№ XIII
The twelve plates
A pasture open to all is grazed to dust; a fishery free to all is emptied; the atmosphere, belonging to everyone, is altered by all and defended by none. The tragedy of the commons looks like a law of human nature — the certain ruin of whatever no one owns. But communities have governed their commons for centuries without ruin, by rules of their own making. This volume asks whether the tragedy is destiny, or only the mark of institutions we failed to build.
the ruin of a shared resource looks like the inexorable work of human selfishness — but is the tragedy a law of nature, or only the absence of rules we might have made?
A commons is a thing that everyone may use and no one can be kept from — a pasture open to all the village, a sea free to every boat, a sky that belongs to all and to none. Such things are among the oldest forms of wealth and, by a long tradition of thought, the most accursed. For a commons is rivalrous in use and unguarded at its gate: what one grazier's beast crops, another's cannot, and yet no fence keeps any beast away. From this pairing — use depletes, but no one is excluded — there seems to follow, with the force of a proof, a melancholy conclusion: that what belongs to all will be cared for by none, and the common wealth is doomed to ruin by the very people it sustains. This volume is about that conclusion — why it has seemed so certain, why it is so often false, and what its long career as a supposed law of nature has concealed.
The argument was given its enduring name by Garrett Hardin, who called it the tragedy of the commons, and its sting lies in that word, tragedy. The herdsman who adds one more animal to the common pasture gathers for himself the whole gain of the beast, while the cost — the thinning of the grass, the crowding of the ground — is divided among all who share the field. His private arithmetic is plain: add the animal. But every herdsman reasons exactly so, and so every herdsman adds, and the pasture that might have fed them all in perpetuity is grazed to dust. The ruin is the work of neither folly nor malice. It is the sum of decisions each entirely rational, each defensible on its own, converging on a catastrophe that none intended and all could foresee — reason itself, faithfully followed, marching the commoners over a cliff. The same logic empties the fishery, drains the aquifer, and fouls the air: wherever a resource is shared and its use unpriced, the individually sensible and the collectively ruinous are one and the same act.
From so grim a diagnosis Hardin drew an equally grim prescription, and it hardened into something close to dogma. If the commons is doomed, then the commons must be abolished — and there seemed only two ways to abolish it. One was to fence it: to carve the common field into private parcels, each with an owner who, bearing the full cost of his own overuse, would husband what was now his alone. This is enclosure, the conversion of common wealth into private property, urged ever since as the cure for every commons from pasture to rainforest to gene. The other was to govern it from above: to set over the commons a sovereign power — a state, a regulator, a Leviathan — that would ration access by quota and license, compelling the restraint that self-interest would never supply. Privatize or nationalize, the market's fence or the State's hand: this was the whole of the choice the dogma allowed. The commons itself, governed by those who used it, was assumed to be no option at all — a primitive thing, fit only to be carved up or seized.
But every proof has its premises, and the tragedy rests on one seldom examined and frequently false. It assumes that the users of a commons are strangers — isolated maximizers, each blind to the rest, unable to speak, bargain, promise, or punish, condemned to move within the herd as atoms in a gas. Grant the assumption and ruin follows without escape. But deny it — admit that the commoners can talk, can see what each is doing, can make rules among themselves and hold one another to them — and the proof comes apart, for now the herdsman who adds the ruinous beast is no anonymous unit of appetite but a neighbor, who will be seen, judged, and made to answer. The tragedy of the commons, looked at closely, is not the tragedy of a resource. It is the tragedy of a resource without rules — and whether a commons has rules is no fact of nature, but a thing a community may achieve, or fail to achieve.
That this is so was settled not by argument alone but by looking, patiently and for years, at the commons history actually affords — the achievement of Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel in economics and the scholar who broke the dogma's hold. Where the theory predicted ruin she found endurance: the high pastures of the Swiss Alps, grazed in common under village rule for five hundred years; the irrigation huertas of Spain; the forests of Japan, the lobster grounds of Maine, the groundwater basins of California — commons beyond counting, managed sustainably for generation upon generation by neither the market's fence nor the State's command but by their own users, bound by rules of their own devising. These communities had solved the supposedly insoluble, and Ostrom set herself to learn how. The answer lay in institutions: clear boundaries; rules fitted to the place and made by those who lived under them; monitoring by the commoners themselves; sanctions that began as a quiet word and stiffened into real penalty; and cheap means of settling quarrels. The tragedy was no law of nature. It was the fate of a commons that lacked these things — and its opposite the reward of one that had built them.
And so the commons delivers the argument of these volumes in its starkest form. A price is a verdict on a hidden contest, mistaken for a fact of nature — and the ruin of the commons is the very same: not the decree of an iron law of human selfishness, but the visible signature of institutions a community failed to make. The selfsame fishery is a tragedy under open access and a treasure under good governance; the resource has not altered, only the rules around it, and the rules are made. To call the destruction of the commons inevitable — to file it among the fixed facts of human nature, beside gravity and mortality — is to commit the master mistake at the scale of the shared world: to mistake the contingent outcome of a contest over governance, which in a thousand places went otherwise, for a sentence handed down by nature.
Nor is the mistake innocent, for the doctrine of inevitable tragedy has always done a certain work in the world. To insist that the commons must be ruined unless it is enclosed is to lend enclosure the dignity of necessity — to present the conversion of shared wealth into private property, from the English fields to the patented genome, not as the contestable seizure it is but as the regrettable price of escaping ruin. The tragedy, dressed as a law of nature, becomes the standing argument for delivering the commons to whoever is best positioned to own it. Here the commons takes its place beside its sister failures in this third group of the table — the failure of competition that The Power anatomized, and the failure of price to carry every cost that The Externality traced — and it teaches the deepest lesson of the three. For the lesson is not that shared things are cursed, but that no economic fate is written into the nature of things: the same resource ruined under one set of rules flourishes under another, and the difference between abundance and desolation is a difference of institutions — of choices, of who decides. A price is a verdict on a hidden contest, mistaken for a fact of nature; and the tragedy of the commons is that verdict at its most sweeping — the seeming doom of the shared world unmasked as the consequence of rules we wrote, or failed to write, and might yet write better.
The twelve plates that follow anatomize the commons in this light. They set out the tragedy and its patient refutation; the free-rider whose defection is its engine, and the public good that is its mirror; the two old remedies — the fence of enclosure and the warden's quota — and the third way Ostrom recovered, the self-governance of those who share; the inversion of the anticommons, where too many owners freeze what too few would have wasted; the knowledge commons that no use can deplete, and the new enclosures that fence it nonetheless; the atmosphere, the commons of all humanity, with neither steward nor warden; the trust we hold for the unborn; and, at the last, the open question on which much may turn — whether the village commons, where neighbors who know one another keep their own rules, can be raised to the scale of the nation, the species, and the planet. The commons is where the master thesis comes home. For of all the things the economy presents to us as facts of nature, none looks more natural than the doom of what no one owns — and none, on inspection, proves more thoroughly a matter of the rules we make. The argument remains open.