Why people behave unsustainably regarding communal property and resources

Communal Property

Human behavior with respect to communal property is a critical issue of our time. The individual profit-maximizing activities of each individual all contribute to the erosion of critical common resources. There are a number of perspectives that help to explain why this occurs.

The tragedy of the commons explains this phenomenon. Hardin (1968) notes that individuals seek to maximize their outcomes -- this could be wealth or it could be utility. In either case, such behavior is strictly oriented to one's own personal well-being. The concept of perfect rationality is applied only in a narcissistic context. This is true even in collectivist societies, because such societies seldom view the human race as the collective unit. Thus, nobody makes their decisions with the good of the entire species in mind. The tragedy is that the cost of things is not reflected in our decision-making. In economics, the concept is externalities, and includes things like pollution. Pollution is something that is the result of an individual decision but affects everybody, and perfectly illustrates the tragedy of the commons. Where the cost of some outcome is not priced into the action, or is priced in a way that people do not understand the cost, then humans will not be able to make the fully rational, informed decision.

Consider the case of the automobile People decide to drive, as it is the most cost-effective means of transportation in many situations. It is so cheap that most people seldom stop to consider whether it even makes sense to use their car for something. The price of gas does not factor in the pollution to our planet, and the cost of the roads has been buried in our taxes. Thus, people are not making a rational decision based on full understanding of all the costs when they decide to drive. Many of those costs are externalities, commons that we are all using at a much faster rate than we should be.

Feeny et al. (1990) elaborate on the tragedy of the commons, noting that the commons are characterized by excludability in that access to them is difficult to control and subtractability, in that individuals have the ability to subtract from these resources. So there is not control put on the use of such resources. That policing the abuse of the commons brings to light the likelihood of the commons being misused, especially when there is value in the commons. For example, the story about the Honduran farmers in Durham (1991) is only partially a story about the commons because in other nations there are tight restrictions on access to and use of farmland. The oceans and the air, however, are genuinely free to abuse. With the nation-state system, there is at least some nominal control of land within the nation-state framework. The oceans and the air are not subject to the same governance.

Thus, individual nations are free to exploit resources associated with the air and the oceans in particular, to devastating effect. There is no coherent system by which enforcement of the commons has been developed. Moreover, if such a system were to have been put in place, this would have had to happen earlier in our history. At this point, the finite nature of these resources is apparent, and we are set to engage in open conflict for control of what remains of these resources.

There have been some attempts to delegate responsibility for some key resources. International bodies have been created to attempt to govern many common resources. The major ones have been left off the list, and even when such bodies have a specific mandate, the naked interests of the signatories renders such bodies impotent. The case of the Atlantic Bluefin tuna is a good example. Japan is the market consumer of this fish, which lives in the Mediterranean. So when Japanese people eat it, they face no negative externalities. There is a body set up to govern the fishery in this fish, but it is comprised of Mediterranean fishing nations. Instead of coming together in stewardship of the resource, we see the tragedy of the commons played out. Rational actors each seek to maximize their own gains from control over the trade in this fish, and only make their decisions on a short-term basis. There is no long-term thinking, which is precisely Hardin's prediction.

The tragedy of the commons occurs precisely because as rational actors we suffer two problems. One is that we do not truly understand the cost of our actions. We have become oriented to thinking only about cost in terms of money. The costs that have not been built into something, therefore, do not exist. This leads to irrational behavior that is ultimately self-destructive. There is ignorance, some of it wilful, but there is also the idea that the costs will be paid by someone else. We pollute today figuring that the problem will either a) be solved by smart people or b ) we'll be dead before the worst of it hits. That lack of a direct link between action and consequence explains a lot about the tragedy of the commons. The Honduran farmers, in contrast, were certainly ignorant of their impacts, but also may have felt that their rational behavior inherently had to be short-term: the long -- term does not matter because their survival past the short-term is not guaranteed.