Tragedy of the Commons: Ideas & Concepts

Without keeping a few head of cattle on the commons, they could not survive, and once the commons was enclosed, they could no longer farm for themselves and thus had to work as laborers on the farms of those who had benefited from the enclosures. The basic distribution of property after the enclosures initially corresponded to the system of property rights that had prevailed before.

In the feudal order, property was always shared property, that is, the nobility or the priory loaned the peasant his holding and the land that belonged to it; he had to perform labor services and pay rents in kind or money rents and was subject to the jurisdiction of the feudal lords. East of the Elbe River, the peasants had to perform labor services in the fields of the manor even until the 19th century and only had usage rights to the commons.

In southwestern Germany and Switzerland, the manor fields were let out to the peasants, and the feudal lords limited themselves to the extensive branches of the economy, such as lumbering or grazing sheep, and competed with the peasants for the commons. Accordingly, property rights developed in different ways. In southwestern Germany, the feudal property was forced back more and more, and around the peasants were de facto owners of their farms and the common pastures.

They also enjoyed defined use rights to the forest, and often also to community woods. With different property regimes, the consequences of the enclosures differed as well. The state acted as midwife of the new system of property rights by passing the parliamentary enclosures, i. In southwestern Germany, in contrast, dividing up the commons after a long process resulted in a beneficial situation for the peasants and communities.

In terms of property law, the commons were bound to ownership of fields; everyone who owned fields was permitted to herd their cattle on the commons. Arable farming was organized in cooperatives, and the village cooperative had the authority to manage the commons. An important rule concerned the date when the harvest was concluded; on that date, cattle were herded to the stubble, where they manured the soil.

In other words, fields and meadows turned into commons after the grain and hay were harvested. Private property was in abeyance and treated as common property until spring returned. It was his duty to ensure that the cattle did not go onto the fields. When the increasing number of cattle raised the risk of overgrazing the pasture, the cooperative issued an ordinance for the pasture in the form of a so-called Weistum, or bylaw. There were similar arrangements for other rules and offenses.

If too much wood was cut, allotments were set. Thus, cooperative institutions were required: In this way, dangers to the commons produced new competencies within the cooperative. The community used wood from the common forest to build and heat such buildings. The community could also sell common land for common purposes.

In other words, the cooperative formed communal institutions capable of holding rights and assets. Cooperative means that the cooperative action of all enables the individual proprietor to conduct economic activity. Only landowners had property rights to the commons.

But besides the peasants, limited use rights were granted to artisans in the village, whose services the peasants depended on, as well as laborers who were employed by the peasants in peak periods, especially the harvest, and who otherwise earned their livelihoods by spinning and weaving.

The cooperative permitted these non-peasants to herd one cow on the commons and to collect dead wood in the forest. These usage rights arose from the mutual dependency of villagers on one another. As the number of spinners and weavers in the villages increased during the early stage of industrialization, the numbers of their cattle increased to such an extent in some places that they overburdened the commons. This indeed brought about a crisis of the commons in these industrialized villages, as those who did not own fields were dependent on the marginal use of the commons, even though the commons were actually a complement to the cultivation of fields.

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The reeve — an official elected by peasants to supervise the land for a lord — became an institution of the community; the manor court became the village court. Instead, every peasant had a vote, following the principle of one man, one vote. And it was by no means limited to the local sphere.

Common Tragedy

As this norm was widely recognized, it was also applied to societal issues in general, such as the demand that rulers use the state to promote the common benefit, and the church to preach these values Blickle Community life was lively and featured an annual procession around the boundaries of the village and the lands belonging to it, a communal drink after auditing the common box the community funds. Folk customs were combined with the common pasture. The commons were part of an economic system that, given the developmental stage of the agricultural production methods, had no alternative but to be communal.

The historical concept of the commons covers a broad spectrum of communal property rights, from merely the right to use a resource owned by the feudal lords to self-management, the exclusion of third parties, and even the right to sell the resource. In contrast, the concept of the commons today often refers to open-access natural resources such as oceans, the atmosphere and space.

Scott Gordon provided a technical analysis of the problem well before Hardin gave it celebrity. Gordon described a situation in which a private fisherman does not benefit from restraining his activity: As a result, valuable fish stocks are often overfished, and fishermen are often poor. The collapse of the North Atlantic cod fishery at the end of the twentieth century, as well as the collapse of the Chilean anchovy fishery two decades earlier, are just two dramatic examples.

The particular conditions inducing waste and rent dissipation that are typical of the tragedy of the commons arise either progressively when populations increase their pressure on a common-access resource, or more suddenly when a resource is discovered or when some technological breakthrough makes its exploitation easier. This is why some such tragedies appear as historical events. For example, whales were not endangered before the introduction of harpoon guns reduced the cost of catching them at the same time that they had become valuable for uses other than food for Inuit.

