Welcome to this second week of the anthropology and environmental course, it was good to see you all
last Thursday and I am also really impressed with how prepared you were. Keep up the good work. Today
we're going to look at two classical themes in environmental anthropology. Commons and the
politics of knowledge so starting out with a debate about commons
Going to get my slides going
There we are
What started that debate was an extremely influential article by Hardin written in
1968 it was actually not about commons as such but about population growth, but what he's remembered
from that article and what is used still today you hear about the tragedy of the commons so what is
used from that article
is what he said about the impossibility of having commons that are not regulated. He starts out bad
saying that there are a set of problems that can't be fixed technically you need some kind of
political enforcement of solutions to solve these kind of problems, and he mentions a few but argues
then that population is
is one of them. He draws on Thomas Malthus' argument to make that claim this is in itself
quite a problematic argument that Malthus is making, we won't talk about that now but basically what
Malthus is saying is that population will always grow exponentially and in a finite world where
you do not have enough resources to sustain
a population this will eventually lead to overpopulation and then Malthus believed mass
starvation's which were necessary for populations to regulate themselves.
Hardin argues then in the article that we will need some kind of situation where population growth will need to
stabilise and be zero, the question if is this will happen by itself, it will not because we cannot
really maximise for population and well-being at the same time. Either you everyone will have to live
at a bare minimum and not
spend energy on vacation, leisure, intellectual work or similar things if you want to have an as
large population as possible, Hardin argues that we need to stabilise the
population some way and that this will not happen by itself. He believes that Adam Smith was wrong in assuming
that an invisible hand
Would mean that enlightened self-interest will lead to what is best for everyone this will not
happen and this is because of what he calls and that is his famous phrase the tragedy of the
commons, and here is an important metaphor from his article imagine a
situation he says where pasture where you grace your cows
it's open to everyone, now all individual herdsmen will want as many cattle as possible for
themselves to gain their own profit, and this is fine this works well as long as an external force
regulate how many cattle can be on that pasture, if you have war if you have other kind of
limitations to how many cows or cattle each person can have this works fine.
but in a situation of peace he says then inherent logic of the commons leads to the tragedy of the
commons and this is because of a really simple mathematical addition he says. If you as an individual
add one more cow to the field it leads to a gain of one, you have one more cow and you should
definitely do that.
if everybody keeps on doing that there will eventually be too many cows right, not enough grass for
everyone.
but he argues the problem with this is that nobody will stop adding cows, because the disadvantage
of adding one more cow is the lack of one additional gracing cow divided by all the different people
who put cows on them so i.e. while adding one makes you gain one the negative effect of
doing so is shared by everyone, and so people rational self maximizing individual will keep on adding
cows until all the cows die and that is the tragedy of the commons.
Freedom in a common he says brings ruin to all and he has a number of examples of that. One
is pastures that we just went through but also wilderness in national parks, everybody goes in to
experience wilderness and to be alone in nature but as more and more people do so you have less
disturbed nature to experience but again nobody would sort of not go
Because just adding yourself to it is not going to solve the situation.
fishing in the sea with no regulation same thing, the fish stock will deplete and diminish but you
will still take out as much as you can you will not yourself try to be sustainable because nobody
else does and it doesn't pay for yourself
it also holds for the reverse situation he says with pollution for instance, so again if
everybody say farmers around a river put pollution or dump waste into it it doesn't really matter as
long as they are not many, if they continue to do so as a population grows you will have a negative
effect there will be less and less pure water but again it doesn't really help if you stop
all right so everybody will keep polluting until the water is completely useless so this is his
argument about the commons, they only work with a low density of people but now we
need some kind of enclosure and creation to make them work and this has been done in the past and
he's talking of course about the enclosures of the common in medieval England and similar situations
but we know how to do so he says for population control. We can't let people decide for themselves
how many children they will have and in this article he only mentions what seems like
one solution to this and that is private property. In later article also says that state
socialism i.e. a strong state control of the commons or enclose the commons will probably also work
now that article has been sort of standing as an almost scientific law as Feeny et. al argues
They summarise the debate after 22 years and see whether this still
holds water as a sign as an universal law and even if they are
not anthropologist themselves, the argument they make is very anthropological in that it brings
empirical nuance to a more universal explanation of the kind that Hardin is making.
