THE TRAGEDY OF "THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS"

I was born and bred up in the countryside of The smallest West African Country called The Gambia with a population of nearly 2 million people within 4.363 square miles. All most all Gambians are subsistence  farmers (85 per cent) bitterly living on the limited gift of nature. They share almost everything in common, they harbor a relentless prowess of sustaining themselves through hard-work, collectivism, unity, and the love for nature-the commons.

Living in a society blessed with natures like wild life, forest, arable land, rivers, seas, lakes, animals like cattle, donkeys, sheep, goats e.t.c, which I will refer to here as “ the commons”, had taught me a lot. Life here was much easy and friendly.

Since many economists, politicians and development planers will cite Hardin’s “Tragedy of The Common” when speaking about maintaining the commons, I critique it on that purpose but also to show that privatization or government is not the best and only way in protecting our environment and ending the Third World poverty. I also want to answer the common question, is the community ownership of land, forests and fisheries a guaranteed road to ecological disasters?

I deliberately choose the above title because I vehemently believe that many who deny Garret Hardin’s thesis “The Tragedy of The Commons” have little to say and the majority of those who worship the thesis are ignorant of the flaws therein.

Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of The Commons” in 1968 was a total misrepresentation of the truth inclined to the “holy” commons.

My deliberations here will tensely analyse the fundamentals flaws outline in his essay. I will prove much with my physical experience as a person bred up within a common frame. I will also site in detail many authors and commentators of the commons.

My title, “The Tragedy of The Tragedy of The Commons” is absolute and apt as we have already seen the nakedness and baseless argument of Hardin’s “Tragedy of The Commons”. However, what is most new here is my personal experiences on the success of the commons and because of which I choose without much hesitation this title.

Finally here, you will comprehend better the dilemmas surrounding the commons one of which to your surprise is Garrett Hardin himself and not his incorrect claims.

THE FUNDAMENTAL FLAWS OF HARDIN’S “THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS”.

According to Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, many great problems in the usage, governance, and sustainability of a commons can be caused by some characteristic human behaviors that lead to social dilemmas such as competition for use, free riding, and overharvesting. Due to this view, I claim that Hardin’s thesis might contribute a lot more to this dilemma hence is putting people into collusion.

Commons substantially need an auto-organized or self-governed system requiring strong and unanimous mechanisms. All this boils down to what I will called collective movement or action. Sustaining something great like the traditional commons, of course we need more hands on the table to accomplished the work ( Sandler 1992,1).

Since this very important actions are voluntary from individuals(Meinzen-Dick,Di Gregorio, and Maccarthy 2004), the “knowledge and will on the one hand, and supporting and consistent institutional arrangements on the other hand,” are very instrumental in the sustainability of common-pool resources. And since the first move of all the well-known common-pool resources are highly based on this fundamental…that common-pool resource users are well-informed on the usage and importance of the commons, Hardin’s argument of no communication between common-pool users is unfounded.

In most of the villages and towns where I went to in Africa as both a journalist and a teacher, are informed, guided and well self-governed. They had tangible rules as in The Gambia and in Senegal, in Guinea as in Sera Leone, in Mali as in Chad, in Mauritania as in Niger e.t.c were grazing by cattle, sheep and other domesticated animals are common, had rules which are communicated to and adhered.

People graze not in hassle against each other as said by Hardin and neither do they graze in blindness or dumbness. In fact, these herdsmen are usually friends. In the forest and on the lands were these animals are raised, the herdsmen usually sit together and chat about their own welfare. Since they were basically living on these lands, their welfare which depends on the usage of these lands was always a topical matter to them. It was often discussed and address.

They all had interests but had as their common fundamental interest, the maintenance and the sustainability of the grazing land. Herdsmen, are not independent of each other nor are they independent of the society where they graze. Thus, they share and communicate amongst themselves.

I will argue that these herdsmen are not selfish and enemies of each other. They are conscious of their dependability on the grazing land and that one herdsman’s usage is important to the other and thus even under difficult situations, they are compelled to communicate. “Collective reciprocity” was important amongst these people as Putnam 2000 will put it.

