Can there be commons without tragedy?
In a residential complex, a mango tree is laden with semi-ripe mangoes, bending towards the ground with its weight. Multiple residents have their eyes on the prize, the delicious mangoes. Two scenarios may occur: one, overnight, the mangoes from the tree disappeared, someone has taken all of them and no one knows who did; the other, all the residents decide that they will take one mango each for their household. Which is more likely to happen?
The first of the two scenarios, i.e. the one where mangoes are taken by an individual or group of individuals overnight, leaving no mangoes for other residents, is an example of this tragedy. A case where the individual maximization by a set of individuals led to the exhaustion of the entire resource. The second scenario is the “ideal” scenario where all the mangoes are shared amongst the residents. This ideal scenario depends upon the assumption that people are capable of coming over their individual interests. In order to see how people would react to the above dilemma, I conducted a survey with the same question, verbatim. It was found that out of 216 survey takers, 65.3% of the survey-takers believed that scenario 1 (representing individual maximization) would be more likely to happen than scenario 2 (representing the ability to overcome individual greed) (see fig.1).
Treat this mango tree as a common, a resource that is not privately owned by any individual or institution, or by any government authority. It is an open access, free-for-all resource that can be utilized by any individual, to any extent. The access to this resource is not governed by any private or government institutional laws.
The above two scenarios presented to the survey-takers act as two of many possible directions that the tragedy of the commons can take. But before we understand these two possible scenarios, let us first understand what the tragedy of the commons is. The tragedy of the commons can be described as a situation wherein an individual decides to maximize their own gain by extracting resources from the commons hampering the collective or common good. The core idea of the tragedy is that individual maximization on limited resources leads the system to collapse because the system cannot support the individual maximization, due to its inability to expand endlessly. Simply put, unlimited extraction for personal gain from finite resources hampers the commons.
Tragedy of the commons gained mass attention after Garrett Hardin’s paper with the same title. In his paper, Hardin proposes certain solutions to the tragedy of the commons. He claims that his solutions may be the answer to avoiding the tragedy. His solutions can broadly be categorized into three: mutually agreed upon coercion, providing ownership, and restriction on freedom.
First, mutually agreed upon coercion appears as a self-contradictory solution because coercion cannot be mutually agreed upon by the individuals who are being coerced. In order for coercion to take place, there must be an authoritative figure that enforces rules and regulations or coerces using their authority. On the contrary, it can be argued that the rules and regulations enforced by the authority can be collectively made by the people who are being coerced while the execution is also mutually agreed upon by them. Hardin strengthens this argument by giving the example of criminal laws that are enforced on a country’s citizens and how the citizens agree to face the repercussions when they violate the law. This, in his case, is the act of mutually agreed upon coercion because the majority is ready to accept the harm that may come its way because of the coercive methods.
Second, the idea of privatizing or providing ownership to an authority. This authoritative figure or institution that will govern the commons would have absolute power over the people who access the commons. This does not solve the problem of the commons but only aggravates it. The restriction to access would create power dynamics within the community that was uncalled for. For example, the Chilika Lake dispute between the traditional fishermen and the non-fishermen groups was a result of a power dynamic created when the Odisha government, in 1991, decided to give the right over the fishing grounds to the highest bidder, most of whom were rich non-fishermen, marginalizing the traditional fishermen (Deshpande and Bedamatta 46). The non-fishermen then gave the fishing grounds on a contractual basis to the companies who would extensively fish for their own gain.
Third, the third solution that Hardin posed was in relation to the population problem by taking away the freedom to breed. According to him, “freedom to breed will bring ruin to all” (Hardin 1248). His only way to solve the problem of overuse of the commons is to reduce the population that makes use of the commons. For him, the reduction in population is only possible if we abandon our freedom to breed. This sort of an authoritarian step was implemented in China during the 1980s. “Millions of Chinese parents had to endure strict enforcement methods of the policy, including forced sterilization and forced abortions.” (Pletcher 2020).