so they begin by summing up the argument saying that it has reached a status as an universal almost
and it's used as an argument even more importantly it's still being used as an argument for a
abandoning commons and to impose some kind of private or state control over resources
there's a number of problems with their argument, first and most importantly he confuses
what they call characteristics of a resource and the property regimes apply to them. I.e. when you
talk about private property and the state you need to distinguish those kind of regimes of
controlling resources from the resources themselves, so they coin a new word a new phrase
which is called common property resources, not just common property right and a common property
resource is defined by two characteristics 1) it has a problem with excludability i.e. it's difficult to
exclude potential users like the pasture that Hardin mentioned for instance, it's not self-evident
that it's an easy fix to exclude other people from exploiting the resource. 2) just as important
it has a problem with subtractability, which means that it matters for the people who use the resource,
each user abstracts from the welfare of the other users and if you think about that that applies to
all the cases but that Hardin mention, so they defined a common property resource as a class of
resources for which exclusion is difficult and joint use involves subtractability
This then needs to be distinguished from property right regimes and these they point out are
ideal types for those of you who have read social science you know what an ideal type is it's a
phrase taken from Max Weber where he says that in order to think and analyse a situation we could
start with pure forms that we don't necessarily find in the world but they are helpful to think
with
which basically means that you won't have pure open Access situation or pure private property
situations or pure communal property situations but if you look at an empirical case you'll find a
mix, in terms of logic and and analysis it's helpful to think of them as ideal types right.
The first ideal type is open access, free and open to all for example oceans before the 20th century
When there was no regulation about who extracted anything, the second idea of type of property regimes
is private property which is defined by a right to exclude people vested in individual and or a
group but also backed by state and that's an important point when it comes to private property when
the kind of private property we have in Norway for instance is backed by the state if somebody
tries to steal
what you think is your private property you go to the police i.e. use the state to back your private
property, and this property is exclusive and is possible to transfer it to a another person, so a
private forest or a range land like that is a privately owned pasture would be examples of that.
communal property then are owned by a community of users
that is an extremely common form in other parts of the world it tends to exclude people who are not
part of that community from use and distribute right to use the resource equally within the
community.
Last ideal type is state property where power is vested in government and enforcement is also done
by government so state forests for instance would be an example of that so we now have these four
different kind of property regimes and the two definitions of what a common property resource is.
A misunderstanding that
Hardin makes they argue is that they see communal property as the same as open access i.e. the example
we used when we started out with a pasture open to all, that's the first sentence in Hardins
example so we need to look at what the empirical evidence actually says about exclusion and about
regulation for the different types rather than assume that communal property means open access
and by what kind of criteria then you would judge success or otherwise in when we examine
exclusion and regulation for the different types well they say let's use ecologically sustainability, is
this a way of looking after the resource that does not deplete it and destroy it in the way that
Hardin argued would happen automatically with communal property.
So let's look at the first one then: open access
in terms of exclusion this supports Hardins argument but they the
situation is often created by for instance a colonial power and this happened for instance in where
I worked in South Africa where communal property regimes were deregulated because
community authority were destroyed.
The regulation likewise is supported by Hardin when supply exceeds the amount so it's
hard to have some kind of regulation for instance when you can't really control the resource
and again they use examples from North America. So for open access situations
Hardin's argument tend to be supported but it's partly more complicated by that because these kind of
situations are often created rather than just given, private property which is Hardin's success
case also tend to be successful but again they say if you look at the empirical evidence not
necessarily and not always so when you look at exclusion you have for example a
classical case like oil in
Pennsylvania which regulated the oil as private property on the surface of individual farms but the
resource of course was under the ground and covered several private properties which meant that you
Did not have a sustainable and helpful way of extracting the oil because rather than
cooperating in getting access to the oil everybody competed
on the same resource. Enforcement should be easy in a private property situation but is not
always and the whole phenomena of poaching of illegally taking a resource that is enclosed is
of course a problem.
regulation is also again following Hardin seems to work relatively well because it is the same
person who would take the cost and the benefit so you wouldn't normally deplete a resource because it
only hurts yourself but that is not always the case if you have a resource that is so slow in
reproducing that
you can't really maximise it at all and that would take 2,000 years to grow back or whales
that would take centuries to rebuild their stock it would actually make sense from a private
property resource management perspective to rather let them die and take out the resource, the profit
that you could from them now rather than just wait for that. So again supports Hardin but not
always.