The actors here share a common belief that they cannot afford to betray. They knew they will fail if they fail to communicate. Since most of these people also do not live in isolation of each other, they communicate to tackle their problems both on the grazing fields and at rest at homes.

Classic fears to commons are commodification or enclosure, pollution and degradation, and non-sustainability,(Ugo Mattei, The Beni Comuni).

One of the best works and truly important findings in the traditional commons research was the identification of design principles of robust, long, enduring, common-pool resource institutions (Ostrom 1990, 90 — 102).These principles according to him are; A)Clearly defined boundaries in place, B) Rules in use are well matched to local needs and conditions, C)Individuals affected by these rules can usually participate in modifying the rules, D)The right of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities, E)A system for self-monitoring members’ behavior has been established, F)A graduated system of sanctions is available, F)Community members have access to low-cost conflict-resolution mechanisms, G) Nested enterprises — that is, appropriation, provision, monitoring and sanctioning, conflict resolution, and other governance activities — are organized in a nested structure with multiple layers of activities. It was like Ostrom conducted this research in the African regions I mentioned above. They are principles on which those African societies are strictly adhering to in their sustainability processes of the common. For these principles to be successful in any society there must be good communication and that is why most African societies until today are able to keep and maintain their commons.

These general principles therein above, are not exhaustible but could be claimed have led to the successes of most African commons. On the same hand, it could be further debated that communities that failed in the conservations of their commons is most probably attributed to the absence of these principle. Whether or not this my claim stands, is a matter of empirical research.

The famous biologist Garrett Hardin created a memorable metaphor for overpopulation, where herdsmen sharing a common pasture put as many cattle as possible out to graze, acting in their own self-interest. The tragedy is expressed in Hardin’s (1968, 1244) famous lines: “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.” This is one of the most often cited and influential articles in the social sciences and is still taught in large numbers of university courses worldwide. What many fail to understand is the untrueness of this claim.

Hardin’s intense story comprises a number of controversies that commons scholars have repeatedly found to be mistaken: in this deliberation , firstly, he was actually discussing open access rather than managed commons since there cannot be sustainability without proper mechanisms.

Secondly, Hardin assumed but falsely little or no communication among these people. No great research will credit this claim of Hardin. Common people on a common grazing land will one way or the other communicate.

Thirdly, Hardin hypothesised that people act only in their immediate self-interest such as if they were in the state of nature as in Hobbs. No individual herdsman is anti-social and unwilling to contribute to the maintenance of his grazing land at least for his own benefits. And because he is forced to act for his own sustenance, he is thus indirectly contributing out of selfish interest (as Hardin will like to argue it) but also contributing on the same venture to the common good of other people since he will be replace by other herdsmen immediately he lives. Rather than assuming that some individuals take joint benefits into account, Hardin refuse to give any credit to communality or collectivistic intentions in the fields were this herdsmen meet.

Not surprisingly, Hardin offers suggestions which he claimed solutions to correct what he called the tragedy. He gave privatization and government intervention as the ultimate solution to this crises. This to every reader or commentator was not the least surprising hence Hardin refuse to associate and form of success(s) in the common management of resources.

Enquiringly, most if not all of the interdisciplinary work on the commons to date is the consequence of the natural-resource commons which the tragedy of the commons still plays at the centre of the Debate. Also, it is rooted in two distinct knowledgeable histories: the story of enclosure and the history of openness and inclusiveness — that is, democracy and freedom.

Traditionally in Europe, “commons” were shared agricultural fields, grazing lands, and forests that were, over a period of 500 years, enclosed, with communal rights being withdrawn, by landowners and the state.

The account of enclosure is one of privatization, the haves versus the have-nots, the elite versus the masses. This is the story of Boyle’s (2003) “Second Enclosure Movement,” featuring the enclosure of the “intangible commons of the mind,” through rapidly expanding intellectual property rights. The occurrence of enclosure is an important rallying cry on the part of legal scholars, librarians, scientists, and really, anyone who is alert to the increasing occurrence of privatization, commodification, and withdrawal of information that used to be accessible, or that will never be available in our lifetimes.

