Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons
March 7, 2019 8:00 PM   Subscribe

As Mildenberger points out, this isn't a case where a terrible person had some great ideas that outlived them: Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons was a piece of intellectual fraud committed in service to his racist, eugenicist ideology. 600 words from Cory Doctorow indicating serious problems with Garret Hardin's work and reputation.

By contrast, consider Nobelist Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons, whose groundbreaking insights on the management of common resources are a prescription for a better, more prosperous, more egalitarian future.
posted by cgc373 (45 comments total) 69 users marked this as a favorite
 
Here's the original twitter thread by a history professor, and incidentally, here's what the SPLC has to say on Garrett Hardin:
"Over the course of his career, Hardin wrote 27 books and over 350 articles, many of which were frank in their racism and quasi-fascist ethnonationalism. Nevertheless, whenever Hardin’s views are presented to the public, the white nationalism that unified his thought is invariably glossed over. In general, the only places to find open discussions of the entirety of Hardin’s thought are on white supremacist websites, where he is celebrated as a hero. Articles and comments on vdare, Stormfront, and The Occidental Quarterly, not to mention publications Hardin personally contributed to like The Social Contract and Chronicles, recognize Hardin as one of the intellectual pillars of modern scientific racism and white separatism. After his death, John Tanton and Wayne Lutton founded the Garrett Hardin Society to continue Hardin’s mission of transforming environmentalism into a weapon to use against immigrants, minorities and poor nations."
posted by ChuraChura at 8:07 PM on March 7, 2019 [22 favorites]


Huh. Good to know.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:02 PM on March 7, 2019 [6 favorites]


Fascinating. The "tragedy of the commons" is one of those ideas that was just kind of in the general discussion when I was in college and beyond, but I'd never heard anything about its provenance.

Note that Cory Doctorow tagged his article with "christ what an asshole," which seems appropriate.
posted by biogeo at 10:18 PM on March 7, 2019 [7 favorites]


Wow, this is really interesting. Thanks for posting this - I hope more people get an opportunity to find out about Hardin's repugnant world view.
posted by kristi at 10:18 PM on March 7, 2019


It was new to me, but didn't exactly surprise me, that the true tragedy of the commons was that rich people wanted to own them. Of course it was.

I note also that he seems to be the source of "what's more important unity or diversity?", which I have heard from someone in the Breitbart cult. I mean, that's prima facie a fast talking snake-oil flimflam man's attempt to force a false choice but I hadn't known it had actual historical white supremacist roots. Of course it does.
posted by Horkus at 10:33 PM on March 7, 2019 [13 favorites]


when i did my undergrad in Ecology in 2000, we were told that Garrett Hardin was the racist uncle of our discipline, that we would have to spend our careers disavowing him; that feminism solves the "population bomb" problem,

and that we would spend the rest of our lives explaining that the "tragedy of the commons" was actually that the native farmers were thrown off their land by speculators, only to become footsoldiers for colonizing Ireland and North America, and throwing Amerindians off their land in turn.
posted by eustatic at 10:34 PM on March 7, 2019 [45 favorites]


George Monbiot (some of whose stuff can be found elsewhere on the blue) has some interesting work on the idea of reclaiming the commons; I read (and wrote a short paper) about his newer book Out of the Wreckage in the fall but my memory's already hazy and I'm too tired to write about it right now but here's a Guardian article in which he talks about it in less depth for anyone interested: Don’t let the rich get even richer on the assets we all share.
I think he even touches on Hardin in the book if memory serves...
posted by LeviQayin at 10:35 PM on March 7, 2019 [9 favorites]


that feminism solves the "population bomb" problem,

Of course it does *slaps forehead*. It's already March 8 over here, so a fitting date for me to realize that.
posted by Harald74 at 12:26 AM on March 8, 2019 [3 favorites]


The earliest recorded discussion about the tragedy of the commons is from an 1833 lecture by Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford William Forster Lloyd where he responds to some of Malthus' ideas.

