Economics
Common Resources
Common resources are goods or services that are non-excludable but rivalrous, meaning they are available to all but can be depleted by use. Examples include fisheries, forests, and clean air. Common resources often face the challenge of overuse or depletion due to the difficulty in regulating access and usage, leading to the "tragedy of the commons" dilemma.
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11 Key excerpts on "Common Resources"
eBook - PDFEnvironmental Law and Contrasting Ideas of Nature
A Constructivist Approach
- Keith H. Hirokawa(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
3 Defining Nature as a Common Pool Resource Jonathan Rosenbloom 1 introduction One of the many ways in which we attempt to study resource use and conservation is to label nature and individual natural resources as “common pool resources.” 2 These are resources that are depletable and to which numer- ous common users maintain access in a rivalrous manner. Ultimately, humans engage in rivalry over the consumption of nature in which we share or pull from the same natural resources, which may certainly be depleted over time. Applying the common pool resource definition to nature incorporates several legal, societal, behavioral, and cultural concepts intended to capture the intricate and complex place where nature and the management of nature (or lack thereof) meet. That intersection involves the coming together of two very different systems: one, a dynamic, diverse ecological system that includes many forms of natural capital, such as wetlands, forests, and water, and the other, a human-made, multijurisdictional, multilayered system of governance that attempts to manage the use of that natural capital through legal rules and regulations. 3 The common pool resource definition attempts to capture both the dynamic ecological system and the human-made system of rules and 1 I would like to thank Professor Blake Hudson, Associate Professor, Joint Appointment, LSU Law Center and LSU School of the Coast and Environment, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for his perceptive and critical comments in helping properly frame and draft this chapter. I would also like to thank Professor Keith Hirokawa for letting me be a part of this book. 2 For purposes of this chapter, “natural resource” and “natural capital” are used indistinguish- ably to refer to various aspects of nature. In the scholarly literature, the “common pool resource” definition is typically applied to distinct forms of natural capital, such as wetlands and forests, as opposed to nature more broadly.
eBook - PDFDevelopment Economics
Theory and Practice
- Alain de Janvry, Elisabeth Sadoulet(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN Common Property Resources and Determinants of Cooperation WHY A RE T HERE C OMMON P ROPERTY R ESOURCES ? As we saw in Chapter 15, property rights are defined in terms of five cumulative rights (Ostrom, 2001). They are the rights to: • access; • extract; • manage; • exclude others; and • alienate (sell or transfer). For these rights to matter, they have to be enforced. Open-access resources offer users only two rights: access and extraction. Common property resources (CPRs), also called common pool resources, give community members the rights of access, extraction, management, and exclusion. Under CPRs, the services of a resource such as fishing, grazing of animals, and the extraction of firewood or lumber from a forest are (1) collectively excludable (nonmembers are excluded, while members cannot be excluded), and (2) rival in use (the fish, forage, or lumber disappears with appropriation by one member), also called substractible. As can be seen in Figure 16.1, CPRs can be compared to private and open-access resources in that they are rival; and they can be compared to club goods in that they are collectively excludable. There are many CPRs in the world (Baland and Platteau, 1996).
eBook - ePubNatural Resources and the Environment
Economics, Law, Politics, and Institutions
- Mark Kanazawa(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
5 Common-pool resourcesIn this chapter, we focus on an extremely important subset of natural resources known as common-pool resources (CPRs). Common-pool resources, which I will define shortly, are commonly encountered in environmental economics. This is because many natural resources may be characterized as common-pool resources. Such resources include fisheries, grazing pastures, forests, and local water resources. Analyzing resources as CPRs provides a systematic way to think about this special class of resources and helps explain why we get certain outcomes such as overharvesting or depletion under certain conditions. This allows us to characterize the economic efficiency of those outcomes and to propose sensible policies. All of this is to say that we get a lot of analytical mileage out of this concept, and we will be returning to it repeatedly in the later special topic chapters.What is a CPR?
