The Drama of the Commons (2002) / Chapter Skim
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12 An Evolutionary Theory of Commons Management
12 An Evolutionary Theory of Commons Management
Pages 403-442
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From page 403... ...
More than a century has passed since Darwin wrote, but the debate among evolutionary social scientists and biologists is still framed in similar terms the conflict between individual and prosocial behavior guided by selection on individuals versus selection on groups. In the meantime, social scientists have devel403
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From page 404... ...
On the other hand, the slow rate at which cooperative institutions evolve suggests that considerable friction will afflict our ability to grow up commons management institutions if they do not already exist and to readapt existing institutions to rapid technological and economic change. A better understanding of the way cooperative institutions arise in the long run promises better tools to foster their more rapid evolution when needed and to regulate their performance as necessary.
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From page 405... ...
The elegant studies by Nisbett's group show how people's affective and cognitive styles become intimately entwined with their social institutions (Cohen and Vandello, 2001; Nisbett and Cohen, 1996; Nisbett et al., in press)
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From page 406... ...
Then, to explain why humans have the unusual forms of social behavior depicted in our list of stylized facts, we need to appeal, we believe, to the special properties of cultural evolution. Evolutionary models have both intellectual and practical payoffs.
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Evolutionary theory often will be useful because it will lead to an understanding of how to accelerate institutional evolution to better track rapid technological and economic change. (For an analogous argument in the context of medical practice, see Nesse and Williams, 1995.)
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From page 408... ...
. Evolutionary models are a natural extension of the concept of bounded rational choice.
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It is the fecundity of insects, and in one case rodents, that permits a single queen to produce huge numbers of sterile workers and hence large, complex societies composed of close relatives (Campbell, 1983~. · Group selection.
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Our own contribution to the study of human behavior is a series of mathematical models in the Darwinian style of what we take to be the fundamental processes of cultural evolution (e.g., Boyd and Richerson, 1985~. The application of Darwinian methods to the study of cultural evolution was advocated forcefully by Campbell (1965, 1975~.
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From page 411... ...
They are replicated as a consequence of the behavior of vehicles of gene replication." Commons institutions are deeply rooted in cultural traditions. Theoretical models show that the processes of cultural evolution can behave differently in critical respects from those only including genes.
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From page 412... ...
EVOLUTION OF COOPERATIVE INSTITUTIONS Here we summarize a theory of institutional evolution that we have developed elsewhere in more detail (Richerson and Boyd, 1998, 1999, 2001~. The theory is rooted in a mathematical analysis of the processes of cultural evolution and is, we argue in these papers, consistent with much empirical data.
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From page 413... ...
Rather, the evolution of complex societies has involved the relatively slow cultural accumulation of institutional "work-arounds." These take advantage of a psychology evolved to cooperate with distantly related and unrelated individuals belonging to the same symbolically marked tribe while coping more or less successfully with the fact that these social systems are larger, more anonymous, and more hierarchical than the tribal scale ones of the late Pleistocene (Richerson and Boyd, 1998, 1999~. Tribal Social Instincts Hypothesis Our hypothesis is premised on the idea that group selection plays a more important role in shaping culturally transmitted variation than it does in shaping genetic variation.
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From page 414... ...
At first, such populations would have been only slightly more cooperative than typical nonhuman primates. However, genetic changes, such as a more docile temperament, would allow the cultural evolution of more sophisticated institutions that in turn enlarged the scale of cooperation.
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However, cultural evolution also creates new selective environments that cause cultural imperatives to be built into our genes. Paleoanthropologists believe that human cultures were essentially modern by the Upper Paleolithic, 50,000 years ago (Klein, 1999~.
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At the same time, cultural evolution must cope with a psychology evolved for life in quite different sorts of societies. Appropriate larger scale institutions must regulate small-group subversion of large-group favoring rules.
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The use of coercion in complex societies offers excellent examples of the imperfections in social arrangements traceable to the ultimately irresolvable tension of selfish and prosocial instincts. Although coercive, exploitative elites are common enough, there are two reasons to suspect that no complex society can be based purely on coercion.
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From page 418... ...
In practice, brutal sheriffs, incompetent lords, venal priests, and their ilk degrade the effectiveness of social organizations in complex societies. Squires (1986)
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From page 419... ...
