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SCIENCE JOURNAL ARTICLE OFFERS NEW PERSPECTIVES
ON 'THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS'
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Thirty years after biologist Garrett Hardin's seminal paper "The Tragedy of the Commons," which asserted that users of a common resource will ultimately destroy the resource on which they depend, a re-examination of common-pool resources by other researchers offers an urgent yet hopeful message.
"In the end, building from the lessons of past successes will require forms of communication, information and trust that are broad and deep beyond precedent, but not beyond possibility," writes lead author Elinor Ostrom with colleagues from four other institutions in an article titled "Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges" in the April 9 issue of the journal Science.
"We have only one globe with which to experiment," the authors emphasize.
Ostrom is Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science, co-director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, and co-director of the Center for the Study of Institutions, Population and Environmental Change, at Indiana University. Ostrom's collaborators on the article are Joanna Burger, Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute, Rutgers University; Christopher B. Field, Carnegie Institution of Washington; Richard B. Norgaard, Energy and Resources Group, University of California, Berkeley; and David Policansky, National Research Council.
Considering the bleak outlook of Hardin's original pronouncements, it is somewhat amazing as well as reassuring that contemporary environmental analysts have any "past successes" at all to draw upon in understanding and managing common-pool resource (CPR) problems. Stories of deforestation, depletion of fishing grounds, and degradation of air quality are far more common than news of positive environmental accomplishments.
Yet Ostrom and her colleagues are cautiously hopeful, pointing to examples where individuals and groups of CPR users have come together to forge their own solutions rather than waiting for governments or other institutions to impose rules and regulations. The authors stress that one of the most important lessons learned from empirical studies of sustainable resources is that more solutions exist than those Hardin proposed.
"Hardin's work was originally understood to say that unless you have private ownership of resources, or government control of them, environmental tragedy is inevitable," Ostrom explains. "That was an overstatement. There are situations where that does apply, but it is limited. It applies to situations where there is so much distrust, and communication is so costly, and people see so little benefit to solving environmental problems that they are, effectively, trapped."
Understandably, government ownership and privatization are themselves subject to failure in some situations. For instance, the authors cite satellite images of northern China, southern Siberia and Mongolia that reveal the effects of different approaches to management of grazing lands. In contrast to the state-owned strategies of Russia and China (the latter having more recently also tried privatization), Mongolia's traditional group-property system has resulted in much less degradation to grasslands.
While no single type of property-rights system will be successful in managing every type of common-pool resource, the authors agree that it is possible to identify certain "design principles" that have been employed in the efficient governance of CPRs. A few of the factors that come into play include the variety and proportion of behavioral types among the users of a CPR; how well these users are able to communicate with one another; the perceived value of the resource and the benefits of preserving it; and the extent to which the users are able to monitor the quality of the resource and enforce rules and sanctions.
"There is a huge body of literature that documents where people have overcome these CPR problems," Ostrom says. "Some of that literature is a little naive and romantic, so I think what we state in the article is important because we aren't just saying, 'There isn't any problem. Don't worry.' There are all sorts of puzzles and problems, and we point to some of the more difficult ones, asking, 'Are there not lessons that we can learn from successful cases, and apply them to larger problems? Can't we build a better theory?' We think we have the foundations for it."
( Jeffrey Austin, Office of Communications and Marketing, 812-855-0084, jeaustin@indiana.edu)