To understand the notion of a CPR, consider a valuable natural resource, like a fishery or a prime grazing area. Because it is valuable, many people would like to tap it for its economic value, by sailing their fishing boats into it, or driving their cattle onto it. For the purposes of analysis, CPRs have two key characteristics. First, the amount taken by me reduces the amount that is available for you. If I catch a fish, you cannot catch that same fish. If I drive my cattle into a grazing area and the cattle consume forage grasses, that means less forage for your cattle. Since you and I are rivals for the resource, we say that our activities are rivalrous . Alternatively, you sometimes hear people say that our uses are subtractable . That is, my use subtracts from the resource available to you. You should think of these terms as meaning the same thing.Second, it is difficult to keep every Pam, Dacie, or Harriet from using and benefiting from the resource. For example, it might be extremely difficult to keep anyone with a boat from fishing in a fishery on the open seas. It may also be difficult to fence in a grazing area or a forest, or to keep people from tapping a source of valuable groundwater. In all of these cases, we say it is difficult to exclude users. This is the notion of non-excludability
eBook - PDFGlobal Environmental Politics
Problems, Policy and Practice
- Hayley Stevenson(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Everyone thinks chie fl y of his own, hardly at all of the common interest ’ (350 BC) (Aristotle, Politics , Book II, chapter 3). A ustrian economist and champion of private property, Ludwig von Mises, later warned that ‘ If land is not owned by anybody . . . it is used without any regard to the disadvantages resulting. Those who are in a position to appropriate to themselves the returns – lumber and game of the forests, fi sh of the water areas, and mineral deposits of the subsoil – do not bother about the later effects of their mode of exploitation ’ ( 1949 : 652). ‘ The Commons ’ are Unmanaged and Freely Accessible The term ‘ commons ’ is widely used to refer to resources that are not exclusively owned: resources that are freely available for humans to use. Think of air, rivers, oceans, and land that is either collectively owned or set aside for public use. Scientists and scholars generally refer to these as ‘ common pool resources ’ , and 22 The Tragedy of the Commons they highlight two key characteristics that these resources share. The fi rst is excludability , which means that it is dif fi cult or costly to control access to the resource: it is dif fi cult to exclude any potential users or even limit their access. Migratory species of birds and other wildlife are characterised in this way, as are the atmosphere, freshwater, and large tracts of forest or land. The second characteristic is subtractability , which means that when one person uses the resources it reduces the quantity or quality for others: if a factory emits pollution into the atmosphere it increases pollution concentration and thus reduces air quality for others; a fi sherman ’ s daily catch reduces fi sh stocks available to others (Feeny et al. 1990 : 3 – 4). Garrett Hardin ’ s parable dealt with a hypothetical grazing environment in which some land was shared.
eBook - ePubEnvironmental and Natural Resources Economics
Theory, Policy, and the Sustainable Society
- Steven Hackett, Sahan T. M. Dissanayake(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
- Common-pool resources (CPRs) are resources for which it is difficult to prevent multiple individuals from harvesting resource units, and resource units harvested by one are not available for another. Thus, CPRs differ from private goods, where it is possible to exclude others from use, and pure public goods like public radio, where my use does not impair your use. Garrett Hardin coined the term tragedy of the commons to refer to the situation in which individuals overuse the commons because of the presence of appropriation externalities: if you graze more cattle, you get the financial gain, while the damage to the common pasture is borne by everyone in the community. Elinor Ostrom has argued that the tragedy of the commons can be (and has been) avoided through the construction and maintenance of carefully crafted CPR governance structures.
- Ecosystem services, such as the supply of fresh water, soil fertility, and climate regulation, are the benefits that human society receives, both directly and indirectly, from ecosystem functions. Costanza and colleagues observe that these ecosystem services represent flows of materials, energy, and information from the stock of natural capital.
- The argument has raged over whether or not there is growing resource scarcity because of growing population, as Malthus originally argued. In fact, the price of many marketed natural resources such as coal, oil, natural gas, forest products, seafood, and pasturage has not risen as rapidly as some predicted and in many cases has actually fallen. This has reinforced the arguments of the technological optimists such as Julian Simon. On the other hand, in many parts of the world, ecosystem services as well as critical common-pool resources are being depleted. There is truth in both camps: human ingenuity has indeed offset substantial amounts of resource limitations with technological advances, but many unique and irreplaceable resources are under increasing pressure, and many are failing.