Where they really disagree about Hardin's analysis is for the communal property regime. Hardin thought
that exclusion in communal property i.e. imagine a farm open to all would be impossible, but it is
actually the norm, in almost all cases you look at of communal property there is
regulation, some set of community some set of
people defined as a community control their resource and would not let anybody else that is not part of
that community on to that resource, a pasture for instance. If a community in
rural South Africa for instance control a pasture they would not let people outside of the community
use that pasture and they will also regulate how many cows people could put onto the common resource, so
There is a lot of evidence that actually shows that exclusion happens as the norm in communal property
and it's not impossible, they also argue that this is not just old ancient regimes or in rural
situations in Africa it's also happened in newer instances, for instance fisheries in Japan deviced
A common because they saw that they had a problem with overfishing so they created a membership of
who could fish
certain areas and decided on how much people can fish
and as they began by saying as well the reason why communal property often fail is
because of outside pressure, a situation like the one I just described is replaced by a powerful
group replacing the community and say this is our resource now and then people stopped
looking after it the people who for instance used it for pasture before would
try to poach and take out as much as they can from that resource.
likewise regulation as I've said, tends to work Contra Hardin.
immediately after he published this article people started pointing out that
his main case the commons of medieval England actually functioned for several
centuries and they were regulated, and again for regulation there's also new instances again an
example from
from fisheries where people decide on we need some kind of regulation here and that
happens it's also happens in again from my part of the world South Africa where
Rivers for instance used for farming you would have the problem of people high up in the stream
extracting too much water leaving nothing for the farmers downstream that is often sold by
regulation
you create a water committee a water board who decides on who gets to take out how much water, so
there is enough for everyone. Where Hardin is basically seriously wrong is in thinking that
exclusion and regulation is not possible for communal property, all empirical evidence show that it
is possible and it's often in position of outside forces that destroy these kind of regimes.
State Property the other thing that he thought would function quite unproblematically also tends to
but again for exclusion you could have a problem with legitimacy, if people don't really
believe that the state should make this decision you will end up with situations where they try to
avoid it and take out control and take out resources, this happens with poaching in
state-controlled
parks for instance national parks in South Africa and likewise with regulation again it tends
to be quite easy because it's one act of the state that imposes a set of regulations on the resource
but as we know can happen when a state or different interest within a state try to impose control
you might have a proliferation of laws because so many different interests so many different state
Bodies try to have their interest expressed in the regulation so it's not completely
straightforward there as well.
so to sum up the argument Hardin assumed when he talks about the impossibility of common that
Commons always had open access that there were no way of constraining or regulating the resource
that demand exceeds supply that uses could not change the rules like we saw happened with the
modern coastal fisheries in Japan and Turkey and most importantly he did not distinguish between
communal property resources
And communal property regimes
which led him to argue that there is no sustainable management and exclusion except for private
and state property and that they are good enough correct there are a lot of
examples of regulation and exclusion for especially communal property and it's not the case either
that private or state property always is sufficient to manage our resource
so what we need to look at instead when we talk about commons or contrast commons with
private and state property is to look at the complex interaction between the resource themselves
and the kind of characteristics they have in this case but it's possible to that it's difficult to
exclude users from them and that it matters
How many people use them, the kind of property regimes that your resources are under and the more
general socio-economic characteristics of sustainability so this is a very
anthropological argument in the sense that it adds empirical complexity to what seems like a very
straightforward clear intellectual argument, when you look at Hardin
Takes his argument and actually applies his argument to real empirical realities you get a much more
complex story and findings and this is what anthropologists are often really good at