The fertility rate and birth rate both went down while the death rate remained the same post policy implementation, indicating how there was an increase in the aging population with no youth to replace it. Further, in China, there is a general affinity towards preferring the male child over female child, leading to social problems such as female infanticide and foeticide throughout the country. Incentivizing or disincentivizing giving birth to a specific number of children is a disrupted idea because this deprives the parents their right of choice on how many kids they want to have. This concept of incentive and disincentive is based on the notion that the individual citizen is incapable of making the right decisions or choices, which in most cases is untrue.
An unintended consequence of Hardin is a freeze on citizen action and a deep belief in strong power held by an authority. While Hardin is able to assess the difference between the good of an individual or a set of individuals and the greater collective good, his solutions are authoritarian in nature and violate the basic freedoms and rights of people. His idea that unlimited extraction will at some point lead to strain on finite resources is accurate, however, better solutions to that tragedy do exist.
Some of them are proposed by Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom proposes eight principles that can help manage the commons: defining clear group boundaries; matching the local needs and conditions to the rules governing use of commons; “ensure that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules”; ensuring the rule-making rights of a community are maintained by outside authorities; developing an internal monitoring system of members’ behaviors; using graduated sanctions for rule violators; providing accessible and low-cost means for dispute resolution; “build responsibility for governing the common resource in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system” (Walljasper 2011).
She argues that commons can work provided that the people who are reliant on the commons cooperate in maintaining the commons. For instance, water bodies, especially marine water bodies, are treated as commons by fisheries and the seafood industry as a whole. Fisheries, mechanized or artisanal, are often regulated by the States in India rather than having a central regulatory authority. These State authorities focus more on resolving conflicts between the fisheries than regulation of net sizes and species caught by them.
In order to fill in this loophole, fishermen from nearby villages form union-like communities or authorities to regulate the net sizes allowed and the species one catches. These authorities allow for prioritizing local ecological knowledge and concern for the environment while producing ecologically-driven seafood harvests that would economically benefit these fishermen. They also are ready to sacrifice economic benefits for the larger social benefit, i.e. providing the future generations of fishermen with fishes that they can catch (Karnad 2017). This supports Ostrom’s idea that there are no one-size-fit-for-all solutions to complex problems and one must always change the solution according to the context it is applied in.
The tragedy of the commons as a whole model is based on an assumption. The assumption of a particular archetype of a human who would always try to maximize individual gain over collective good. There have been instances where this is not the case. People have put the collective good ahead before their individual gain. This is also evident in the survey conducted where 34.7% people believed that it was possible. There sure exists a tragedy but it is not one that cannot be controlled. The control over this tragedy can take place when there is some level of communication amongst the people who access or utilize these resources. The unintended or intended communication amongst these stakeholders, the ones who utilize the resources, allows for maximizing profits amongst them (Ostrom and Nagendra 2006).
References:
Deshpande, R S, and Satyasiba Bedamatta. Water Conflicts in India: a Million Revolts in the Making, Routledge, 2008, pp. 44–49.
Hardin, Garrett. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science, vol. 162, no. 3859, 1968, pp. 1243–1248., doi:10.1126/science.162.3859.1243.
Karnad, Divya. “Navigating Customary Law and State Fishing Legislation to Create Effective Fisheries Governance in India.” Marine Policy, vol. 86, 2017, pp. 241–246., doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2017.09.002.
Ostrom, Elinor, and Harini Nagendra. “Insights on Linking Forests, Trees, and People from the Air, on the Ground, and in the Laboratory.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 103, no. 51, 2006, pp. 19224–19231. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30051282. Accessed 12 May 2021.
Pletcher, Kenneth. "One-child policy". Encyclopedia Britannica, 12 May. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/one-child-policy. Accessed 12 May 2021.
Walljasper, Jay. “Elinor Ostrom's 8 Principles for Managing A Commons.” Elinor Ostrom's 8 Principles for Managing A Commons | On the Commons, 2011, www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons