by the concern that their individual decisions will have only a marginal impact on the health of the resource; unlike unilateral, voluntary actions, the adoption of a universal solution can save the resource.(14)

    Experimental simulations of commons dilemmas confirm these intuitions.(15) Participants in the simulations behave far more cooperatively when choosing whether to support a universal solution than when choosing whether voluntarily to restrict their resource use. Even participants who refuse to limit their consumption in the face of clear evidence that the resource is being depleted will vote to eliminate free access to that resource if overuse becomes bad enough. Trapped in a commons dilemma, participants will continue to compete for the resource until the resource is depleted. But given the opportunity to limit capture, a mojority of participants realize at some point that it is in their rational self-interest to solve the commons dilemma.(16)

    Yet in real life, many commons dilemmas have proven impossible to resolve. Not only is it difficult to get people to actively support solutions to commons dilemmas, but also the people with the most to lose if the commons is destroyed--the resource users themselves--often combine together to oppose proposed solutions. The primary questions addressed in this Essay are why resource users so frequently oppose proposed solutions and whether there are any steps that...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT