Tragedy of The Commons - Theories and Examples

Theories and Examples

Central to Hardin's article is an example (first sketched in an 1833 pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd) involving medieval land tenure in Europe, of herders sharing a common parcel of land, on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze. In Hardin's example, it is in each herder's interest to put the next (and succeeding) cows he acquires onto the land, even if the quality of the common is damaged for all as a result, through overgrazing. The herder receives all of the benefits from an additional cow, while the damage to the common is shared by the entire group. If all herders make this individually rational economic decision, the common will be depleted or even destroyed, to the detriment of all. Hardin also cites modern examples, including the overfishing of the world's oceans and ranchers who graze their cattle on government lands in the American West.

A similar dilemma of the commons had been discussed by agrarian reformers since the 18th century. Hardin's predecessors used the alleged tragedy, as well as a variety of examples from the Greek Classics, to justify the enclosure movement. German historian Joachim Radkau sees Garrett Hardin's writings as having a different aim in that Hardin asks for a strict management of common goods via increased government involvement or/and international regulation bodies.

While Hardin recommended that the tragedy of the commons could be prevented by either more government regulation or privatizing the commons property, subsequent Nobel Prize-winning work by Elinor Ostrom suggests that handing control of local areas to national and international regulators can create further problems. Ostrom argues that the tragedy of the commons may not be as prevalent or as difficult to solve as Hardin implies, since locals have often come up with solutions to the commons problem themselves; when the commons is taken over by non-locals, those solutions can no longer be used. Ostrom recognizes that there are real problems, and even limited situations where the tragedy of the commons applies to real-world resource management.

Hardin's work has been criticised on the grounds of historical inaccuracy, and for failing to distinguish between common property and open access resources. As Hardin acknowledged there was a fundamental mistake in the use of the term "commons." This was already noted in 1975 by Ciriacy-Wantrup & Bishop (1975: 714) who wrote that we "are not free to use the concept 'common property resources' or 'commons' under conditions where no institutional arrangements exist. Common property is not 'everybody's property' (...). To describe unowned resource (res nullius) as common property (res communis), as many economists have done for years (...) is a self-contradiction."

Hardin's commons theory is frequently cited to support the notion of sustainable development, meshing economic growth and environmental protection, and has had an effect on numerous current issues, including the debate over global warming. An asserted impending "tragedy of the commons" is frequently warned of as a consequence for adopting policies which restrict private property and espouse expansion of public property.