Hardin acknowledge privatization and government intervention as the ultimate and only apt way to sustain our ecological balance. This untrue and capitalist ideology is mostly accepted in administrations all over the world and thus subjugate the poor and the week. It gives false bases to government authorities to use violence over the people in the name of conserving commons.

I argue that no authority willing to establish fairness and justice in her community should adopt Hardin’s suggested ways of control or preserving the commons. In fact the moment those entities(private and government) are involved in this crucial issue, there is the final elimination of the commons. His arguments are in fact more correct about privatization and government intervention since here private persons are likely in a state of fear against each other from extinction.

Though a good contribution into the arena of discussions about the commons, but in my opinion his critiques should be used to improve. and analyse the commons well but not submitting to privatization or government ownership. Hardin’s work should only be use as a capitalist mode of looking at the commons and thus must be rejected. He has pointed great problems about our society and many of those are factual but they were rather exaggerated which put into fallacy the bases of his thesis.

The questions that Hardin has raised in me are many but can be extended indefinitely. Who owns, say, the natural gas deposits that have lain, untapped, under the ocean near Sable Island, a hundred kilometers from a friend’s house? Who owns the Gorgon gas field under Barrow Island off Australia’s west coast? Who owns the methane hydrate deposits off the shore of New Jersey? Who owns the limestone deposits under California’s central coast (deposits that yield up some of the world’s sublime wines)? Who owns the great boreal forests of Alaska, Siberia, and Canada? Who owns the rocks of the earth? Who, indeed, owns the air? The birds of the air? The water? The oceans? Fish stocks? Who owns the whales? And in short who owns nature? If Harden’s solutions were to shift to privatization or government control machines how many percentage of society will benefit from this commons?

Let’s shift to another area beyond Hardin’s myopic analysis, about another kind of commonwealth: who owns culture? Who owns languages, science, the accumulated genius of technology? Who owns history? Who owns, in short, the human library? Who owns it, and who has the right to sell it?

In an empty world, these questions, or at least the ones about nature, which Hardin argue about didn’t much matter. Nature seemed inexhaustible. Still, natural philosophers, as scientists were once called, have wrestled with the issue for millennia, as have political authorities. In Roman times, the Senate put together a series of laws that classified several aspects of what came to be called “the commons” as explicitly owned by the people collectively. These res communes, common things, included water and the air, but also “bodies of water,” that is lakes, and shorelines generally. Wild animals, as opposed to domesticated ones, were included. After the Roman empire collapsed, overrun by what the Romans were pleased to call barbarians, some aspects of the res communes came into dispute — feudal lords, and then kings, claimed to control them.

The implications of a commons is that since as Hardin put it no one owns the commons , anyone can use it, exploit it, and pollute it at no charge. This is not true in an organised common system.

The question we are now faced with are heavy, in a well-ordered political and if you like capitalist’s world, do we private property rights stop? How best should we treat the commons so it survives for the benefit of all? How well to allocate the incomes that flow from what exploitation is allowed? Private property is the engine of prosperity argued Harden. Common property is the backdrop before which private actors perform. Both are necessary. So an answer is critical. In my view we have three economic sectors: the private sector, the public (or state) sector and the commons sector. Only the last has “no recognizable body of law to defend it, and no accounting systems for its profits or sufferers.”

So the question still grows and it becomes: if the various natural systems of the universe, especially the air, the water, the land and its minerals, and the complex life systems they sustain, are indeed “the commons,” how do we guard against the “tragedy of the commons?” If no one owns the resource and anyone can use it, how do we potentially protect it from depletion? The answers are well-founded in the rich guided and protected common regimes in Africa. The simple answer is not from Harden. The best answer to this questions is common governance and institutions dictated by all and for the benefits of all.

The tragedy of the commons as a phrase owes its origins to Garrett Hardin’s essay in Biology or science in 1968, though the notion of a social trap involving a conflict between individual interests and the common good goes far back, at least, to Aristotle.

