Natural Resources

The History of the Study of Natural Resource Management

Although natural resources and politics have been intimately connected throughout the history of human civilization, a politics of natural resource management in a modern sense did not appear until the 1960s. The “discovery” of a wider set of environmental problems brought with it a growing realization that many natural resources were being exploited in ways that rapidly undermined their future existence. Out of this realization came the perhaps single most influential article ever published in the field of natural resource management: Garrett Hardin's 1968 Science article, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” has had a substantial and long-lasting impact on how problems of natural resource management are conceived of and theorized. By modeling the usage of jointly owned natural resources—the commons—as a collective [Page 1666]action problem, Hardin argued that finite natural resources that were jointly used would eventually be exhausted. Since no single resource user has an incentive to limit his or her outtake from the resource, the resource would soon suffer from overexploitation. Because most natural resources are collectively owned, Hardin's prediction was that the world's natural resources were on the brink of depletion, unless they could be brought under either private or governmental ownership.

The situation described in the “Tragedy of the Commons” continued to be the mainstream model for understanding interactions between society and natural systems until the next seminal work in natural resources management appeared in 1990. Elinor Ostrom's path-breaking classic Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action built on the fundamental problem of jointly used resources and the resulting overutilization assumed by Hardin but argued that the depletion of the resource was not an unavoidable outcome. One of Ostrom's core contributions is the conceptual distinction between common property (resources owned jointly) and common pool resources (CPRs—resources that are highly subtractable and have high exclusion costs associated with them). Relying on evidence from multiple case studies and game theoretical models, Ostrom pointed out that natural resource users may solve the commons dilemma through self-organizing institutions that regulate access and resource extraction activities. However, simply setting up an institution is not a panacea for the problem of sustainable natural resource management. Since the very act of constructing an institution is a collective action problem in itself, creating the institution in many cases poses an insurmountable challenge. Moreover, even with the institution in place there is still a large amount of variation in how well different types of institutional configurations are able to achieve sustainable resource use. Factors such as power asymmetries and levels of trust among users, the ability to control access to the resource, whether or not resource units are easily distinguishable, and the degree of volatility in the resource system itself are all highly influential factors for successful management.

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