In the early twentieth century, oil was discovered and exploited in common pools in the United States. This led to overextraction as one operator rushed to exploit a pool before others could deplete it. Climate change is another example: While pervasive, is the tragedy of the commons inevitable, as implied by Hardin? Were the fishery controlled by a single owner who decided how much fish should be caught, that single owner would bear the consequences of overfishing privately and would properly weigh such costs against the benefits of higher current catches. The outcome would be Pareto efficient under perfect competition.

There are many examples of private property rights solving the tragedy of the commons. The enclosures episode which witnessed the construction of fences around previously open-access areas in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England is a celebrated though disputed example. In Governing the Commons , Elinor Ostrom analyzes many instances where societies have devised institutions other than private property and markets to secure or induce efficient resource use. A simple look at the organization of economic and social life shows many potential tragedies being avoided thanks to property rights or other social rules: We accept that we must pay for food that we buy in a supermarket; most of the time, cars do not get robbed while parked on the street; we do not freely cut trees in forests for firewood.

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Yet solutions or improvements are not easy to come by. The creation or enforcement of property rights, whether private or otherwise, may be institutionally or technologically difficult. Ideally, property rights must be designed in such a way that they cause decision makers to act in the interest of society as a whole in the use of the resource. In many situations, this is not possible either because the required information is not available at a reasonable cost, or because it will not be revealed to the regulator by decision makers, or because there is no authority with the power to impose the required behavior.

Yet, stakeholders may be aware of the collective costs associated with the tragedy of the commons.

They can try to improve the situation by signing contracts or treaties, sometimes involving cooperation. They will do so with due consideration for their position in the status quo as determined by their power. The Simple Economics of Easter Island: American Economic Review 88 1: Journal of Political Economy The Tragedy of the Commons. The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Retrieved December 18, from Encyclopedia.

Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. The term tragedy of the commons was coined by Garrett Hardin who hypothesized in that, as the size of the human population increased, there would be mounting pressures on resources at the local and global levels, leading to overexploitation and ruin.

Partly the tragedy would occur because some "commoners" or users of common resources would reap the full benefit of a particular course of action while incurring only a small cost, while others would have to share the cost but receive none of the benefits. The classic examples of such overexploitation are grazing, fishing, and logging, where grasslands, fish stocks, and trees have declined from overuse. Hardin suggested that governmental intervention and laws could become the major method of solving such overexploitation. More recently, the concept of the commons has been expanded to include air, water, the Internet , and medical care.

Much controversy has developed over whether commoners are caught in an inevitable cycle of overexploitation and destruction of resources, or whether the wise use and management of natural resources are possible. Although many examples of overexploitation exist, particularly in fisheries, Elinor Ostrom, Bonnie McCay, Joanna Burger, and others have argued that there are also examples of local groups effectively managing commonly held resources, and that such local control requires accepted rules, with appropriate sanctions and some governmental control to prevent exploitation by outside interests.

That is, a fishing cooperative can succeed only if outside fishermen agree to adhere to existing rules or laws. In an age with increasing populations, understanding how different societies and groups have managed a common pool of resources allows us to apply successful methods in managing these resources.

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Burger, Joanna, and Gochfeld, Michael. Local Lessons, Global Challenges. Also available from http: A term referring to the theory that, when a group of people collectively own a resource, individuals acting in their personal self-interest will inevitably overtax and destroy the resource. According to the commons theory, each individual gains much more than he or she loses by overusing a commonly held resource, so its destruction is simply an inevitable consequence of normal and rational behavior.

In the study of economics, this idea is known as the free rider problem. Human population growth is the issue in which the commons idea is most often applied: Even though each additional child taxes the global community's food, water, energy, and material resources, each family theoretically gains more than it loses for each additional child produced. Although the theory was first published in the nineteenth century, Garrett Hardin introduced it to modern discussions of population growth in a article published in the journal Science.

Since that time, the idea of the tragedy of the commons has been a central part of population theory. Many people insist that the logic of the commons is irrefutable; others argue that the logic is flawed and the premises questionable. Despite debates over its validity, the theory of the commons has become an important part of modern efforts to understand and project population growth. In its first published version, the idea of the commons was a scenario mapped out in mathematical logic and concerning common pasture land in an English village.

In his essay, William Forster Lloyd described the demise of a common pasture through overuse. Up to that time, many English villages had a patch of shared pasture land, collectively owned, on which villagers could let their livestock graze. At the time of Lloyd's writing, however, many of these commons were being ruined through overgrazing. This destruction, he proposed, resulted from unchecked population growth and from the persistence of collectively held, rather than private, lands.

Tragedy of the Commons

In previous ages, said Lloyd, wars and plagues kept human and animal populations well below the maximum number the land could support. By the nineteenth century, however, England's population was climbing. More people were looking for room to graze more cattle, and they used common pasture because the resource was essentially free.

Free use of a common resource, Lloyd concluded, leads directly to the ruin of that resource. In his article, Garrett Hardin applied the same logical argument to a variety of natural amenities that we depend upon.