Tragedy of the Commons

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  Concepts & Elements of Sustainability

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The English Press

    (Publisher)

  ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Chapter- 6 Tragedy of the Commons Cows on Selsley Common. The Tragedy of the Commons is a useful parable for unders-tanding how overexploitation can occur. The Tragedy of the Commons is a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen. This dilemma was first described in an influential article titled The Tragedy of the Commons, written by Garrett Hardin and first published in the journal Science in 1968. ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Hardin's Commons Theory is frequently cited to support the notion of sustainable development, meshing economic growth and environmental protection, and has had an effect on numerous current issues, including the debate over global warming. Central to Hardin's article is an example (first sketched in an 1833 pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd) of a hypothetical and simplified situation based on medieval land tenure in Europe, of herders sharing a common parcel of land, on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze. In Hardin's example, it is in each herder's interest to put the next (and succeeding) cows he acquires onto the land, even if the quality of the common is temporarily or permanently damaged for all as a result, through over grazing. The herder receives all of the benefits from an additional cow, while the damage to the common is shared by the entire group. If all herders make this individually rational economic decision, the common will be depleted or even destroyed to the detriment of all. A similar dilemma of the commons had previously been discussed by agrarian reformers since the 18th century.

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  Agent-Based Modelling in Economics

  • Lynne Hamill, Nigel Gilbert(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  10 Tragedy of the Commons

  10.1 Introduction

  The term ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ was coined in 1968 by Garrett Hardin, a professor of biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His famous paper (Hardin, 1968) primarily addressed the problem of human overpopulation and argued that technology could not be relied on to accommodate ever-increasing numbers: social changes were required to limit the population. As one example among several, he described a pasture open to all and argued that, eventually, if each herdsman behaved rationally and pursued his own interest by adding animals to the pasture, the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ would ensue because the pasture could not support an ever-increasing number of animals. Thus, the herdsman pursuing his own private interest did not promote the interest of the community as a whole: Adam Smith’s invisible hand (see Box 5.4 ) was not at work. But this analysis fails to acknowledge that people have found ways of avoiding the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ by cooperating. For instance, Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom (1990, pp.58–88) described systems that have persisted for hundreds of years for managing alpine pastures in Switzerland, forests in Japan and water for irrigation in Spain, while Straughton (2008) described the management of moorlands in northern England.

  Before discussing the issues, we first define exactly what we mean by ‘commons’. Formally, a ‘common pool resource’ (CPR) is ‘a natural or man-made resource system that is sufficiently large as to make it costly (but not impossible) to exclude potential beneficiaries from obtaining benefits from its use’ (Ostrom, 1990, p.30). In economic terms, a CPR is not a public good because it is a limited resource and use by one person means that it cannot be used by another. Indeed, it is because the CPR is a limited resource that the problem of management arises. In contrast, the use of a public good by one person does not reduce its availability for another, for example, a weather forecast (Ostrom, 1990, pp.31–32).

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  Climate Justice and Collective Action

  • Angela Kallhoff(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Instead, the diagnosis of a tragedy juxtaposes a particularly dramatic outcome and the goodwill of actors. Steve Gardiner has provided the most vivid picture of such a tragedy when exploring climate change as the “real Tragedy of the Commons.” 32 He argues that the climate tragedy is particularly difficult to resolve not only because of its vast global scale, but also because of its intergenerational dimension. 33 Tragedies have unintended, yet particularly severe effects that result from the actions either of individuals or of collectives. I reinterpret what is often called the “Tragedy of the Commons” to explain that tragedies also entail unintended misfortunes, and that actions have causal effects. In order to highlight this side of the Tragedy of the Commons, I describe a whole array of tragedies: the tragedy of exhaustion, the tragedy of chaotic exploitation, the tragedy of gradual depletion, the tragedy of invisibility, and the tragedy of reinforcement through channelling. All of these tragedies result from causal effects on the resource that together are particularly harmful. The effect is that the common-pool resource is severely endangered. 2.3.1 The tragedy of unintended exhaustion As long as people and institutions are not forced to coordinate their activities when benefitting from natural resources, unplanned depletion is a likely outcome. In optimizing private gains, many parties together contribute to overconsumption. This first Tragedy of the Commons is the tragedy of unintended exhaustion. 34 It results from a situation in which over-exploitation takes place, although long-term sustenance would be the best for at least many of the beneficiaries of a shared resource. Access barriers might even exist and be incorporated in rules that communities choose as a means of preserving their life-sustaining natural resources. 35 Yet such efforts might not lead to success, because they may not be all-encompassing