He uses the idea of overgrazing the commons as an analogy to people trying to find employment in a limited job market. I don't think overt white supremacy of the modern sort was quite as big a driving factor in Lloyd's work. (He was English in the 1800s, so covert white supremacy might well have been a background factor.)
posted by entity447b at 12:51 AM on March 8, 2019 [3 favorites]


A lot of dodgy, right-leaning ideas seem to be predicated on negative solidarity: the idea that people are fundamentally untrustworthy aggressors, that social interactions are predominantly hostile, and that social organisation is fundamentally about defence and deterrence. Free-market economics, for example (that coöperation must be quantified by economic self-interest), or the curious insistence that before money was invented, people bartered routinely (now debunked; as David Graeber mentioned in Debt: The First 5000 Years, barter only occurred when two groups were either unacquainted or too mutually hostile to agree to a record of debts). Or the rats-in-a-cage theory of urban density trotted out by the US right some decades ago (that low-density suburbs are civilised, but if you pack people into tight cities, they fight like rats packed into a too-small cage; a theory that lends itself all too easily to racial dog-whistling). In hindsight, that the Tragedy Of The Commons fits into this pattern is obvious.
posted by acb at 2:23 AM on March 8, 2019 [28 favorites]


We read Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons" and "Lifeboat Ethics" in my undergrad environmental ethics class. I wrote a paper picking apart the latter and calling it a racist, genocidal work; to learn all these years later that I was if anything being too generous is not surprising.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:37 AM on March 8, 2019 [8 favorites]


This is fascinating, but it doesn't immediately follow that Hardin = racist and tragedy of the commons = false, ergo tragedy of the commons = racist. Which is not exactly the claim they are making but certainly seems to be implied. The tragedy of the commons also is also clearly true in many instances (climate change, anyone?)--it's just a limited case. That happens, not-so-coincidentally as it turns out, to have sprung from some (racist) motivated reasoning. Ostrom's excellent work sets it within a game theoretical framework that no longer ignores learning and trust and the ability of humans to socially organize.

Acb: you are absolutely right. This goes all the way back to the foundations of modern political science (Machiavelli, Hobbes, etc...). Generally the less trustworthy you believe people to be, the less you believe people can act to make a better society. These ideas are true enough on some level but they ignore history and fail to imagine anything beyond simplistic, atomistic actors.
posted by ropeladder at 4:53 AM on March 8, 2019 [11 favorites]


This is fascinating, but it doesn't immediately follow that Hardin = racist and tragedy of the commons = false, ergo tragedy of the commons = racist.

It's a good enough reason not to assign Hardin to undergrads, tho, given that there are loads of other ways to get the basic gist of collective action problems across.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:01 AM on March 8, 2019 [8 favorites]


"Tragedy of the commons" wasn't invented by Hardin. A quick rundown.

Eugenics still survives. What kind of scares me about the whole thing is how worked up otherwise well meaning modern progressive people can get over population. Even here on the blue, the concept of population control starts to dance around the issue, non-racist of course, to the point where the mods will have to shut it down. It's one of the areas where I think all it will take is a small, if dramatic, event to tilt balance all out of whack.

Given that, there might be value to study Hardin's work to see where logic goes bad. but then again, humans are sometimes prone to drawing bad conclusions from good lessons.
posted by 2N2222 at 5:12 AM on March 8, 2019 [3 favorites]


When I read the paper a number of years ago, I found the basic idea really interesting and started applying it to all sorts of things. (E.g., the effect of lowering of wages is driven by tragedy-of-the-commons mechanisms: If one company lowers wages, they'll make higher profits, so all companies are motivated to lower their workers' wages; however, once everybody's wages are low, nobody can afford to buy much, so profits for all companies will drop and, at the extreme, the economy will collapse. Individual maximization leads to collective tragedy. The solution is "mutual coercion mutually agreed upon", i.e. taxes and redistribution.)

Fascinating to get more background, to learn that the weird bits I glossed over were for Hardin the main point.
posted by clawsoon at 5:31 AM on March 8, 2019 [1 favorite]


My recommendation for replacing Hardin in college courses.