Leaders in complex societies must convey orders downward, not just seek consensus among their comrades. Devolving substantial leadership responsibility to subleaders far down the chain of command is necessary to create small-scale leaders with face-to-face legitimacy.
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and territory incursion is a frequent cause of violent conflict. Exploitation of Symbolic Systems The high population density, division of labor, and improved communication made possible by the innovations of complex societies increased the scope for elaborating symbolic systems.
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Subcommunities of the imagined type are often important for commons management, ranging from environmental pressure groups to professional communities with a role in environmental management. Many problems and conflicts revolve around symbolically marked groups in complex societies.
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The worldwide growth of fundamentalist sects that challenge the institutions of modern states is a contemporary example (Marty and Appleby, 1991; Roof and McKinney, 1987~. Ongoing cultural evolution is impossible to control, at least completely.
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From page 423... ...
Legitimate Institutions In small-scale egalitarian societies, individuals have considerable autonomy, considerable voice in community affairs, and can enforce fair, responsive even self-effacing behavior by leaders (Boehm, 1999~. At their most functional, symbolic institutions, a regime of tolerably fair laws and customs, effective leadership, and smooth articulation of social segments can roughly simulate these conditions in complex societies.
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Legitimate institutions have a huge role to play in commons management. One of us has had considerable positive experience with the burgeoning system of Cooperative Resource Management Committees (CRMCs)
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From page 425... ...
REPRISE: TESTING THE HYPOTHESES How much confidence should we have in the tribal social instincts and workaround hypotheses? We argue elsewhere that much evidence from a number of domains is more consistent with the tribal social instincts hypothesis than with its best articulated competitors (Richerson and Boyd, 1998, 2001; Boyd and Richerson, no date)
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From page 426... ...
The systematic application of modern evolutionary theory to human behavior is scarcely a quarter century old. The variety of evolutionary theories we can imagine is rather large, especially if cultural evolution and gene-culture convolution play important roles.
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From page 427... ...
In even the most atomistic human societies, people have some propensity to fairness in economic interchanges that can aid their transition to the modern world. The indications that social organization is deeply entangled with styles of thinking suggest that complex, historically contingent evolution does indeed create considerable evolutionary inertia in institutions.
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The rapid change that often accompanies market penetration to formerly isolated village societies is more likely, we suggest, the culprit in destabilizing traditional commons institutions than markets per se.
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Foreign social institutions are often (1) not compatible with existing institutions, (2)
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For example, the conversion of Russia from a socialist one-party state to a market economy and elective democracy is far from a success after more than a decade of work. The study of the rates of cultural evolution prevailing in the modern world and a sophisticated dissection of the processes that regulate those rates is a project in its infancy.
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From page 431... ...
A few systems for collectively managed cultural evolution do stand out as possible examples of the application of sensible collective decision making to cultural change. In contemporary open societies, the harnessing of science to the public policy-making process via government-sponsored science at research institutions and research universities works splendidly when the science is tractable and social consensus as to directions to take are strong.
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From page 432... ...
The variation is best explained by the existence of complex cultural traditions of social behavior, the collective results of which we call social institutions. Our ability to organize cooperation on a scale considerably larger than predicted by theory based on unconstrained selfish rationality, or by most evolutionary mechanisms, is one of the most striking features of our species.
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From page 433... ...
We believe that all the empirical methods needed to study cultural evolution have been used effectively in some specialized application or another, even if they are not yet in every social scientist's toolkit. We believe there is nothing to lose and everything to gain by developing and verifying a rigorous evolutionary theory of human behavior.
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Bettinger, R.L. 1991 Hunter-Gatherers: Archaeological and Evolutionary Theory.
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1965 Variation and selective retention in socio-cultural evolution.
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Chagnon, and W Irons 2000 Adaptation and Human Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective.
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Evolution and Human Behavior 19:215-241. Henrich, J., R
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Johnson, A.W., and T.K. Earle 1987 The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State.
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1998 A behavioral approach to the rational choice theory of collective action. American Political Science Review 92: 1-22.
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in Institutional evolution in the Holocene: The rise of complex societies. Proceedings of the press British Academy.
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1966 Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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From page 442... ...
Witt, U 1992 Explaining Process and Change: Approaches to Evolutionary Economics.
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