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  Behavioral Public Economics

  Social Incentives and Social Preferences

  • Shinji Teraji(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  7 Governing the commons with social incentives 7.1 The Tragedy of the Commons The term ‘commons’ is widely used in political discourses on how to tackle challenges such as climate change, food security, and transmission of knowledge. Climate change can be viewed as an illustration of collective action problems detrimental to commons. The greenhouse gases that any individual emits have an imperceptible impact on climate change, while activities producing greenhouse gases (e.g., driving, heating, and air conditioning) have noticeable benefits to the individual’s personal well-being. In academic writings, the commons have come to represent an alternative model of social organization, going beyond the market–state dichotomy. Governance is about forming institutional structures: the concerns are making social priorities, resolving conflicts, and facilitating coordination. Polycentricity is a concept that describes a complex form of governance with multiple centers of decision-making, each of which operates with some degree of autonomy. Governance arrangements exhibiting polycentric characteristics may be capable of striking a balance between centralized and decentralized (or community-level) governance. In a polycentric governance system, many autonomous units take others into account through processes of cooperation, competition, conflict, and conflict resolution. The Tragedy of the Commons is a thought experiment used by Hardin (1968). It is a metaphor that refers to the ultimate destruction of a common. According to Hardin (1968), users of a common are selfishly rational, and they will consequently overuse the common, resulting in the tragedy of its destruction. Imagine some herdsmen who have access to a common pasture. Each of them can increase one’s herd by at least one sheep. If the herdsmen behave fully rationally and self-interestedly, they bring one more sheep to the common

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  Advanced Introduction to Community-based Conservation

  • Fikret Berkes(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Edward Elgar Publishing

    (Publisher)

  94 6 No tragedy on the commons 6.1 Introduction Conserving biodiversity depends on understanding how people interact with their environment, and what motivates them to conserve. Long-term biodiversity conservation in much of the world can be achieved in partnership with the people living with it, the only viable option for an effective human stewardship of the biosphere. No one owns biodiversity, but many people and groups have stewardship responsibilities for it. Biodiversity is a shared resource. It is both a local and a global commons. But is it subject to “the Tragedy of the Commons,” the Hobbesian vision of what happens to shared resources in the absence of a strong central ruler? Under open-access or free-for-all conditions, the “tragedy” is likely to occur. However, scholars have challenged the assumption of open-access, and questioned if government regulations and the market are the only necessary conditions to solve the tragedy. In fact, many of the really important commons (for example, atmosphere, oceans, biodiversity) cannot in any case be controlled effectively by regulations or be divided up and privatized for markets. Commons theory developed as a response to these assumptions, elaborating principles that reflect the ability of groups to deal with open-access conditions and collectively manage their commons. Starting in the 1980s in laboratory-like settings of small communities to understand the workings of local institutions, commons theory gradually incorporated multi-level linkages from local to global. Contemporary commons theory is sufficiently mature to specify the conditions under which collective action is feasible for community-based conservation. NO TRAGEDY ON THE COMMONS 95 Success depends on the ability of people to use the resources they conserve today for their own livelihood needs and well-being tomor- row. This is not always easy, raising questions of rights, and power and responsibility-sharing, known as co-management.

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  The Cambridge Handbook of Commons Research Innovations