In Hardin’s own words:

“Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy. As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” This utility has one negative and one positive component. The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is [obvious]. The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction [of the burden] … The rational herdsman concludes [from this] that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another, and another … But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit, in a world that is limited. 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’s argument was widely accepted by economists and free-market enthusiasts. The solution to the dilemma, it seemed obvious, was privatization, the enclosure of the commons.

But it is not obvious. Hardin’s theory was the purest poppycock, and widely adopted only because it seemed to convey the essence of free market competition. It was a truly corporatist view.

The principal mistake was to adopt a key proposition or position about free market, and of Adam Smith’s, that man is a rational being who always acts in his own best interests, and futhert to assume that those interests inevitably involved development of personal assets. However, what Hardin was describing was not rational behaviour, but it was the purest selfishness. And there is, after all, a central difference. A rational being, faced with a dilemma of the commons, would be able to calculate long-term prospects and conclude, quite rationally, that some sort of short-term limit, arrived at through negotiation, would be in his own interests. In other words, in the context of a limited commons, cooperation is a more rational decision than independence.

Hardin derived his views from biology — he wasn’t an economist nor was he a politician — and preferred a hard-line version of Darwinism called, not surprisingly, survival of the fittest. Yet “fit” was interpreted narrowly and stripped of its social context. Hardin simply assumed that when men came together without rules, violence or conflict ensued. This is untrue again. He had no knowledge of the equally Darwinist view that natural selection could just as easily select for mutual cooperation as for continual family warfare or social good, a view that has been gaining credibility among biological evolutionists in the past few decades. He took no account, therefore, of the human ability to develop rules for accessing and using common resources.

Cooperation, communication and welfare on the common platform when you look for it, is not that hard as Harden will prefer to it. Fishermen in several places have banded together to set sustainable catch quotas. In my country and so is it in many other African countries and to some extend in other developed capitalist states. The same thing is true, as Jonathan Rowe pointed out in an essay for WorldWatch, in the rice paddies of the Philippines, in the Swiss Alpine pasturelands, the Maine lobster fishery, the Pacific haddock fishery, and many other places. The case could even be made that as long as settled communities remain intact, the commons flourishes. The community merely needs to be enabled to protect it.

Marq de Villiers is an award-winning writer of books and articles on exploration, history, politics, and travel. He is also a graduate of the London School of Economics, and his latest book puts his training in economics to good use. Our Way Out: Principles for a Post-Apocalyptic World offers a refreshing menu of economic options for an overly consumptive population living on an environmentally stressed planet.

I conclude that Harden’s tradedy of the common is but to a much degree another tragedy in two main senses. One, he could not defend himself well and most of his arguments unfounded within an organised common. Two, his contribution induce a lot of fear and made others adopted bad policies and brought a lot of criticism towards the holy heavens of the commons.

Conclusion

My essay is natural from experience and research . I believe that via revising the Commons, we will surely focuses on new ways to conceptualize and analyse commons as a complex, global, and after all and most importantly shared resources. David Bollier reproduces and reminds us all on the evolution of the meaning of the commons from a concept describing some historical developments to its current applications to the realm of basic conservation which I shall always argue are still in place in most of the African communities.

While Garrett Hardin’s essay brought new attention to the idea of the commons, its misconceptions tended to shame, discredit and unguaranteed the commons as an real, active, efficient and effective. instrument of community power or governance. After all, in my view, if a “tragedy” of the commons is unavoidable as Hardin puts it, why study it?

Nevertheless, a thesis that was written in 1968 has found itself naked bearing no truth in the mid-1980s, the flaws in this analysis were discovered, explored and scholarly interest in the commons began to take root. I will further argue that in fact more. interest in the commons grew in the mid-1990s as the capitalists want to enslave everyone. New types and modes of social communities and communication in an entirely new public sphere, have all began and this is not only making more scholars and students to discredit Hardin but also raise public awareness towards preserving common. Still even with these developments, the concept of the commons rests novel and alien to many people.