The Commons and How to Manage Them

Few ideas in modern social science have been as influential as the argument known as 'the tragedy of the commons'. It was made famous in 1968 by the American ecologist Garrett Hardin, in a short and forceful essay that has been reprinted and argued over ever since. Hardin set out to explain why resources that belong to everyone, and therefore to no one in particular, tend to be overused and destroyed. His conclusion was bleak, and it seemed at the time almost impossible to escape. The phrase he coined proved memorable, and it was soon being applied to problems of every kind, from overfished seas and polluted rivers to overcrowded roads, wherever a resource open to all appeared to be heading for exhaustion.

Hardin illustrated his argument with a simple picture. Imagine a pasture open to all, on which a number of herders graze their animals. Each herder, acting purely in self-interest, has an incentive to add one more animal to the common land, because he personally gains the full benefit of the extra beast while the cost of the additional grazing, the gradual damage to the pasture, is shared among everyone who uses it. Since every herder reasons in exactly the same way, more and more animals are added, until the pasture is stripped bare and ruined for all. The tragedy, in Hardin's telling, is that individually rational decisions lead collectively to disaster, and that no single herder can prevent it by acting alone.

From this grim analysis Hardin drew a clear practical lesson. If shared ownership inevitably led to ruin, then the only escape lay in abolishing the commons altogether. Either the resource had to be divided up and handed over to private owners, who would have every reason to look after their own portion, or it had to be placed under the strict control of the state, which could impose limits and punish those who broke them. Private property or government regulation: for Hardin these were essentially the only two ways of avoiding catastrophe, and much of the policy thinking that followed took his conclusion for granted.

For several decades this pessimistic view held sway, but it did not go unchallenged. Its most formidable critic was the American political economist Elinor Ostrom, who spent much of her career studying how real communities actually manage shared resources. What she found flatly contradicted Hardin's gloomy prediction. Across the world, from mountain pastures and forests to fishing grounds and irrigation systems, Ostrom and her colleagues documented communities that had shared a common resource successfully, often for hundreds of years, without either dividing it into private plots or handing it over to a distant government.

The secret, Ostrom argued, lay in the ability of ordinary people to organise themselves. Communities that managed their commons well had developed their own rules, worked out over generations, about who could use the resource, how much they could take and what would happen to those who broke the agreement. Crucially, the users themselves helped to design and enforce these rules, which made them far more likely to be respected than restrictions imposed from outside. People will obey limits they have helped to set, Ostrom suggested, far more readily than limits handed down by a remote authority who may not understand local conditions. Hardin's mistake, in her view, had been to imagine the commons as a free-for-all with no rules at all, when in reality successful communities were governed by dense webs of custom and mutual obligation.

Ostrom's work, for which she became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in economics, did not prove that shared resources are always safe; commons can and do collapse when the conditions for cooperation are absent. But it demolished the idea that ruin is inevitable, and it shifted the debate. Where Hardin had seen only two remedies, private ownership or state control, Ostrom revealed a rich third possibility: that communities can, under the right conditions, govern themselves. The lesson for anyone concerned with shared resources, from village woodlands to the global atmosphere, is that neither the market nor the state exhausts the options, and that the capacity of people to cooperate should never be underestimated. The most important lesson of all may be that there is rarely a single, universal solution, and that arrangements which work well in one community may fail in another with different customs and needs.