Okay, so it's 10 times longer and more specialized. But it's an excellent introduction to the management of common land in north-west Europe - and the differences between the case studies show how use and management of common land changes based on population density and demand.
posted by jb at 5:47 AM on March 8, 2019 [3 favorites]


I briefly mention the Tragedy of the Commons in Env Sci 1101, but only in the Elinor Ostrom sense that clearly the solution to the overexploitation of the environment is government regulation and education. Regardless of what historically happened to the literal commons, it is clear that the problem of everything from cod fisheries to climate change is a tragedy of the commons problem, but it's also clear that only regulation can solve that problem and force people to share, where sharing includes leaving some unexploited so that natural processes can continue.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:57 AM on March 8, 2019 [9 favorites]


This is fascinating, but it doesn't immediately follow that Hardin = racist and tragedy of the commons = false, ergo tragedy of the commons = racist.

I agree, and though I'm not a fan of post-modernism beyond a private language among the humanities, a founding kernel years back was the idea that an author cannot determine the meaning of their work, which seems obvious today. However, it doesn't stop people from implying that bad person equals bad ideas, or even bad art. People are still human and contain generational flaws and dimensions of bad taste that were once common. And there lies another angle to the tragedy of the commons, insofar as being common will always be on the wrong side of history because really bad ideas were common to most people.

What kind of scares me about the whole thing is how worked up otherwise well meaning modern progressive people can get over population.

Most people I talk with suggest that we can just go to Mars if we need to, almost a state of perfect denial but with acknowledgement. I'll stick with the paranoids on this one because of well hidden problems are either rarely mentioned or yet linked to population. But welfare has nothing to do with population, and can be associated with free birth control and non-religious training on the personal benefits, because the same organizations administer both.
posted by Brian B. at 6:28 AM on March 8, 2019


the Elinor Ostrom sense that clearly the solution to the overexploitation of the environment is government regulation and education

That is not what Ostrom is saying! The whole book is sort of a cautionary tale for regulators to sometimes leave well enough alone and not stampede into local areas breaking the in-/semi-formal local institutions that were working perfectly well.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:46 AM on March 8, 2019 [2 favorites]


Thanks for the Elinor Ostrom link. It led me back down the Metafilter rabbit hole to Elinor Ostrom on the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Which You Should Approach with a Hermeneutic of Suspicion):
One important application of PD is found in Garrett Hardin’s extremely influential “Tragedy of the Commons”. ... (Hardin, though citing game theory sources, does not use the term PD explicitly. However, the payoff matrix for cooperation vs. defection is the same, as is the outcome of the game.) QED, right? Not so fast.

It’s interesting to note that when social scientist got around to — quelle horreur — actually testing Prisoner’s Dilemma on real prisoners, PD (and by extension not only Tucker’s thesis, but Hardin’s “tragedy”) broke down: ... A pair of German economists offered female prisoners a chance, and found they were more likely to act in cahoots than shaft the other prisoner, compared with female students in a control group.

...Ostrom, critiquing Hardin, explains why in her Nobel Lecture, which is dense but fast-moving and well worth reading and study. ...

So, whenever you hear an analyst or expert, especially an economist, invoke the Prisoner’s Dilemma, you might ask yourself, this being the hermeneutic part:

1) Whether the key assumption — that game participants cannot communicate — is realistic* in context as you know it, and

2) Whether — and here we draw on the seminal work by Outis Philalithopoulos on “academic choice theory” — the analyst or expert is personally invested in the “optimal set of rules” they will seek to impose on you (and people like you).
This gets me back to thinking about free markets. In the idealized free market, price is the only mean of communication. Workers do not organize; business owners do not collude. Idealized tragedies of the common are inevitable on idealized commons. In the real world, not so much.

I know that many of you know a lot more about this than me, and I would love someone to go into detail on Ostrom's thought.
posted by clawsoon at 6:48 AM on March 8, 2019 [5 favorites]


it doesn't immediately follow that Hardin = racist and tragedy of the commons = false, ergo tragedy of the commons = racist.

