The Drama of the Commons (2002) / Chapter Skim
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1 The Drama of the Commons
1 The Drama of the Commons
Pages 1-36
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From page 3... ...
As we discuss, however, that logic depends on a set of assumptions about human motivation, about the rules governing the use of the commons, and about the character of the common resource. One of the important contributions of the past 30 years of research has been to clarify the concepts involved in the tragedy of the commons.
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From page 4... ...
The rational actor model that dominates economic theory, but is also influential in sociology, political science, anthropology, and psychology, posits strict self-interest. As Adam Smith put it, "We are not ready to suspect any person of being defective in selfishness" (Smith, 1977~18041:446~.
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From page 5... ...
Just as evolutionary and developmental biology progressed by studying the fruitfly, Drosophila melanogaster, an organism well suited to the tools available, we suggest that studies of the commons and related problems are an ideal test bed for many key questions in the social sciences.2 As is evident in the chapters of this volume, commons research already draws on most of the methodological traditions of the social sciences. There are elegant mathematical models, carefully designed laboratory experiments, and meticulous historical and comparative case studies.
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From page 6... ...
Interest was fanned by the debate about limits to growth, and the increasing awareness of deforestation in tropical regions of the world. Prior to the publication of Hardin's article, titles such as "commons," "common-pool resources," or "common property" appeared only 17 times in the academic literature published in English and cataloged in the "Common-Pool Resource Bibliography" maintained by Hess at Indiana University.4 Between that time and 1984, before the Annapolis, Maryland conference organized by the Na
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From page 7... ...
Panel on Common Property Resource Management, the number of such titles had grown to 115. The Annapolis conference in 1985 brought together a large number of scientists from different fields and different nations to examine common-pool resources and their management.5 The conference provided an opportunity for scholars to synthesize what was known in disparate disciplines as of 1985 which we summarize briefly in this chapter.
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From page 8... ...
was an organized, self-acting group of Teutonic families, exercising a common proprietorship over a definite tract of land, its Mark, cultivating its domain on a common system, and sustaining itself by the product." In an in-depth analysis of Maine's work, Grossi (1981) argues that Maine had identified how village communities in many settings had developed a keen sense of private property for agricultural plots combined with a common-property system for forested and pasture lands.
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As shown in Figure 1-2, the underlying relationship between fishing effort measured on the horizontal axis and cost measured on the vertical axis is linear, while the relationship to revenue, also measured on the vertical axis, is curvilinear. This is due to the presumed basic biological relationships involved in determining maximum sustainable yield.
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From page 10... ...
NOTE: Total revenue, TR; total cost, TC; level of fishing effort; E; maximum economic yield, MEY; maximum sustainable yield; MSY; open access, OA. Profit is revenue minus cost and is represented by the vertical distance between the total revenue and total cost curves at any particular level of effort.
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From page 11... ...
controls can be effective, suggesting that effective rules cannot be based on creating internalized norms or obligations in resource users. The other is that agreements on rules must be reached only through the state (usually, the national government)
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Another type of challenge came from game theorists. Early attempts to formalize commons situations using game theory typically posed the problem as a prisoners' dilemma (PD)
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From page 13... ...
Similarly, when the opposite conditions were present, Netting predicted that users would develop some form of private property (see also Netting, 1981~. Netting provided substantial evidence to support his claims, also showing that common-property regimes developed under the above conditions had been sustained for centuries without overexploiting resources.
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From page 14... ...
Even scholars focusing on a single continent, such as Africa, who were studying forest resources were unaware of the findings of researchers studying pastoral resources or inshore fisheries on the same continent. Panel on Common Property Resource Management: A First Synthesis In September 1983, the National Research Council appointed a Panel on the Study of Common Property Resource Management.8 The panel recognized that one of its chief tasks was to create a framework whereby individuals from multiple disciplines could begin to communicate about the diverse property systems operating in different resource sectors.
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From page 15... ...
The need to compare the costs and benefits of various institutional arrangements for a given resource. Under some circumstances, common property regimes perform better than private property.
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Furthermore, the rich case study literature illustrated a wide diversity of settings in which users dependent on common-pool resources have organized themselves to achieve much better outcomes than can be predicted by Hardin's model (Cordell, 1990; Ruddle and Johannes, 1985; Sengupta, 1991; Wade, 1994~. This research changed the focus of the field from a search for the correct overall conception and the single right policy to a search for understanding of the conditions under which particular institutional forms serve user groups well in sustaining their resource bases over long periods of time.