  • Sheila R. Foster, Chrystie F. Swiney(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  3 (1949): 100–101 (citing Aristotle: “What is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest.”). 3 Barton H. Thompson Jr., “Tragically Difficult: The Obstacles to Governing the Commons,” Environmental Law 30, no. 2 (January 2000): 241–278. See also Robert Stephen Hawkshaw, Sarah Hawkshaw & U. Rashid Sumaila, “The Tragedy of ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’: Why Coining Too Good a Phrase Can Be Dangerous,” Sustainability, 4, no. 1 (2012): 3141–3150 (“[Hardin] is the frequent victim of drive-by-citation. The Tragedy of the Commons is invoked because it sounds good, not for what Hardin was actually advocating.”). 4 Siegfried Von Ciriacy-Wantrip, “The Economics of Environmental Policy,” Land Economics, 47, no. 1 (1971): 35–45; Robyn Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach (State University of New York Press, 1992); Ian Burton, The Environment as Hazard (The Guilford Press, 1993): 124. Examples are legion; the paper has been cited over 40,000 times per Google Scholar. 5 See, e.g., Daniel J. Rankin, Katja Bargum & Hanna Kokko, “The Tragedy of the Commons in evolutionary biology,” TRENDS in Ecology and Evolution, 22, no. 12 (2007): 644; David Grossman & Ruth Kark, “Communal Holdings and the Economic Impact of Land Privatization,” in Policies and Strategies in Marginal Regions (W. Leimgruber, R. Majoral & C-W. Lee eds., 2003): 23. 6 Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” 1243. 26 thesis. 7 Hardin suggests coercive, 8 illiberal means of population control, 9 merely using the idea of the commons as a thought experiment, a sort of stepping-stone to introduce issues of social morality, human rights, and the nature of the state. A read through of the full article would no doubt surprise or even offend most readers, even those generally familiar with commons scholarship.

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  Philosophy of Economics

  A Heterodox Introduction

  • Oliver Schlaudt(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Figure 3.1 ). The piece of land can support a certain number of cattle, which the herdsmen share. If both respect this constraint, they will earn a certain profit X. However, there is a temptation to overgraze. If one of them increases the number of cattle, he harms the grazing land and reduces its productivity. However, both herdsmen have to share the costs Y, while one alone can make the extra profit Z. If both choose this option, however, cattle herding will eventually collapse.

  FIGURE 3.1

  The Tragedy of the Commons as a prisoner’s dilemma.

  Even if the commons may play only a marginal role in today’s livestock farming, at least in Europe, there are nevertheless many other communally used goods which, despite their vital importance, were for a long time far too self-evident in many parts of the world to be perceived as such. Groundwater and the atmosphere are important examples, as is the environment in general in its function as a dumping ground for sometimes highly toxic waste. The Tragedy of the Commons can in this sense be transferred one-to-one to the problem of environmental pollution: if the manufacturer cleans his emissions of toxic substances, he alone bears the costs. If he releases the emissions unfiltered into the atmosphere, he shares the costs with the community (under a number of problematic assumptions that we will discuss in Chapter 4 ).

  The well-known result arises once again and the tragedy takes its fateful course: individually rational actions (in the sense of the economist’s concept of rationality) lead to a collectively irrational result, the invisible hand fails. For an understanding of Hardin’s concern, it is important to know that he does not question the underlying model of rationality and thus considers the disastrous outcome of the game-theoretical analysis – the collapse of farming – to be a realistic prognosis.

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  Evolutionary Perspectives on Environmental Problems

  • Iver Mysterud(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part 3The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons Passage contains an image

  6The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons

  Garrett Hardin

  In science, as in other human endeavours, progress is sometimes delayed by a “double-take,” to borrow a term from the comic theatre. The message is first met with silence, only later to be followed by a painful dawn of understanding. Recall the silence that greeted Mendel’s theory of heredity in 1866. Not until 1900 did three scientists experience a double take and alert the world to genetics. Delay of the “take:” 34 years.

  Human ecology furnishes another example. In 1833 William Forster Lloyd published his Oxford lectures.1 Little notice was taken of this work until 1968, when I expanded the theory in my essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.”2 Contributing to the long neglect, no doubt, was a 43-word summary in a massive review published in 1953 by the United Nations.3 This book, the work of an anonymous committee, had the thrust of Lloyd’s argument exactly wrong.4 Duration of the “double take:” 135 years.

  The intellectual climate of the times no doubt contributed to the delay. Laissez-faire was the dominant attitude after Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776. The prevailing spirit was wholly optimistic and non-interventionist. Let each man pursue his own interest, economists said, and the interests of all will be best served in the long run.

