Environmental Degradation

“WHAT IS COMMON to many is taken least care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than what they possess in common with others.” “The tragedy of the commons” is a modern statement of the insight captured by Aristotle. Any arrangement whereby benefits accrue to one group of people but the costs are borne by another group is a recipe for disaster. Many experts would argue that is exactly what has happened with our environmental resources.

Garret Hardin, who coined the phrase the tragedy of the commons, used the example of a common village pasture for illustration. He reasoned that each cattle owner in the village has incentive to allow his cattle to overgraze since the benefits of overgrazing accrue to him while the costs are borne by all cattle owners in the village. Each one thinks that if he limits grazing of his cattle, there is no assurance that others will also do so. This cost-benefit calculus leads to a situation whereby all cattle overgraze the common pasture, the grass runs out before the next rains, and many cattle die—the tragedy of the commons.

However, before the advent of modern governments, most of the natural resources were managed by local communities. Access to a common resource—vil-lage pastures for cattle grazing, forests for fruits and fuel wood, wild animals for hunting, river water for agricultural use—was controlled by norms and customs, either articulate or inarticulate.

Ever-increasing demand for these resources due to growing population, accelerating economic development, and improving technologies began to put pressure on the informal norms and customs that managed the use of these resources. Unfortunately, instead of building on the informal arrangements that had worked well, a completely new method was adopted. The state took over the ownership and management of common resources. The commons were nationalized.

[Page 315]By all accounts, state ownership and management, commonly referred to as the command-and-control approach, has singularly failed in managing the use or the preservation of natural resources. Instances of government failures in management of natural resources abound: in a famous study of grassland degradation in central Asia, satellite images showed marked degradation in the grasslands of southern Siberia, where the former Soviet Union had imposed state-owned agricultural collectives, while grasslands in Mongolia, which had allowed pastoralists to continue their traditional, self-organized group property regime, were in much better condition.

The reason for this state failure is precisely the one that Hardin gave for the tragedy of the commons. The benefits of the resource accrue largely to the functionaries of the state but the costs are borne by all citizens. The nationalization solution had assumed that the interests of government officers and those of the people are the same; that government officers would behave as if the costs and benefits were borne equally by all citizens, including themselves; and that the forest guard would protect tigers as if they were his. Alas, that is not the case—all men have greater regard for what is their own than for what they possess in common.

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