Garret Hardin’s projection of his own flawed values onto communities managing commons should have been discarded instead of embraced. As Dr. Elinor Ostrom’s recent Nobel Prize in Economics has shown, local community management is often the best option.
Garrett Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons remains a bastion of environmental and political policy to this day,over forty years since publication. Hardin’s premise, that individuals will maximize their own interests in shared resources even if it leads to environmental destruction, has been quoted hundreds if not thousands of times, and taken as gospel truth. However, subsequent to the publication of the article, many researchers continued to study community management of common resources, and one researcher has extracted design principles that are present in successfully managed commons. The “tragedy” is not inevitable, nor does it require external authority to avoid.
In addition to ignoring actual examples refuting his position, Garrett Hardin promoted a belief in elitism and external control, even to the point of stating, “Freedom to breed is intolerable,” and calling for a rejection of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In spite of these obvious affronts to equal rights, Hardin’s article has become a central tenet in the promotion of external control of natural resources, with the imposition of “property rights” coming from advocates of either nationalization or privatization. The imposition of property rights has often led to swift and massive devastation of previously sustainably-managed natural resources.
In some cases of privatization or nationalization, a vibrant community-based management of the natural resource was swept away, as in the recent cases of the nationalization of forests of Nepal in 1957 and the privatization of lands in Argentine Chaco since 1982.
Even without property rights, wider access to a natural resource previously closed by locals may be enforced by national and international governments, as is occurring off the coast of Somalia, where local fishermen are turning to piracy to replace the fishing income lost to naval-guarded European factory ships and transport vessels dumping toxic waste.
In other cases, regional economic goals impose minimum extraction rates on natural resources, inhibiting conservation efforts. In the South Saskatchewan River Basin of Alberta, water licensees who do not extract water for three consecutive years may lose their license, even though the rivers are already drawn dangerously low. While people may be extracting the natural resource at an unsustainable rate, this is not due to a lack of restriction within local communities but is instead driven by external authorities.
Central to the concept of “commons” is that the outcomes are collective: everyone that relies on a resource is dependent on the actions of everyone else. Most aboriginal groups are already familiar with this concept. The Nuu-chah-nulth of the Alberni Valley on Vancouver Island have a saying, “Hishuk-ish-t’sawalk,” which means “Everything is one and all is interconnected.” The connection to the land, the air, and the water conditioned individuals from taking more than what met their necessity, even though no external authority existed to restrain them.
The concept of interconnectedness is forcibly driven from Western culture in most arenas, whether through the ridicule of “Zen mysticism” and “communist notions,” or the exultation of individual accomplishments.
In the battle between the leviathan of giant government and the tyrannyasaurus of market-based “efficiency” (where it is good to be at the top of the food chain), a third option is ignored. Much like the rise of small, nimble mammals, local community-based management is often the most successful approach to sustainable management of natural resources.
The irrigation systems of the Zanjeras of the Phillippines were first recorded by the Spaniards in 1630. These mud canals flood frequently and require substantial amounts of shared manual labour by landowners. Access to water is not necessarily specific to the geographic location of the land; water access is made available through multiple sections, not just upstream/downstream placement, which ensures that almost everyone has balanced benefits and costs.
In Spain, the irrigation areas known as Huertas were chartered in 1432, but the organizations date back another 500 years. Community management determines access to the water, and each huerta has unique rules. Water allocation may be by time, where each irrigator has a fixed length of time to divert water to his or her fields, or by volume, where each irrigator’s storage capacity is filled but rotation will not return until everyone else’s storage is also filled. The opening of gates adjacent to two irrigation systems is done jointly, by the irrigator losing access and by the irrigator gaining access. As a result, opportunistic behaviour is reduced through decreased opportunities.
In studying both successful and unsuccessful management of commons by community groups, Dr. Elinor Ostrom has determined that there are eight characteristics of successful management. These “design principles” are rarely explicitly documented in the rules governing community management, but analysis can determine if the design principles are present. One such principle is known as “minimal recognition of rights to self-organize,” where external authorities recognize the rights of the local community group to manage, without impediment, the natural resource. This principle is often violated by governments bound by trade agreements and/or political and financial greed.
Two other design principles are monitoring and sanctioning. While Canadians are very good at organizing monitoring operations on natural resources, the emphasis on “positive” actions often leads to an unwillingness to increase the costs to violators through sanctions. Efforts to alter self-maximizing behaviour are unlikely to succeed unless the community management group is willing to alter the bottom line of the violators by increasing costs, either socially or financially.
Garrett Hardin’s superficial examination of the selfish nature of humans should have been discarded along with other distorted views on humanity. Instead, it became entrenched in environmental and political philosophy. There are many challenges to sustainable management of commons, but destruction by self-maximizing individuals is not inevitable.
Cultural values play a significant role in creating internal norms that limit or encourage individual behaviours, and community efforts can reinforce those values. The structure of the community management system is as important as the coherence of values within the community. In this day of failed nationalization, and the privatization of natural resources, local community management can be the best option.
Ostrom’s Eight Design Principles for Successful Commons Management
1) Clearly Defined Boundaries: This includes geo¬graphic regions, who, what, how much, when, and under what conditions these conditions may change.
2) Proportional Equivalence Between Benefits and Costs: A balance should occur between the effort expended and the rewards accrued.
3) Collective-Choice Arrangements: The people affected by the rules make the rules and enforce them.
4) Monitoring
5) Graduated Sanctions: This is internal monitoring and internal sanctioning. Long-enduring systems have low initial sanctions, and those sanctions which are agreed-to by the participants are the ones least contested yet most effective.
6) Conflict Resolution Mechanisms: Resolve conflicts quickly and affordably.
7) Minimal Recognition of Rights to Organize: This is external recognition of rights. When a decision is made locally, external authorities respect that decision.
8) Nested Enterprises: Small systems grouped into small numbers within small numbers at even higher levels. The seven preceding design principles are all repeated at each of these levels. The key is to drive the decision-making down to the level that is directly impacted by those decisions.
References:
Altrichtera, Mariana, and Basurto, Xavier (2008). “Effects of Land Privatisation on the Use of Common-pool Resources of Varying Mobility in the Argentine Chaco,” Conservation and Society 6(2) pp.154-165. www.conservationandsociety.org/cs-6-2-154.pdf
Bromley, Daniel W., and Chapagain, Devendra P. (1984). “The Village against the Center: Resource Depletion in South Asia.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 66 (5) pp. 868-873.
Hardin, Garrett (1968). “The Tragedy of the Commons,”
www.garret¬hardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of_the_commons.html
Ostrom, Elinor (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of In¬stitutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press. New York, NJ, U.S.A. 18th printing, 2006
[Watershed Sentinel, November-December 2009]