  Not necessarily, said Lloyd. Let a number of herdsmen turn their cattle loose in a pasture that is jointly owned and soon the common will be ruined. Why? Because the pasture has a limited “carrying capacity” (to use a modern term), and each herdsman gets the full benefit of adding to his herd, while the disbenefits arising from over-exploitation of the resource (e.g. soil erosion) are shared by all the herdsmen. Fractional losses are not enough to deter aggressive cattle owners, so all the exploiters suffer in an unmanaged common. 5

  Alternatives to the unmanaged commons can be classified under two headings. In privatism, the resource is subdivided into many private properties.

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  The Palgrave Environmental Reader

  • Richard Newman, Daniel Payne(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.” He then goes on to say, “This inevitableness of destiny can only be G arrett H ardin 189 illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappi- ness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama.” The Tragedy of the Commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably sat- isfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long- desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy. As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” This utility has one negative and one positive component. (1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the addi- tional animal, the positive utility is nearly 1. (2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing cre- ated by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular deci- sion-making herdsman is only a fraction of 1. Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another . . . . But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons.

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  Barbed Wire

  Capitalism and the Enclosure of the Commons

  • Patrick Brantlinger(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  15 I suspect that most fifth-graders could figure out the fallacy of this argument, because everywhere around us are examples of the more or less successful collective management of natural resources and other aspects of the economy. What would be gained by outsourcing America’s national parks, for example, to a corporation to manage? Why privatize the U.S. Post Office, which is both efficient and self-supporting? What improvements would privatized police departments bring about? Besides, both governmental and corporate modes of management are collective. But the claim that the commons are inevitably tragic has been used to contend that public assets—a city-owned water system, for instance—should be turned over to corporations. Instead of a fifth-grader, it has taken a Nobel Prize winner to dispel the Tragedy of the Commons argument.

  p.130 Actually working commons

  The late Professor Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009. She is the only woman to have won that prize, and she did so as a political scientist. Both facts raised the hackles of a number of economists. She became a Nobel laureate on the basis of empirical research that demonstrated how the collective management of “the commons” or of “common pool resources” need not lead to tragedy, but could instead often contribute to ecological sustainability and be productive for those participating in their use.16 Ostrom’s work and that of her husband Vincent, as well as of their numerous colleagues and students, have opened new perspectives on what constitutes the commons today and on aspects of certain resources that cannot or should not be privatized.

  A key result of Ostrom’s work has been to discredit the idea that communal management of resources typically has tragic results. That notion originated in a 1968 article by biologist Garrett Hardin in Science

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  Except-Africa

  Remaking Development, Rethinking Power

  • Emery Roe(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 The Tragedy of the Commons

  Like Garrett Hardin, this chapter’s counternarratives keep to grazing and herders, but with wider applicability. The chapter concludes with a discussion of what is triangulated on by the four counterscenarios, namely, the rather surprising, but robust, finding that if we differentiate herders, herds, and their rangelands from the outset, we will never find a Tragedy of the Commons taking place.

  The counternarratives are based on competing theories of resource management in the face of a highly complex, uncertain environment, as found in the arid and semiarid rangelands of sub-Saharan Africa. Triangulation of theories requires that: (1) each approach should take complexity seriously, i.e., each represents at some fundamental level a theory of uncertainty induced through complex processes; (2) the approaches in question should be orthogonal on the dimension of comparison, which, in our case, means each differs fundamentally on the core Tragedy of the Commons issue of resource management; and (3) each approach defamiliarizes the problem of resource management in fresh ways, i.e., more conventional analytical frameworks, such as microeconomic analysis, are often part of the problem being analyzed, which is certainly the case in the tragedy-of-the-commons debate.1

  The approaches are orthogonal (though not perfectly so) in the following way. Both the local justice and management-under-stress frameworks equate resource management with local level, while cultural theory argues that this management represents only one or two of the handful of basic cultures possible for local resource management. Girardians will have none of that, insisting that none of these cultures—local or otherwise—are in any sense permanent, doomed as they are to disappear in crises of undifferentiation. Thus, if these divergent approaches do indeed converge (i.e., triangulate), we can be fairly confident that we are on to something that should be followed up, as in “No matter from what direction you look at this issue, you’re still led to the same [conclusion, starting point, problem definition, or other desideratum].” Of course, convergence and confidence do not mean we have miraculously found “common ground” between approaches that differ so radically from each other. Rather, what we have done, when triangulation is successful, is recast a complex issue in ways that we feel confident to pursue further.

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