"It shouldn't be used because it is false and was created by racists based on a non-factual, racist view of history to support racist philosophies" and "it shouldn't be used because it is false and is inherently racist" seems like a distinction without a difference to me.
posted by solotoro at 6:54 AM on March 8, 2019 [10 favorites]


It is interesting how all these 60s era proofs that society is in fact vile and needs authoritarian heavy hands to rule it are all being revealed as frauds or unrepeatable or highly biased.

Almost like there was a social need to promote them into “common knowledge”.
posted by The Whelk at 7:00 AM on March 8, 2019 [21 favorites]


I'm a mathematician, not an ecologist, and I'd never even heard of Hardin (I'd pegged the Tragedy of the Commons as folklore, essentially), but I'd discussed the Tragedy of the Commons in the context of game theory, as a multiplayer generalization of the Prisoners' Dilemma, to illustrate that a game-theoretical approach to problems may produce socially inadequate solutions.

The concept that every actor pursuing their own advantage can produce a result to everyone's disadvantage is a pretty useful one, because there are plenty of situations where it does happen, but it'd be good to find a way of describing those scenarios that isn't saddled with repugnant ideological baggage.
posted by jackbishop at 7:18 AM on March 8, 2019 [8 favorites]


Eugenics still survives. What kind of scares me about the whole thing is how worked up otherwise well meaning modern progressive people can get over population

I would agree.

""Over population" is an argument for eugenics masked with environmentalism. It is eco-fascism and seemingly every liberal believes in it."
Source.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 7:19 AM on March 8, 2019 [1 favorite]


Rascism is belief that all members of specific race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races. There is nothing overt in this paper that denigrates a specific race. Consequently, I don't understand either Matt Mildenburger's or Cory Doctorow's statements that this paper represents the epitome of racism and genocide. Furthermore, I don't agree that the value of scholarly work should be denigrated ad hominem.

This essay reads as a philosophical and economic argument about the depletion of common economic resources by individuals and societies acting in their own interests, resulting in a ruinous endpoint. This hypothesis certainly seems to be affirmed in relation to our natural resources, where we have a dramatic impact on the survival of many ocean faring species, and pollution is a rampant problem mentioned daily in the news. Those represent ongoing examples where societies act in their own self interests to exploit common resources, and collectively many societies (not individual societies) can deplete the commons. So while people may decry limiting population growth as an evil, genocidal plan, there is no denying that the population of the world will continue its linear growth (because all societies have a vested interest in seeing their populations grow); as a consequence, we will reach 11.2B people by 2100. Given that the planet seems to be struggling with global warming and other almost apocolyptic events with just 7.7B people at present, I would not be so quick to discount the message in this paper, which are calls to limit growth and exploitation of the commons, because you don't like the man bearing the message.
posted by Schadenfreude at 7:33 AM on March 8, 2019 [1 favorite]


It's like, there are so many non-racist thinkers we could consult on this. Why the fuck do we need to die on the hill of this particular dipshit?
posted by tobascodagama at 7:52 AM on March 8, 2019 [6 favorites]


"The Bell Curve was published by racists pushing a racist agenda, but we can't dismiss it out of hand because Gaussian distributions exist and are a useful concept."

That's what you fucking people sound like, Jesus Christ.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:54 AM on March 8, 2019 [18 favorites]


there is no denying that the population of the world will continue its linear growth (because all societies have a vested interest in seeing their populations grow

This is the kind of sentence that I hope I never write:

* "there is no denying that..." prefacing a statement about an extremely complex phenomenon projected indefinitely into the future;

* "linear growth": technical-sounding term inserted meaninglessly with the hope of reinforcing the claim with Science;

* "all societies have a vested interest in seeing their populations grow": attempt to cast human behavior as constrained by some kind of effective Law (thereby naturalizing chosen behaviors), done at such an extraordinary level of generality about such a huge pool of behavior that it can only indicate the speaker is deeply ignorant both of history and the present day, having cherry-picked some (at best) poorly-understood examples to construct his Law

This is exactly Hardinian bad thinking.
posted by praemunire at 8:00 AM on March 8, 2019 [16 favorites]


Oh, wow, this is totally the kind of thing that makes me feel like MetaFilter is My People.

