Environment and Society. Paul Robbins

Figure 4.2 Irrigation systems are labyrinths of sluices, canals, and gates, which test the limits of people’s ability to cooperate in managing environmental goods. This example, from the village of Musha in the Nile Valley, shows the interrelationships of one private field to the next, tied together by the mutual need for water held communally. Source: Reproduced from Turner, B.L.,II and S.B. Brush (eds.) (1987). Comparative Farming Systems. New York: Guildford Press.

       Wildlife Commons: Collective Management through Hunting

      Even the world’s wildlife can be considered a kind of commons. In the United States, where herds of elk and other important species were in serious decline a century ago, management has worked to develop common property solutions to problems of over-hunting. Historically, since such animals were wide-ranging and the property of no single land owner, they could be hunted with impunity, leading to population declines in the late 1800s. Current systems of management in states like Montana utilize many of the principles of common property design. Limits are placed by the government on the number of hunters and the number of hunting licenses in any given year based on extensive monitoring of game populations. Preferences for licenses are given to residents of the state. While the overall limits are set by officials, all the rules are overseen through a collective review process that includes Montana hunters themselves. The result is a system where a potential “open access” resource (free-ranging elk) is made into “common property” by 1) excluding some potential outside users, 2) establishing rules and limits, and 3) reviewing and overseeing these rules through consultation with resource users themselves. Versions of this system are in place across the United States.

       The Biggest Commons: Global Climate

      But not all commons are local, like irrigation, or regional, like elk herds. This brings us full circle to the problem of governing the climate. The global climate has all the qualities of a common property system headed for failure: exclusion is difficult and costs to defer depletion of the collective good can be high to individuals, firms, or states. By treating the global climate as common property, it is possible to think about it in a new way, however. As a commons, we can imagine climate as a shared good, and that people polluting it might constrain their behavior through some kind of collective agreement.

      Clearly the possibilities for collective action exist, and many new systems to manage the problem have emerged in the last decade, including the Kyoto Protocol (see Chapter 11). That agreement essentially imposes a mutual set of restrictions that countries must follow on their emissions, with mechanisms for crafting rules and making decisions even in the absence of any kind of higher authority; there is no real “world government” to enforce global agreements, after all.

      The problems facing the common property of a fishery are largely similar to global climate, of course. It is hard to monitor who is doing what. Sanctions are difficult to impose on free-riders who do not comply with the rules or on users of the resource (polluters) who are not part of the agreement (e.g. the United States). The presence of collective choice systems for setting and revising the rules is also unclear, beyond the fact that signatories participate in negotiation rounds to work out provisions. For these reasons, an institutional analysis of the climate problem sheds light on the prospects for success in controlling climate change by identifying areas where creativity will be necessary to solve it as a common property problem.

      Are All Commoners Equal? Does Scale Matter?

      As attractive and effective as an institutional perspective appears to be, it is not without detractors. At their core, these criticisms revolve around some of the assumptions that common property theory inherits from game theory. Specifically, these theories, as embodied in the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the “Tragedy of the Commons,” assume individual free agents of relatively similar power in both determining the outcome of the game and making choices to cooperate. In a world of complex political power and inequality, such assumptions are unrealistic and potentially dangerous.

Consider the ways that access to resources and the rules that govern them have been heavily influenced by social and political conditions surrounding, for example, gender. In many places ownership or inheritance of property is traditionally patriarchal and patrilineal, meaning women cannot own, or at least not inherit, property. At the same time, women’s labor may be essential for the maintenance or use of commons, including the drawing of water, the management of irrigation infrastructure, the tending of community gardens or forests, among many others. What this means for common property management is important, since matching rules with users and developing systems of collective choice becomes extremely difficult in places where not all users have equal access or responsibilities.

For these reasons, developing common property management regimes in village India, for example, can be difficult. Here, traditional decision-making bodies (called panchayats) tend to be dominated by men, and usually men from elite families or castes. If these decision-making bodies are the ones that make the rules about access to village pastures for grazing, they may be viewed as totally illegitimate by the people who use the resource, including women and more marginal groups who tend cattle. If, on the other hand, new collective decision groups are formed to make new rules, and these groups include women and more marginal groups, they might still be dominated by historically powerful communities, again leading to a lack of legitimacy. In either case, a weak authority may lead to indiscriminate use of the grazing lands by people who feel excluded or, worse, view the establishment of rules as effectively representing a taking-away of their traditional rights. Forming clear common property systems may be desirable in complex power-laden contexts, but it may not be easy by any means (Figure 4.3).