On Environmental Governance

Sustainability, Efficiency, and Equity

Oran R Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317255239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In On Environmental Governance, Oran R. Young examines a variety of efforts to meet the challenge of governing human interaction with the environment in the interest of sustainability. At the same time, he considers measures to minimize restrictions on human actors in using their natural resources. Young looks at issues including climate change, biodiversity, deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, and carbon cycle disruption in exploring impacts from the local to the global. The book draws on general ideas about the nature of governance while exploring new models for governing human-environment relations.

PART I

SIMPLE ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE

CHAPTER ONE

NATURAL RESOURCES

SOLVING COLLECTIVE-ACTION PROBLEMS

Collective-action problems are ubiquitous in human affairs. They arise whenever the members of a group make choices that seem rational from an individualistic perspective but turn out to produce outcomes that are undesirable for everyone.¹ The security dilemma in which nation-states engage in arms races fueled by efforts to counter one another’s initiatives is a well-known example arising in the realm of world affairs, as is the failure of groups in domestic settings to band together to supply themselves with public goods, like secure neighborhoods or communal recreation facilities, even though all the members stand to benefit from the supply of such goods. Those seeking to elucidate the fundamental character of collective-action problems have devised a number of analytic constructs to aid thinking about such matters.² The most familiar approach centers on the game-theoretic model known as the prisoner’s dilemma. A particularly striking feature of this construct is that each of the participants has a “dominant strategy,” or, in other words, an option (generally referred to as “defect” in the literature on the prisoner’s dilemma) that seems best regardless of the choices that others make. This means that avoiding or solving such problems is not simply a matter of providing the actors with information about the nature of the situation they face and making sure that they are aware of the existence of other, more cooperative options that can produce outcomes that are better for everyone; the concern about being exploited or becoming what is known as a “sucker” is too great in many cases to allow individuals to accept the risk that others may take advantage of their willingness to opt for a cooperative strategy.

Collective-action problems are just as prominent in the realm of human-environment relations as they are in other issue domains. The most striking cases involve what are known commonly as the tragedy of the commons and the free-rider problem. In the tragedy of the commons users of a resource (e.g., fish, forests, the capacity of biophysical systems to absorb wastes) deplete or overuse the resource because they are able to reap the benefits of doing so while incurring only a fraction of the costs of depleting or degrading the ecosystems in question. The essential challenge here is to find ways to limit the actions of individual users in the interests of achieving sustainability for all. In the case of the free-rider problem, by contrast, the difficulty involves persuading individual members of a group to contribute to the supply of public goods (e.g., the survival of charismatic species, a benign climate system). Even those who stand to reap net benefits if they make a contribution to the supply of such goods are likely to be tempted by the prospect that they can achieve even greater benefits if they are able to enjoy the public goods in question while leaving the cost of supplying them to others. The critical issue here is to create burden-sharing mechanisms that will generate sufficient contributions from the members of the group to cover the costs of supplying and, in some cases, maintaining the relevant public goods.

Formally, representing these problems in similar models is possible. They share the essential feature that what seems like a dominant strategy to those who assess their options in individualistic terms will lead to outcomes in which there are no winners. In thinking about environmental governance, however, there is much to be said for separating these problems and taking them up sequentially. The tragedy of the commons is the dominant concern of those who worry about the depletion or degradation of natural resources and devote their energy to devising ways to curb users’ behavior that leads to these socially undesirable outcomes. Conversely, the freerider problem looms large in the thinking of those who worry about the unwillingness of the members of a group to take the actions needed to supply themselves with a range of public goods like a stable climate or healthy and productive ecosystems. In this chapter I start with a discussion of strategies for avoiding the tragedy of the commons as it pertains to pursuing sustainability in the use of renewable resources. I then proceed to consider strategies for enhancing the willingness of group members to contribute to the supply of goods that everyone will enjoy once those goods become available to any member of the group.

The Tragedy of the Commons

Formalized in the 1950s in articles by Scott Gordon and Anthony Scott dealing with marine fisheries and popularized in Garrett Hardin’s iconic 1968 Science article dealing with communal pastures, the idea of the tragedy of the commons has developed over the years into what is surely the best-known analytic construct dealing with human-environment relations.³ The tragedy is treated as a product of the actions of human users of common pool resources. Such resources are both nonexcludable (once they become available to some members of a group, they are accessible to the others as well) and rival or subtractable (use on the part of individuals reduces the quantity or quality of the resources available for use on the part of other members of the group). The root of the problem lies in the fact that individual members of such groups lack incentives to conserve common pool resources either because others will snap up any units of the resource they leave or because they reap the full benefits but bear only a fraction of the costs associated with using the resource. Acting on the basis of individual incentives, therefore, group members will continue to use such resources until those resources are severely depleted/degraded and, in some cases, driven to extinction/exhaustion. Many observers have concluded that tragedies of this sort are common occurrences in a wide variety of social settings and that avoiding or ameliorating such problems is the central challenge of environmental governance.

