Global Political Ecology and the Tragedy of the Commons

One of the most essential contributions to a contemporary political ecology is common property theory. This understands that fisheries, forests and other resources, are traditionally managed as collective property, but where private benefits are accrued at a cost to the group, there is a potential for environmental degradation, which may be seen as a failure of collective management. During the 1970’s conventional western wisdom held that private gains might hold social or ecological costs and collective resource use tended inherently toward abuse and degradation. This was codified into a socio-economic theory, the “Tragedy of the Commons”, which emerged as the dominant discourse,arguing that only centralized regulation or privatization can solve the dilemma of collective resources (Hardin, 1968). This discourse has proved to be both popular and enduring, its seemingly apolitical nature avoiding problematic political issues and its simplified explanation placing equal blame on all, hence this theory remains an inadequate yet common framework.

Contemporary political ecology challenges this traditional discourse in various ways. Because fish populations are the classical example of common property resources, Hardin’s ‘Tragedy of the commons’ is frequently cited as the cause of their decline. However, overfishing is not an inevitable outcome of collective ownership and management (Robbins p.43). Empirical evidence from the last three decades shows less support for this theory, many exceptions, and instances of common management theory working at a local scale. The failure of collective management is therefore in the structure of the rules rather than in the inherent design of the concept. Margaret Chapman for example illustrates how Hardin’s model ignores the critical relationships which exist between common-property and private resources in many third world rural societies in her study of fishery depletion in Amazonia. Indeed the fault of common-property management is often not with local people, who have a vested interest in sustainable management, but rather with the infiltration of coercive states and new markets into social economies, which results in the appropriation of communal capital away from the locals and into the hands of elites, non residents, and other distant parties.

Indeed, this is reflected in Mansfield’s article,‘modern industrial fisheries and the crisis of overfishing’ in which she argues that overfishing is primarily caused by the industrialization of fisheries for economic development. She notes that the problem of the tragedy of the commons concept is that although it appears to be an apolitical theory, it is actually highly politicized, as it supports certain outcomes and groups of people over others. For example, policies encourage capital intensive fishing, which places control in the hands of fewer firms, who become more efficient, more economically developed, and are driven by market incentives and short term profit margins. I.e. the western capitalist model of development is to blame for the crisis of overfishing, turning fishing into a modern industrialist enterprise. An apolitical theory of commons is attractive but inadequate, as multiple scales of power and diverse players remain unexamined and the multi scale structure of the economy is ignored.

Young uses the case of fisheries in Baja California Sur to critique this tragedy of the commons model as a metaphor for understanding increasingly abusive patterns of marine resource use. In order to safeguard public property resources are often placed under national or private ownership. However she notes centralized environmental management by the state is inherently paradoxical, due to the friction between the states role as both developer and protector of natural resources. The tragedy of the commons model is problematic because it is applied uncritically as a metaphor to guide natural resource policies with little attention to the underlying assumptions of the model and whether they apply to a particular empirical setting, and by attributing environmental ruin and human impoverishment solely to the common property status of a resource one overlooks the impact of broader political and socio-economic factors such as governmental policies and the expansion of global capitalism on local resource use. Young is therefore correct in her conclusion that the role of changing state policies forms not so much a tragedy of the commons, as what McCay and Acheson (1987) call a tragedy of incursion. i.e. state induced outside encroachment.

So, we can understand that the assumptions upon which the tragedy of the commons model are based are inherently problematic. A political ecological approach is necessary when examining global fisheries, as the needs of the state to utilize their resources economically need to be balanced with an understanding of how these capitalist interests and infiltration of new markets will effect local communities. For example, privatization can often mean the loss of access to critical resources by local populations, as well private entrepreneurs being motivated solely by short term profit, discounting the future value of the resource. Fisheries present inherent problems in that they are hard to monitor, and are ecologically and spatially heterogenous, but privatization of the commons is not necessarily the only answer. As Mansfield notes, the privatization of the oceans is merely an extension of this capitalist model, which ignores history and politics by naturalizing over-fishing as a problem of human nature that can be solved through capitalist markets. Degradation is by no means the inevitable result of collectivity. Mansfield argues that the solution would be to promote small scale fisheries that appear environmentally sustainable and environmentally friendly, but realistically a new framework of rules are needed for common ownership which could be informed by taking a global political ecological perspective.

Mansfield B. (2011). Chapter 4 in Peet et al. "Modern" Industrial Fisheries and the Crisis of Overfishing

Young, E. (2001). State Intervention and Abuse of the Commons: Fisheries Development in Baja California Sur, Mexico. Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol. 91(1): 283-306.

Chapman, M. (1989). The Political Ecology of Fisheries Depletion in Amazonia. Environmental Conservation Vol. 16 (4) :331-337

Robbins, P. (2004). Political Ecology