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From page 17... ...
Such a resource could be left as open access without rules or could be managed by a government, as private property, or by a common property regime. The term "common property resource" had become so embedded in the language used in the economics and policy literatures that making this conceptual advance has been difficult.
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From page 18... ...
The diversity of property rights regimes that can be used to regulate the use of common-pool resources is very large, including the broad categories of government ownership, private ownership, and ownership by a community. When no property rights define who can use a common-pool resource and how its uses are regulated, a common-pool .
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From page 19... ...
Thus, a core problem related to the use of common-pool resources is the cost of preventing access by potential users unless they agree to abide by a set of rules. In regard to a common-pool resource, users free ride when they harvest from or dump pollutants into the resource independently and take only their own costs and benefits into account.
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From page 20... ...
Harvesters obtain the full benefits from their overuse through the market for the resource units and suffer only a proportion of the costs they impose on others by overusing the system that provides the resource units. Common-pool resources share the problem of difficult exclusion with another important policy problem the provision of public goods such as international peace, knowledge, and living in a just society (Olson, 1965; Young, 1989~.
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Institutions for governing use fit into three broad classes that are referred to as private property, common property, and government property. Each of these institutional types has a wide diversity of subtypes, and many hybrids exist as well.
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We briefly describe three further attributes of resources that may have a major impact on the incentives that individuals face: renewability, scale, and cost of measurement. Renewable or Nonrenewable Common-Pool Resources Renewability relates to the rate at which resource units that are extracted (or used as a sink)
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From page 23... ...
Heterogeneity of resource users may not have the same effects on local common-pool resources and on international resources. The literature on local common-pool resources suggests different, even opposing effects of heterogeneity among actors on cooperation.
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Although most scholars agree that heterogeneity of resource users makes a difference, considerably more work is needed to clarify this concept and its effects.~7 It has become increasingly clear that global and local common-pool resources are not only analytically similar, but interrelated. The use of resources at the local level affects international and global resources, and vice versa.
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Meanwhile, considerable scientific uncertainty exists about how various property regimes and associated institutional forms affect resource sustainability. The best available knowledge strongly suggests that the search for a single best strategy will be futile.
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examine the effects of attributes of resource users, their groups, and the tasks they face by reviewing findings from experimental studies involving simulated common-pool resource users. Falk, Fehr, and Fischbacher (Chapter 5)
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Wilson (Chapter 10) discusses the history of scientific fisheries management to raise issues about the appropriate roles of standard science and local knowledge in resource management and about the effect of scientific uncertainty on the ability to use deterministic scientific models as a main management tool.
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From page 28... ...
Agency for International Development, the Ford Foundation, and the World Wildlife Fund. At about the same time as the NRC Panel on Common Property Resource Management was organized, Acheson and McCay organized two symposia and one workshop to bring together anthropologists from diverse subfields to examine the meaning of the concept "the commons" and to draw on the tools of sociocultural, economic, and ecological anthropology to examine basic questions of the commons (see McCay and Acheson, 1987b)
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From page 29... ...
For some time, scholars tried to classify all goods, resources, and services into those that could be called "private goods" and were best provided by a market and those that could be called "public goods" and were best provided by a government. The recognition that there were multiple attributes of goods and resources that affect the incentives facing users came about gradually as the dichotomies posed by Samuelson and Musgrave proved to be theoretically inadequate to the task of predicting the effect of institutional arrangements (see Chamberlin, 1974; Ostrom and Ostrom, 1977; Taylor, 1987)
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From page 30... ...
Berkes, F., ed. 1989 Common Property Resources: Ecology and Community-Based Sustainable Development.
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Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. 1999 A Comprehensive Bibliography of Common Pool Resources (CD-ROM)
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1989 Common Pool Resources and Collective Action: A Bibliography; Volume 1. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis.
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From page 33... ...
Pp. 13-30 in Proceedings of the Conference on Common Property Resource Management.
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Pp. 31-62 in National Research Council, Proceedings of the Conference on Common Property Resource Management.
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Ostrom 2001 The contested role of heterogeneity in collective action: Some evidence from community forestry in Nepal. World Development 29(5)
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