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 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…