Review Questions and Problems
- Suppose that in the oil example given in this chapter for dynamic efficiency, all else remains the same except that the discount rate r
- Sheila R. Foster, Chrystie F. Swiney(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Since its publication, Hardin’s article has gained impressive traction with a broad range of scholars from across the globe in diverse fields of study. For many years after its publication, the concept of the “commons” was consonant with Hardin’s open pasture where everyone had rights of inclusion and no one had rights of exclusion. These “common pool resources,” as they came to be known, are characterized by the difficulty of excluding users from them (“nonexclud- ability”) and the potential for overconsumption (“rivalrousness”), meaning that one user’s share or consumption of the good diminishes the availability of that good to others. Many scholars, and this is particularly true of legal scholars, have tended to hew very closely to these neo classical economic assumptions when analyzing resource dilemmas or problems through the lens of the commons. These scholars start from the idea that the commons, or common pool resource, is an unrestricted and unregulated open access resource that allows uncoordinated actors to overconsume or over exploit a resource. They then proceed to analyze the collective action problems that beset these resources and propose solutions to avoid “tragic” outcomes. The year 2020 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Elinor Ostrom’s seminal book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. In this influential work, Ostrom challenged the core assumption underlying Hardin’s Tragedy by refuting the view that individ- uals cannot collectively come together and manage common pool resources sustainably without resorting to either a system of public regulation or private property rights. Ostrom’s research revealed that many social groups and communities around the world, in entirely different contexts and focused on entirely different resources, have successfully averted the Hardinian curse pertaining to shared resources by developing and maintaining self-governing institutions.
eBook - PDF- Katharina Pistor, Olivier De Schutter(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Columbia University Press(Publisher)
This rela-tionship, in turn, serves to protect a variety of uses and users of common-pool resources. Regulating entry and exit among common-pool resources may also have positive consequences for environmental services and the environmental infrastructure that produces those services. Managing spill-over effects limits destructive uses that harm users of linked common-pool resources, and in so doing provides some protection for social and public goods and those dependent on such goods for their livelihoods. 8 C O N C L U S I O N Returning to the epigraph but modifying it slightly, “the only thing worse than being excluded from environmental services is not to be excluded from common-pool resources” captures two related exclusion tragedies that exhibit different dynamics. The two are related because environmental services and common-pool resources are provided by the same environmental infrastructure. They exhibit different dynamics because they entail different types of “goods.” Environmental services such as water purification, flood control, and soil regeneration are public goods. As public goods, if they are available, many people may partake of their value. Thus, the tragedy of exclusion in relation to environmen-tal services is a tragedy of supply. Degrading or extinguishing environ-mental services deprives people of their value. Common-pool resources such as rivers, groundwater basins, fish stocks, and forests—unlike pub-lic goods—are rivalrous or subject to crowding. This typically occurs when people convert the flows of common-pool resources into private goods, such as harvesting fish or diverting water from a stream. The tragedy of exclusion in relation to common-pool resources is a tragedy of demand. Unchecked crowding or unregulated use leads to the dissipa-tion of the value of resource flows. In both instances, people are deprived of essential resources.
eBook - PDFCommon-Property Arrangements and Scarce Resources
Water in the American West
- Edward M. Barbanell(Author)
- 2001(Publication Date)
- Praeger(Publisher)
The main example Hardin uses—herders graz- ing their cattle upon an open, common rangeland—is taken by many economists to be an accurate model of all commons problems. How- ever,there are certain resources that exhibit factor endowments that are not captured by Hardin’s scenario; the presence of those factor endowments tells against private-property arrangements for those resources. In other words, because economists have rushed to ex- plain with a single, attractive metaphor a whole range of problems associated with Common Resources, they have “obscured some impor- tant distinctions in the physical characteristics and the manner of use of [those resources].” 5 Certain characteristics of resources may make those resources less amenable to private-property arrangements. In such cases, a common-property arrangement may be more effective for dealing with resource scarcity. I will use Hardin’s account of “the tragedy of the commons” as a starting point for discussing the issues sketched earlier. In the course of this discussion, we will have to grapple with some key eco- nomic concepts, the most important of these being externalities. As will become clear, certain resources exhibit externalities for which private property is not well suited. Armed with both a more accurate picture of common property and a more elaborate structure of indi- viduals’ behavior, a common-property arrangement emerges as a vi- able alternative to private ownership for such resources. Water in the West is one of those resources. In the final chapter,I lay out an al- ternative to the Prisoner’s Dilemma model of human behavior; I de- scribe there the conditions under which the Assurance Game model Economics and Property Rights 111 becomes operative, and I show how those conditions either already exist or might be created in the American West.