Science has a podcast that I listen to. A few months back they did a "Tragedy of the Commons at 50" thing. The concept of public lands and (especially) wilderness management is something that is near and dear to me, and it occurred to me that wilderness can (IMO) be understood as a commons where the resource is wilderness itself and its appropriators are its visitors. Recreational users who visit wilderness are appropriating that resource in the sense that they glean personal benefit from the experience, but with every person in the wilderness, it becomes "less" of a wilderness.

So I read Hardin's paper for the first time, and I was like, "Huh, this is underwhelming, not really supported by much in the way of empirical evidence, reads more like an editorial than a research paper, and also is kind of gross." How does a paper get cited almost 40,000 times with headings like "the freedom to breed is intolerable" and "how to legislate temperance"? It's like Thomas Malthus had a baby with the local racist crank who writes angry letters to the editor, and the baby was Hardin's paper. "Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush." Thank you, Cormac McCarthy, for your nuanced view of the human race.

I was surprised that there wasn't a greater abundance of critical work being like, "Attention, this guy is racist as hell, and also he literally is like "we can solve problems by taking things that are shared in common and parceling them off to individual dudes."

So I read Ostrom's book, and it was like, the total opposite of Hardin's paper. It's well-researched, draws on a wide variety of case studies, refrains from speaking in absolutes, looks at successes and failures, and generally does not treat humanity as a plague. It's a really good book!

I know that many of you know a lot more about this than me, and I would love someone to go into detail on Ostrom's thought.

My understanding of Ostrom (and someone please correct me if I have misunderstood, misread, or misremembered) is that, under certain favorable conditions, individual cooperation costs among resource appropriators are less than the individual gains achieved by cooperation. Therefore there is an incentive to avoid a tragedy of the commons situation without resorting to privitization or authoritarianism. These favorable conditions can be achieved by self-organized collective institutions that regulate and enforce sustainable rules about resource appropriation. She views resource appropriators as existing within an interdependent system complicated by temptations to free-ride or prioritize short-term gains over long-term productivity. (She also points out that privatization brings with it its own set of economic inefficiencies that are often overlooked. In other words, it costs money to fence the commons.)

Ostrom breaks down resource appropriation problems into first-, second-, and third-order problems. IIRC, first-order problems are operational problems that must be dealt with, such as rule enforcement and the actual apportionment of the resource (or access to the resource). Second-order problems arise with respect to the collective organizations governing groups of resource appropriators (e.g., how to set those first-order rules). Third-order problems relate to the governing framework within which these collective institutions operate (e.g., "constitutional" problems; what are the rules that govern the creation and enforcement of other rules). Different factors at different levels can set things up for success or failure.

To grossly oversimplify things: There are four "internal variables" that govern rational action by individuals: expected benefits, expected costs, internalized norms, and the "discount rate," i.e., how much do you discount the value of future expected returns over immediate short-term gains.

Successful institutions have low discount rates, shared norms that dissuade free-riding (norms I believe that are supported by monitoring and enforcement of rules), low cooperation costs, and user-buy in thanks to user participation in the second-order rule-making process.

I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of stuff and getting some things wrong, and my personal interpretation and take-home message on Ostrom's work haven't totally gelled yet, but it's a really cool book and I highly recommend it to anyone who's taken the time to read or comment here.
posted by compartment at 8:07 AM on March 8, 2019 [30 favorites]


For Schadenfreude and others who are Not Getting It, this is racist: "it would be better if Some People had fewer offspring, because they're unable to care for them without government help, and that help causes more of them to come into being, continuing the cycle."

Specifically, the framing of Some People as intrinsically, eternally dependent and unable to support themselves implies genetic/ethnic inferiority, and reads to me, as an American, as very blatant antiblackness.

Stuff like "it would be better if their children starved to death" is at best eliminationist. "Genocide" isn't a big stretch.