Rights, Rules, and Common Pools

How persuasive is this line of reasoning? To answer this question, it is helpful to begin with several clarifying observations about the nature of common-pool resources and the circumstances of those humans who use them.⁴ So long as the supply of a common-pool resource (e.g., a stock of fish, a pasture for cattle) is sufficient to meet the needs of all the human users/appropriators without degrading the quality of the resource or driving up the costs of harvesting, the tragedy will not occur. In situations in which the ratio of supply to demand is favorable, in fact, users are likely to band together to harvest the relevant resource in a cooperative manner that meets the needs of all and improves efficiency. There are many examples of sustainable systems of this sort in small-scale societies organized around various forms of hunting and gathering.⁵ The question now is whether the growth of human populations and the rise of lifestyles featuring high levels of material consumption have created conditions on a global scale in which the supply-demand ratio has tilted so far in the other direction that no existing practices relating to the use of common-pool resources can yield sustainable results.

There are also questions about what is and is not a common pool resource. Stretching supplies of resources (e.g., freshwater) by using them more efficiently is often possible; advanced technologies may reduce the demand for a particular natural resource (e.g., bandwidth in the geomagnetic spectrum). Still, rivalness is a fairly straightforward condition; it occurs whenever one user’s enjoyment of a resource reduces the quantity or quality of the resource available to others. But this is not the case when it comes to nonexcludability. With regard to renewable resources, like fish and game, there is a long history of efforts to introduce exclusion mechanisms, such as use rights and regulations intended to impose restrictions on the actions of potential users. The introduction of restrictions such as individual transferable quotas (ITQs) or catch shares can transform a fish stock that was once a common-pool resource into a resource featuring effective exclusion mechanisms. The creation of transferable emissions permits covering emissions of SO₂ or NO_X can change the atmosphere from a common-pool resource for disposing of the relevant wastes into a resource in which effective use rights govern the actions of human users. Both the feasibility and the cost of introducing exclusion mechanisms vary as a function of the attributes of the resource, the imaginativeness of managers, and the skills of political leaders. It may turn out, for example, that devising effective exclusion mechanisms to deal with the use of the atmosphere treated as a repository for emissions of greenhouse gases is particularly difficult or costly. Yet once the political will to tackle this issue arises, key players will likely find ways to create exclusion mechanisms that will transform this common-pool resource into a resource that prospective users will have to pay to use. For the most part common-pool resources are socially constructed. What was once a resource of this type can be turned into a resource of another type through the creation of exclusion mechanisms.

Solution Strategies

Empirical research has made it clear that something like the tragedy of the commons occurs under some conditions but not others.⁶ What are these conditions, and what strategies are available to those who wish to avoid or ameliorate the tragedy in specific situations? Broadly speaking, three types or families of strategies have emerged in efforts to address this challenge.⁷ Each is associated with a distinctive structure of property rights, and each directs attention to a different mechanism for avoiding the tragedy. For purposes of discussion we can characterize these strategies as (i) the rise of social conventions or norms guiding behavior in common property systems, (ii) the emergence of incentives for individual users to conserve resources in private property systems, and (iii) the development of regulatory arrangements governing behavior in public property systems. Some analysts seek to compare and contrast the performance of these strategies in the hope of coming up with the solution to the tragedy of the commons. But the principal conclusions emerging from a large and growing body of research in this field are that each of the mechanisms has advantages and disadvantages; more than one of the mechanisms may suffice to avoid the tragedy in specific situations, and the choice of a particular mechanism in any given case is apt to be as much a matter of political culture as of the objective merits of particular solutions.