eBook - ePubContested Common Land
Environmental Governance Past and Present
- Christopher P. Rodgers, Eleanor Straughton, Angus J.L. Winchester, Margherita Pieraccini(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
The variety of uses of common land, and the layers of perception that have endowed it with a symbolic place in national culture, lie at the root of the multifaceted array of contests over common land which form the central theme of this book. At the heart of all communal resources lies an inherent tension between individual self-interest and the communal good. This, of course, is the conflict at the heart of the ‘tragedy of the commons’, assumed by Hardin (1968) and many others to lead inevitably to the destruction of the resource in question. Notwithstanding the body of literature which has demonstrated that sustainable management of common pool resources (CPRs) is possible, the inherent contest between individual and communal interests remains a key feature of common land, distinguishing it from other property regimes. On common land there exists an essential paradox: no one individual can take sole control or dispose of the resource; yet the interests and actions of each individual are immensely powerful – potentially destructive – and must be carefully balanced by the community of users if the common is to be sustained.These inherent tensions frequently gained substance in day-to-day contests over the use of common land. Indeed, the property rights regime on common land contained within it a set of tensions between the rights of the owner of the soil and those having communal land-use rights. Not infrequently, the lord of the manor’s rights to game or minerals came into conflict with the tenants’ rights to grazing or to take vegetation. Managing a common as a breeding ground for game was not necessarily compatible with managing it for grazing; quarries could destroy pastures (e.g. Aldred, 1990, pp76–78, 124–126, 157–159); mining could lead to subsidence. Furthermore, different common rights were not always mutually compatible: the exercise of turbary rights could potentially conflict with pasture rights, as digging peat and turf could destroy the vegetation cover, for example, or lead to waterlogging. Even different aspects of the exercise of a particular common right might lead to tension, as in the conflicting demands for bracken, where the careful harvesting of fronds for thatching could be sabotaged by wholesale harvesting for animal bedding or for burning into potash. Such tensions and conflicts were rarely far from the surface, as the case studies in Chapters 6 to 9 of this volume demonstrate. They also lie at the heart of the quest for successful governance regimes for common land, as discussed below in Chapters 3 and 5
eBook - PDF- Kumar, Sunil(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Biotech(Publisher)
Cannot be resold/distributed. rural households keep a traditional complement of livestock. Ever since the publication of Garrett Hardings thought provoking article ‘Tragedy of Commons’ (Hardin 1968), there has been a great deal of research interest on common property resources(CPRs). The concept has been used to explain detrimental effects on economy, ecology and environment. These effects could be more discernible in fragile ecosystem of hilly region where degradation of CPR land would cause substantial socio-economic unrest not only in hills but also in plains. There is no denying fact that with increasing human and livestock pressures the size and quality of CPRs is dwindling. Jodha (1986) reported a decline of 41 to 55 per cent in the area of village commons over a period of 30 years and declining trend was also notice by Vashist and Pathania (1999) in Himachal Pradesh. The factors resulting in decline of these resources are: land reforms, development programmes, unlawful encroachments and commercialization of agriculture (Jodha 1985, Iyengar 1988). The management of CPRs has remained a highly debated issue with increasing biotic stress of human and livestock adaptation. The CPRs have come under the proverbial strain ‘Tragedy of Commons’ where in every member of the society stake claim in open pool resources and nobody shares the efforts and cost in managing them. As such, we come across over-exploitation of natural resources, overgrazing of pastures, air and water pollution, encroachment, depletion of water sources, shrinking biodiversity and extinction of many species of plants and wild life. This so called developmental dilemma of recent times has put a heavy debit charge on ecology and environment particularly of hills that are the precursors of rich resource endowment in the country.
eBook - PDF- Tracey Skillington(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Under this type of regula- tory regime, private-public resource management partnerships would be 220 T. SKILLINGTON permitted only if they can be shown to promote equity and inclusion in the distribution of the resource in question. There are at least four objec- tives guiding such regulatory reform: (1) to subject private appropria- tions of essential natural resources to greater levels of scrutiny, regulatory control, and democratic accountability; (2) to subject the rights status of Common Resources to further legal clarification and more stringent pro- tection; (3) to establish new ‘common assets’ management procedures (like that proposed by the UN, Back to Our Common Future, Visions for Sustainable Development 2012: 27) that work towards minimizing what are currently expanding inequalities, and ensure a communization of the costs of grave resource depletion and long-term protection; and (4) to prevent or, at least, delimit the possibility of overuse on the part of any one community or state-corporate actor alliance. Regarding the first objective in particular, traditional Lockean renditions of a justified private appropriation of natural resources, which in their original state belong to all in common, come under scrutiny especially if not enough and as good is left for others. 6 According to Locke (1970) there is a constraint on the private procurement of originally Common Resources such as water reserves when they are in scarce supply. Equal share of a global commons may permit persons limited use of finite resources so long as one does not cause so much damage that far-reaching perturbations occur and the long-term supply of such resources is not put in jeopardy (Moellendorf 2011: 106). At present, the overappropriation of limited water and arable land sup- plies in the developing world is jeopardizing the basic resource needs of local communities.
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