It's theoretically possible that a person saying this stuff could have intended to suggest we cause the deaths of children of the poor, the disabled, or some other group as a matter of policy. Given the context in which Hardin wrote, though, this is unambiguous antiblackness.
posted by bagel at 8:24 AM on March 8, 2019 [14 favorites]


Thanks, compartment!
posted by clawsoon at 8:31 AM on March 8, 2019 [1 favorite]


Interesting that the linked Twitter thread calls Ostrom's work on the commons a "friendly amendment" to Hardin, and says that other people have done "wholesale critiques". It doesn't say who those other people are, though. Anybody know?
posted by clawsoon at 8:42 AM on March 8, 2019


That's what you fucking people sound like, Jesus Christ.

Collective-action problems are not like the Bell Curve.

Hardin was, unfortunately, an early popularizer of ideas that were already well-known. Googling, the first recorded use of an explicit, formalized PD game* was in 1950, and the first recorded significant formalization of public-goods provision* was in 1954. Olson's book was a few years earlier in 1965. The underlying ideas go back at least as far as Hume and/or Hobbes in the more-or-less renaissance. There's nothing inherently racist about the pd's payoff matrix. These were (AFAICT) decent and respectable ideas before Hardin got to them.

The Bell Curve, otoh, is just nonsense racist eugenics all the way down to the bones of its intellectual history.

*...that I could find in a few minutes
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 8:45 AM on March 8, 2019 [2 favorites]


Surely that means there's even less reason to give the time of day to Hardin's work, then.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:17 AM on March 8, 2019 [5 favorites]


For another historical review of the ‘Enclosure’ process in England, this article in The Land is worth reading. The apocryphal tale of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ in England is nothing like the thesis presented by Hardin.

Nevertheless, overfishing, air pollution, and global warming is a tragedy of the commons and could be the basis of a more modern analysis. I would argue that a shift from mercantilism to capitalism and a money economy was the major driving force of the Enclosure while our our current troubles and our apparent inability to deal with it are more rooted in modern capitalism of the neoliberal and libertarian type
posted by sudogeek at 12:43 PM on March 8, 2019


sudogeek: Nevertheless, overfishing, air pollution, and global warming is a tragedy of the commons and could be the basis of a more modern analysis.

I've so far watched this lecture by Ostrom, and it sounds like she's one of the people doing exactly the kind of more modern analysis you're looking for. She mentions overfishing a number of times. It adds the interesting wrinkle that information on fish stocks is hard to gather, which complicates efforts to cooperate: If we don't know how many fish there are, how do we convince everyone that the limits we're placing on fishing are reasonable and will benefit them in the long run? That's just one of the many factors she gets into.
posted by clawsoon at 12:59 PM on March 8, 2019 [8 favorites]


Interesting that the linked Twitter thread calls Ostrom's work on the commons a "friendly amendment" to Hardin, and says that other people have done "wholesale critiques". It doesn't say who those other people are, though. Anybody know?

Here's the 50th anniversary piece from Science, which contains a variety of contemporary perspectives on Hardin's paper. I'm not sure whether it represents the full spectrum of critiques though.

I would not characterize Ostrom's work as a "friendly amendment" to Hardin. Ostrom does not amend Hardin's terms; she explicitly rejects the false dichotomy he presents. For example, Hardin suggests in his paper that we might preserve Yosemite National Park by privatizing it or allowing the government to allot access on the basis of wealth. Hardin essentially proposes "the firm" or "the state" (not necessarily his language) as the only two solutions to the tragedy of the commons. Ostrom is like, "There is another way, it's self-organized collective action. Here are dozens of examples of commons that have been sustainably managed for many years; many centuries in some cases."

Ostrom writes, "The tragedy of the commons, the prisoner's dilemma, and the logic of collective action [referring specifically to an earlier theory by Mancur Olson] are closely related concepts ... As long as individuals are viewed as prisoners, policy prescriptions will address this metaphor. I would rather address the question of how to enhance the capabilities of those involved to change the constraining rules of the game to lead to outcomes other than remorseless tragedies."

