the planet, increasing incrementally the burden of humanity upon the Earth. This is a Prisoner’s Dilemma, insofar as some people may choose to forgo more children in the interests of the planet, but others will inevitably “defect” or cop a “free ride.” The worst outcome is much more likely (now sometimes called the “Nash Equilibrium” for its mathematical discoverer John Forbes Nash, made famous in the film A Beautiful Mind), at least without some form of coercive restraint on people’s behavior. Overpopulation, as this logic goes, is inevitable without some form of enforcement mechanism (Chapter 2).
The article was made more compelling by its use of an agricultural metaphor for the problem. Rather than think directly about people’s reproduction, Hardin asked us to “picture a pasture open to all …” in which numerous herdsmen managed their individual herds. Following precisely the logic of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, it is in the interest of each herder to increase the size of their own herd, Hardin argued, since each new animal costs him nothing but gains him much. But since all herdsmen enjoy the same incentive, the inevitable result is a destroyed pasture. Because it belongs to everyone, the resource belongs to no one, and will inevitably be grazed into destruction. In language typical of the article he explains:
Ruin is the destination toward 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. (Hardin 1968, p. 1243)
Conscience and goodwill, Hardin further asserted, were useless in the face of compelling, internal, adaptive, evolutionary logics. Real solutions, however distasteful, must inevitably take some other form. People of the Earth must choose either coercion (“mutual coercion mutually agreed upon,” p. 1247), to tyrannize ourselves into control, or turn to strict forms of private property and inheritance so that all impacts of poor decision-making will be visited only upon the owner of that property. The former approach was rejected by Hardin, as he concluded that the problem with tyranny is that there is always a possibility that a system of governance will come under the undue sway of one of the users of the commons and cannot itself be controlled: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes – ‘Who shall watch the watchers themselves?’” (pp. 1245–1246). The latter approach – privatization – was preferred and defended by Hardin since, no matter how unjust it might be (not all rich people are smart people, he pointed out: “an idiot can inherent millions,” p. 1247), such a solution was the best one available. In either case, whether state or private control, some form of enclosure was deemed as essential, where an “open access” resource is bounded and given over to control either by individual owners or by a strong state management body.
The power and influence of this argument were enormous, and remain so to this day. It continues to be perhaps the most cited academic article in the social sciences, it provided foundational arguments for fields as widespread as evolutionary biology and economics, and it is typically invoked in debates over environmental scarcity. Because Hardin convincingly used an environmental crisis as his metaphoric example, his essay on population quickly became the key defining metaphor for many people (managers and scholars) in guiding their thinking about all environmental problems more generally. Nature in all its forms (fisheries, oil fields, climate systems) might be seen as commons, those difficult-to-enclose systems that invite free-riding and defection.
Viewed this way, the solutions to environmental problems do appear to take the form Hardin suggests: either some form of environmental super-police state, or private property rights over all environmental systems or objects. Environmental commons in this way of thinking lead inevitably to tragedy and so must be made into non-commons through the power of law and property. There is close match of this way of thinking with the market logics (i.e. internalizing externalities) reviewed in Chapter 3.
The Evidence and Logic of Collective Action
Exactly at the same time that the logic of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the “Tragedy of the Commons” was becoming widely accepted, confusing and incongruent evidence was beginning to mount. As anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and geographers observed resource management around the world, they continued to report behaviors that in no way fit Hardin’s predictions. Specifically, they found countless examples of complex systems for management of difficult-to-enclose resources – ranging from fish, trees, and pasture to computer processing time – that relied neither upon some form of tyrannical enforcement authority nor upon the assignment of exclusive private property rights to the resources in question. Some other form of management appeared not only possible but actually predominant in natural commons around the world.
Lobster fisheries in Maine, for example, were observed to be supported and maintained less through centralized state law than through the behavior of lobster fishers themselves, who self-limited the number of boats allowed in the fishery and their distribution of traps. Village irrigation systems in southern India were shown to be carefully self-managed systems where irrigators followed careful rules concerning the opening and closing of flood gates to water their fields while keeping the array functioning for the flow of water to downstream users. Tree tenure traditions in East Africa were organized to allow the use of forest products by households who did not hold title to the land on which the trees stood, while limiting their access to sustain the harvest. Even global environmental treaties, which are technically unenforceable, often result in remarkable success, as in the case of the Montreal Protocol to address deterioration of the ozone layer (see Box 4.1 ). Across the world, countless, highly variable systems of institutions appeared to violate the iron laws of the Prisoner’s Dilemma through some form of local organization.
Box 4.1 1Environmental Solution? The Montreal Protocol
Chlorofluorocarbons (or CFCs) are artificial chemical compounds that have a range of industrial uses, including applications in refrigeration and fire-fighting and uses ranging from solvents to propellants in spray cans. Part of the chemical revolution of the 1920s and 1930s, CFCs were viewed as a flexible, cheap, and efficient set of chemicals and they were widely used throughout the twentieth century. The most exciting thing about these chemicals, from an economic point of view, was that they are highly non-reactive; they break down only very, very slowly.
This blessing proved to be a curse, as soon as it was discovered that the chlorine in CFCs, when exposed to the atmosphere, broke down ozone, leaving behind more trace chlorine for hundreds more such reactions. Such ongoing reactions can lead to whole gaps in the ozone layer shrouding the Earth: an ozone hole. That hole in the stratosphere was observed by scientists in the 1970s and became a source of grave concern. Because atmospheric ozone keeps deadly radiation from reaching Earth, and because trace amounts of CFCs can destroy lots of ozone, and since CFCs are otherwise so non-reactive that they can survive in the atmosphere for more than a century before becoming inert, it was determined by the late 1980s that the world had an extremely serious problem on its hands. Worse still, by that time, CFCs were employed in an unimaginable range of economic activities, with many industries depending heavily on the chemicals; chemical companies in particular defended their product.
If this was not bad enough, the ozone crisis represented a classic common property problem and a Prisoner’s Dilemma. The cost for any firm or country to switch to alternatives was extremely high, so unless everyone stopped using CFCs at once, the opportunities and incentives to “free-ride” – by continuing to use CFCs and underselling other countries and companies with cheaper goods and services – were extremely high. While some individual countries and states (Oregon, for example) did create their own bans on CFC use, the problem could not be solved without collective action.
Remarkably, the world community overcame the cost and difficulty of coordinating their actions and sat down for an international meeting in Montreal in 1987.
