Political Economy Students' Journal

Imagine a village of herdsmen living together, taking advantage of the surrounding pastures to feed their cattle. Each villager owns a certain number of animals, and all of them depend on the existence of grasslands on which their cattle can graze, and which are thus owned commonly, a so-called commons.

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According to a neoclassical worldview, every single one of those herdsman, all presumably being rational-choice decision-makers, will try to maximize his gain and therefore eventually ask the question:

“What is the marginal utility of adding one more animal to my herd?”

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The yield generated by this additional animal is entirely reaped by its owner, while the costs incurred from the animal grazing are externalized to the community or rather, shared by all. Subsequently each individual in the village will have to come to the same conclusion that the rational course of action is to acquire as many additional animals as possible. Given that there is no intrinsic limit to the number of animals and that the pastures in vicinity of the village is necessarily finite, this will lead to scarcity at some point in the future, as there will be no more grassland on which to graze. The community is now headed towards inevitable catastrophe.

 

This somewhat tragic allegory was first published in a pamphlet by British economist William F. Lloyd in 1833, in order to introduce readers to the concept of overuse of a commons. In 1968 it was unearthed anew by US-American ecologist Garret Hardin in his seminal text “The Tragedy of the Commons” (Hardin, 1968). Hardin uses Lloyd’s thought-experiment as basis for his claim that there are just two possible options for avoiding environmental disaster: Either to rely on authoritarian planning to allocate rights to use of the commons or to sell them off, partitioning them into pieces of private property so as to internalize the risk of over-use and eliminate the incentive to limitlessly acquire ever more ‘cattle’. 

 

Following this, Garret Hardin set out to show how the free choice of families to bear and raise as many children as they wish, would eventually deplete resources. In his eyes the population problem has no technical solution, making that freedom ultimately intolerable. Hardin’s almost Malthusian reasoning on this, became widely accepted at the time and inspired many economists to join the call for privatization in the name of the preservation of limited natural resources. This opinion was so widespread that “The Tragedy of the Commons” turned out to be one of the most cited scientific papers of all time.

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And, after reading it, one understands how Lloyd’s allegory provides a compelling and simple story, which seems to support one side of the seemingly unending debate on privatization. Looking closer at the inferred argument however, Hardin seems to depart from rather weak assumptions, despite reaching a supposedly strong conclusion. As a general rule in academia, one should be suspicious or at least reserve some scepticism pertaining to arguments with these characteristics. And indeed, it’s overwhelming acceptance also came with some stark criticism by various well-known scholars, not the least of whom was luminary institutional economist and political scientist Elinor Ostrom. 

 

Nevertheless, the lesser-known points of critique notwithstanding, the acceptance for Hardin’s simple rhetoric was so pervasive that political economists and anthropologists are still regularly confronted with new forms of Hardin’s hypothesis today, when defending any form of governance that does not rely either on authoritarian rule or privatization. This essay endeavours to highlight some of the main logical and historical counter-arguments, that half a century of economic analysis has provided, as well as argue how William F. Lloyd’s story about the village of herdsman actually presents a stronger argument for the abolition of private property than for privatization. 

 

The first important point is that the binary choice between privatization or authoritarian planning constitutes a false dichotomy. An empirically-based argument for this was laboriously laid out by Elinor Ostrom in her book “Governing the Commons” (Ostrom, 1990). For this, Ostrom did extensive research on cattle herders in Switzerland, forest dwellers in Japan, irrigators in the Philippines, and other such groups who for centuries, oblivious to Hardin’s prescription, had crafted rules to manage the commonly held pastures, forests, and water sources their livelihood depended on. She then developed what she considered to be the main characteristics of a successfully held commons. These included clearly defined group boundaries, effective monitoring of the commons and escalating sanctions for cheaters. 

 

It should be noted that Ostrom’s findings were criticized for being too case-specific, and hence unable to disprove Hardin's ‘Tragedy’. In other words, the fact that there are communities here and there that have, for some time, successfully managed a commons, is not considered to make Hardin’s general prediction any less valid. However, this rejection can seem disingenuous since Hardin’s reasoning clearly attempts to establish some form of universal inevitability. From his writing it is clear how he wishes to assert that his conclusion necessarily follows from the given premises. 

As if it is not made clear enough by his explicit use of the term ‘Tragedy’, Hardin spells it out, after he is finished describing Lloyd’s analogy:

 

 “Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit - in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination to which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”

 

Since Elinor Ostrom found specific examples of commons that are managed without heading towards catastrophe, this is not at all the inevitability Hardin constitutes it to be. After all, Ostrom does not claim that there are no systems in which Hardin's Tragedy comes true. Indeed, one could, for instance, easily interpret the astonishing rate at which some edible fish are vanishing from the oceans due to overfishing as, in some way, a manifestation of it. But the claim that it is inevitable appears irredeemably false. And this is the most important fact of all because, if we are to believe that it is not false, we are doomed to neglect an extremely wide variety of forms of governance that are based neither on privatization nor on authority. Had everyone firmly believed in Hardin’s narrow interpretation of human-resource dynamics, many of the inspiring experiments to manage the commons of eco-socialist and libertarian origin in recent memory, such as the Zapatista movement in the state of Chiapas in Mexico or the Internationalist Commune of Rojava in Syria might never have existed. 

 

A simplistic yet elegant logic explaining this, is that brought forward by famed Marxist economic-geographer David Harvey in his 2011 paper called “The Future of the Commons” (Harvey, 2011). In it, Harvey contends that when looking at the story of the village, we are misled into focusing too much on the fact that the pasture is commonly owned by the herdsmen and not nearly enough on the fact that the herds themselves are private. According to him, the real problem arises from the fact that there are private resources that depend on one another, while the benefits of one are internalized and the damage done on the other is externalized. 

 

Even if we accept the inevitability of the ‘Tragedy’, would it not be equally valid to draw the conclusion that it is privatization that is at fault? The entire argument rests on the fact that in such a situation, any extra animal acquired represents more profit than damage from any individual’s perspective. Would the ‘Tragedy’ not be averted if both the yields and the costs of the extra cattle were shared by all? Hardin himself says that some commons such as air and water, by their nature, cannot readily be fenced or otherwise limited and are therefore difficult to privatize. He thus concludes that these must be managed via the use of coercive laws. The argument, is that an alternative solution could potentially avoid authoritarian planning, by making sure that all benefits of production are commonly reaped, along with the corresponding costs. But let us consider the consequences of Hardin’s proposal to privatize the commons as a means to preserve our finite resources. We live in a world where land is, for the most part, privatized, but we are nonetheless on the brink of ecological breakdown. While it could be argued that air is still a commons and that green-house gas emissions are perhaps the consequence of a poorly regulated one, such a line of reasoning surely cannot be applied to soil erosion or deforestation. For example, the enclosure of Brazil’s rainforest has, in fact, been one of the main drivers of its destruction over recent years. To assume that private ownership disincentivizes the overuse of a resource seems therefore almost naive, given that the history of capitalism has continuously demonstrated the opposite.

 

This essay does not set out to argue that the de-facto abolition of private property is the most reasonable way to tackle all of the ecological problems of resource-scarcity, which we are already confronted with today or which still lay ahead. The goal is simply to show in Hardin’s own terms that the arguments laid out in “The Tragedy of the Commons”, which have at times been elevated to an outright unquestionable truth, have at best enjoyed undeserved attention, and at worst constrained our collective imagination in ways that could prevent us from finding much needed alternative solutions. One can only imagine how different the discussion around privatization would look today, had Hardin concluded that the only way to avoid depletion of common resources was to do away with private property altogether. 

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Reference:

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David Harvey, "The Future of the Commons" Radical History Review (2011) (109): 101–107.

 

Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)

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Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons” Science 162 (1968), 1243 – 8