In the article Benefits of the Commons, Berkes et. al challenge the idea of the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’, proposed by Garrett Hardin in 1968. The idea, that resources held in common are vulnerable to overexploitation as there is no one to control access and thus private property and governmental regulation are the only successful ways of protecting the environment, has become common sense in the West. This article shows that Hardin fundamentally misunderstood the complexities of commonly held property. It does this by first briefly defining common-property as a resource for which exclusion of members is problematic along with having the characteristic of subtractability, and then listing the four main property rights regimes which exist. These are given as open access, a space which lacks well-defined property rights, private property, government property and communal property, where resources are held by an identified community. Berkes conflated open-access and communal property, failing to recognize that communities do possess self-regulating mechanisms. The authors then draw on several previously published case studies of communal-property schemes to illustrate both the benefits of these smaller, potentially more flexible, systems, as well as the potential shortcomings of governmental regulation.
The article has major implications for human-environment interaction. It is taken for granted that the Tragedy of the Commons is truth and that privatization and state regulation are the only legitimate management systems, which has had huge effects both in the US and around the world, as Western development organizations and NGO’s have imposed these types of management systems on different societies. As the case studies in this article show, conventional way of thinking needs to shift to a more complex and accurate understanding of human-environment relationships.
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- F. Berkes, D. Feeny, B. J. McCay, and J. M. “Benefits of the Commons” From Nature, vol. 340: 91–93, copyright 1989.