Some of those concerned about the tragedy of the commons equate common property with social practices allowing for unrestricted or open-to-entry access to resources on the part of all those actors who are members of the ownership group. But this is an extreme case that is uncommon in developed governance systems featuring common property. In the more typical case social conventions or norms evolve—explicitly or implicitly—that impose duties on users and spell out well-defined procedures for limiting harvests and regulating the distribution of resources when supply is insufficient to satisfy the demands of all those desiring to use the resources.⁸ The resultant social practices are normally rooted in established cultures that determine who is entitled to harvest the resources, how the harvest is to be distributed among members of the relevant social group, and what measures are available to ensure that individual members comply with the norms embedded in these practices. These practices yield sustainable results in a wide variety of real-world situations, but there is no guarantee that they will always produce socially desirable outcomes in human-environment interactions. Broadly speaking, it is fair to say that this way of avoiding the tragedy of the commons will run into trouble when nonlinear and abrupt changes in biophysical systems require rapid adaptation to shifting conditions and when the relevant cultures are underdeveloped (e.g., in the case of international society) or compromised due to the impact of outside forces beyond their control (e.g., the spread of colonialism). Nonetheless, the evidence is clear that common-property systems have produced sustainable results in a variety of settings featuring distinct patterns of resource use and different types of social practices. Key questions regarding strategies featuring some form of common property include the extent to which such practices can hold up under the pressures arising from population growth and globalization and the degree to which such solutions can work under conditions of modernization or at higher levels of social organization ranging up to the level of global systems, as in cases like protecting the Earth’s climate system.

Privatization offers an alternative approach to avoiding or solving the tragedy of the commons that appeals to those who are accustomed to operating in settings in which private property systems are prominent or even predominant social institutions.⁹ Strategies of this kind involve introducing exclusion mechanisms that make it possible to provide individual members of the group with secure property rights in the resource. This results in creating bundles of rights that may include proprietary, use, exclusion, and disposition rights and whose actual content varies considerably from one case to another. The core idea is that privatization will alter the incentives of individual users in desirable ways. Harvesters will have incentives to limit their take when they know that units of the resource (e.g., fish, trees) they leave today will be available to them in the future and that they will bear the full costs as well as reap the benefits arising from the use of the resource (e.g., parcels of grazing land). This approach to solving the tragedy of the commons has well-known attractions, but it also has real or potential drawbacks. Owners of natural resources may decide to liquidate them entirely, investing the proceeds in alternative activities that seem more profitable to them regardless of the views of the broader community.¹⁰ When the rights in question (e.g., catch shares in the fisheries) do not include the authority to set allowable harvest levels, privatization may still lead to overuse or degradation of resources. Market failures may lead to outcomes that are inequitable or violate other community standards. The actions of owners may generate more or less severe side effects (e.g., the disruption of ecosystems critical to other living resources) that owners of a given resource are free to ignore in making decisions about the use of the resources they own. The results may violate pertinent standards of fairness or justice, either because the initial allocation of resources among members of the ownership group is inequitable or because such arrangements give owners an unfair advantage over other members of the social group. None of these problems is an inevitable consequence of privatization; in specific situations, those who are alert to the dangers, possess the authority needed to address these problems, and are prepared to take vigorous steps to exercise this authority can avoid or overcome many of the challenges. Nevertheless, empirical research on cases in which groups adopt some form of privatization as a strategy for avoiding the tragedy of the commons makes it clear that privatization is not a panacea under real-world conditions. Despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that privatization appeals to many on what are basically ideological grounds, therefore, it is critical to examine the pros and cons of this family of solutions to the tragedy on a case-by-case basis.

This brings us to strategies featuring public property as a means of avoiding or solving the tragedy of the commons. The core idea here is simple: if the state owns land and natural resources and if the agents employed by the state to manage human uses of these resources can be counted on to act in the public interest, it is possible to establish and implement rules and regulations that would limit uses of the resources in the interests of achieving sustainable outcomes and ensuring that the public reaps benefits in such forms as lease sales, royalties, and user fees imposed on individual or corporate users. As with the other strategies, there are many real-world situations in which arrangements of this sort produce socially desirable outcomes. But here too there are pitfalls.¹¹ Special interests may capture regulatory agencies or exert undue influence over their behavior. Regulatory systems are subject to problems of inability to determine optimal use rates, bureaucratic sluggishness, and institutional arthritis that become more severe with the passage of time. Public resources are sometimes simply given away on the basis of arguments that are ideological in character or made available to private users on a heavily subsidized basis. Nor is public ownership a guarantee that uses of natural resources will conform to community standards of equity or justice. A special case arises with regard to rivers, coastal and marine areas, and airspace managed by public authorities, despite the fact that they are not, strictly speaking, part of the public domain. Resources of this sort are commonly subject to some sort of public trust doctrine that authorizes and even obligates the state to make arrangements for their management.¹² As in the cases of common property and private property, the bott...