So, in that sense, I would not call Ostrom a "wholesale critique" of Hardin. Hardin devises a metaphor, applies it to all of humanity, and proposes two solutions. Ostrom is interested in observing reality and seeing what solutions already exist. It's not a wholesale critique because Hardin is off by himself worrying about who's breeding faster than whom. He's not even in the room.
posted by compartment at 2:34 PM on March 8, 2019 [8 favorites]


One thing Ostrom talked about in the lecture I linked was that sometimes communities fail to self-organize, and then it's useful for higher levels of government to step in. Is that something she talked about in Governing the Commons, or did that come later in her thought?
posted by clawsoon at 2:43 PM on March 8, 2019 [3 favorites]


I think there's a case study that talks about an NGO facilitating the self-organization in an irrigation district.

There's a lot of emphasis on the importance of government being present to to provide a framework within which self-organization can take place. The best example that comes to mind is groundwater pumping in Los Angeles County, where basins were in danger of depletion, and, in some cases, of being infiltrated by saltwater and rendered useless. State water law and the court systems provided a framework that allowed for the preservation of the groundwater basins. I don't think anyone looks at water law and is like "that makes a lot of sense" but absent some of the early adjudication, I think the groundwater basins would have been depleted or destroyed. She contrasts this with failures to manage groundwater basins in San Bernardino County, but I don't recall to what she attributes the difference.

I'm looking forward to having the opportunity to watch that lecture; Governing the Commons predates it by about 25 years. Ostrom talks a fair amount in the book about the importance of a government that supports self-organization, but I don't recall offhand anything at length about exactly when governments need to step in. She does I think explicitly acknowledge that there are circumstances (e.g., times of rapid change or problems of large scale) that individuals are incapable or unlikely to self-organize. She's pretty clear about most of case studies in the book dealing with communities at or below maybe 15,000 resource appropriators, so large-scale problems like CO2 emissions are outside the scope of that text.
posted by compartment at 3:28 PM on March 8, 2019 [2 favorites]


Ostrom's Law: A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory.
posted by clawsoon at 4:10 PM on March 8, 2019 [10 favorites]


Oh, I like that one.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:32 PM on March 8, 2019


Mod note: Couple comments deleted. First, we can do this without the patronizing "math terms may be frightening to you" stuff. Second, the discussion isn't about the isolated question of whether/at what rate world population is growing, it's about this guy's specific ways of talking about that and how that connects to specific racist conclusions/actions he meant to promote; getting off into a sidebar about the first is a misdirection.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 8:09 AM on March 9, 2019 [2 favorites]


Ostrom's Law: A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory.

This fails to hold if the removal of resources continues to increase, because the practice that worked previously is overdrawn. I'm reading how the Ostroms are typically framed as a third-way to a solution, but it clearly assumes a local scale. And if we only assume a local scale, in the context of a million other local scales, then the problem remains on a global scale. So what was a local approach needs to go global at some point. In the end, the commons problem is about managing the demand if the supply is fixed, including the environment itself. The demand can be managed by technological advances, or increased fees to remove the incorrect valuation of free (such as pollution), and limiting access through lotteries, licenses or exchanges. Price also goes up as supply dwindles, pressuring governments to subsidize distribution of a limited resource, such as water projects. It is all refocused as it threatens the entire world, as global warming and rising demand for carbon resources impacts all water, fisheries, forests, arable land, energy and transportation. Global warming discussions assume global approaches, which often settle on solutions that lower demand by taxation. This is a government function, but a hidden one that is often not assumed or even used, because it isn't dictating production as people expect from government. Most people have no context for the commons problem, because they are prone to subsidizing growth as an economic or religious impulse and so free-rider logging, fishing, grazing, mining or polluting aren't their personal concerns. So the Ostroms work for their sensibilities. Obviously all three approaches to the problem are best, the point being that we don't have to exclude the others as opposites.
posted by Brian B. at 11:31 AM on March 9, 2019


Brian B.: This fails to hold if the removal of resources continues to increase, because the practice that worked previously is overdrawn. I'm reading how the Ostroms are typically framed as a third-way to a solution, but it clearly assumes a local scale. And if we only assume a local scale, in the context of a million other local scales, then the problem remains on a global scale. So what was a local approach needs to go global at some point.

I suppose that a corollary to Ostrom's Law would be that a resource arrangement that doesn't work in practise shouldn't work in theory.

The Ostrom's Law link talks about how the optimal scale to solve a resource problem can change over time or with regard to different resources in the same space (section 4, "Scale and the commons"). However, based on my (small amount of) reading so far, it does seem to be the case that Ostrom wants to remind us that local action will be important in solving even global problems like climate change:
SPIEGEL ONLINE: In your research, you focused on local and regional levels. What makes you think that your solutions would work for the entire planet as well?

Ostrom: Indeed, the global scale is a challenge. Building that kind of knowledge between the different parties is tricky. We need our global leaders to take some of the decisions on a very big level. Here at the summit, those guys are talking to each other and gaining some trust because they meet face to face. But then they go home -- and that's when the real action starts.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Can money help to build trust between developing nations and industrialized nations?

Ostrom: Maybe, and it is hard to see a climate deal without serious financial commitments. But at the same time, I am very worried and nervous about corruption. If we pour money into a country in which the corruption level is very high, we would be kidding ourselves not to think that some of it will end up in the wrong pockets. At first, a lot of the proposals on the table sound great. But four to six years later, you have a lot of politicians who have money in Swiss bank accounts. What we need are tight rules and controls to ensure that the billions that might be put on the table here are used correctly.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In other words, an anti-corruption task force -- like the one that exists in Indonesia -- might be the best environmental protection agency?

Ostrom: Absolutely! If you look at the role corruption plays in giving away forests to big corporations and in looking away if forest protection rules are broken, you will see that bribery is one of the main contributors to environmental destruction.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is it possible to save the climate with a single treaty?

Ostrom: One treaty will not solve the problem entirely. This is why I propose a so-called polycentric approach to tackling climate change. We need all levels of human society to work on this to be effective in the long run. Cities, villages, communities and networks of people have been neglected as players.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What happens if there is no agreement?

Ostrom: We need to get away from the idea that there is only one solution on the global scale. There are many, many levels in between. So we need to take action on smaller levels. If the politicians do not agree in Copenhagen, I would like to embarrass the hell out of them by getting some agreements going where people are doing something -- essentially saying: "We are tired of waiting for you."
It's entirely possible (and likely?) that the climate change problem won't be solved. If it's not, Ostrom's Social-Ecological Systems framework, given how well-informed it is by empirical work from many different fields, seems as likely as anything to tell us why not.
posted by clawsoon at 5:46 AM on March 10, 2019 [2 favorites]


A General Framework for Analyzing Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems: "The prediction of resource collapse is supported in very large, highly valuable, open-access systems when the resource harvesters are diverse, do not communicate, and fail to develop rules and norms for managing the resource. The dire predictions, however, are not supported under conditions that enable harvesters and local leaders to self-organize effective rules to manage a resource..."

The use of fossil fuels and the global destruction of forests seem like they would fit into the first category.

On my reading list:

- This (open-access) issue of Ecology and Society, which has a couple of articles that Ostrom was working on at her death, plus a number of articles from people she collaborated with.

- Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems: "In this article, I will describe the intellectual journey that I have taken the last half century
from when I began graduate studies in the late 1950s."

- Understanding Institutional Diversity: "Thus, understanding institutions is a serious endeavor. It is an endeavor that colleagues and I at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis have been struggling with for at least three decades. After designing multiple research projects; writing numerous articles; developing ideas in the classroom; learning from eminent scholars in the field, from students, and from colleagues; and making diverse attacks on this problem, it is time to try to put thoughts on this subject together within the covers of a book, even though I am still not fully satisfied with my own understanding. Consider this a progress report on a long-term project that will be continued, I hope, by many others into the future."
posted by clawsoon at 6:11 AM on March 10, 2019 [1 favorite]


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