Professional Documents
Culture Documents
REVIEW: SUSTAINABILITY
T
hirty years have passed since Garrett a reassessment of the generality of the theory effectively depletable only in an international
Hardin’s influential article “The Trag- that has grown out of Hardin’s original paper. context (10). Management of these resources
edy of the Commons” (1). At first, Here, we describe the advances in under- depends on the cooperation of appropriate
many people agreed with Hardin’s metaphor standing and managing commons problems international institutions and national, region-
that the users of a commons are caught in an that have been made since 1968. We also al, and local institutions. Resources that are
inevitable process that leads to the destruc- describe research challenges, especially those intrinsically difficult to measure or that re-
tion of the very resource on which they de- related to expanding our understanding of quire measurement with advanced technolo-
pend. The “rational” user of a commons, global commons problems. gy, such as stocks of ocean fishes or petro-
Hardin argued, makes demands on a resource An important lesson from the empirical leum reserves, are difficult to manage no
until the expected benefits of his or her ac- studies of sustainable resources is that more matter what the scale of the resource. Others,
tions equal the expected costs. Because each solutions exist than Hardin proposed. Both for example global climate, are largely self-
user ignores costs imposed on others, individ- government ownership and privatization are healing in response to a broad range of hu-
ual decisions cumulate to a tragic overuse and themselves subject to failure in some instanc- man actions, until these actions exceed some
the potential destruction of an open-access es. For example, Sneath shows great differ- threshold (11).
commons. Hardin’s proposed solution was ences in grassland degradation under a tradi- Although the number and importance of
“either socialism or the privatism of free tional, self-organized group-property regime commons problems at local or regional scales
enterprise” (2). versus central government management. A will not decrease, the need for effective ap-
The starkness of Hardin’s original state- satellite image of northern China, Mongolia, proaches to commons problems that are glob-
ment has been used by many scholars and and southern Siberia (8) shows marked deg- al in scale will certainly increase. Here, we
policy-makers to rationalize central govern- radation in the Russian part of the image, examine this need in the context of an anal-
ment control of all common-pool resources whereas the Mongolian half of the image ysis of the nature of common-pool resources
(3) and to paint a disempowering, pessimistic shows much less degradation. In this in- and the history of successful and unsuccess-
vision of the human prospect (4). Users are stance, Mongolia has allowed pastoralists to ful institutions for ensuring fair access and
pictured as trapped in a situation they cannot continue their traditional group-property in- sustained availability to them. Some experi-
change. Thus, it is argued that solutions must stitutions, which involve large-scale move- ence from smaller systems transfers directly
be imposed on users by external authorities. ments between seasonal pastures, while both to global systems, but global commons intro-
Although tragedies have undoubtedly oc- Russia and China have imposed state-owned duce a range of new issues, due largely to
curred, it is also obvious that for thousands of agricultural collectives that involve perma- extreme size and complexity (12).
years people have self-organized to manage nent settlements. More recently, the Chinese
common-pool resources, and users often do solution has involved privatization by divid- The Nature of Common-Pool
devise long-term, sustainable institutions for ing the “pasture land into individual alloca- Resources
governing these resources (5–7). It is time for tions for each herding household” (8). About To better understand common-pool resource
three-quarters of the pasture land in the Rus- problems, we must separate concepts related
sian section of this ecological zone has been to resource systems and those concerning
1
Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and degraded and more than one-third of the Chi- property rights. We use the term common-
Environmental Change and Workshop in Political The-
ory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University, Blooming- nese section has been degraded, while only pool resources (CPRs) to refer to resource
ton, IN 47408, USA. 2Environmental and Occupation- one-tenth of the Mongolian section has suf- systems regardless of the property rights in-
al Health Sciences Institute, Rutgers University, 170 fered equivalent loss (8, 9). Here, socialism volved. CPRs include natural and human-
Frelinghuysen Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA. and privatization are both associated with constructed resources in which (i) exclusion
3
Carnegie Institution of Washington, Stanford, CA
94305, USA. 4Energy and Resources Group, University
more degradation than resulted from a tradi- of beneficiaries through physical and institu-
of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. 5National tional group-property regime. tional means is especially costly, and (ii)
Research Council, Washington, DC 20418, USA. Most of the theory and practice of suc- exploitation by one user reduces resource
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E- cessful management involves resources that availability for others (13). These two char-
mail: ostrom@indiana.edu are effectively managed by small to relatively acteristics— difficulty of exclusion and sub-
iiii
1. G. Hardin, Science 162, 1243 (1968). ness (working paper, University of Massachusetts, erty, D. Feeny, T. Hargis-Young, C. Hess, B. J. McCay,
2. , ibid. 280, 682 (1998). 1997); E. Ostrom and J. M. Walker, in Perspectives on M. McGinnis, M. Polski, E. Schlager, N. Sengupta, J.
3. J. E. M. Arnold, Managing Forests as Common Property Public Choice: A Handbook, D. C. Mueller, Ed. (Cam- Unruh, O. Young, and anonymous reviewers for their
(FAO Forestry Paper 136, Rome, 1998); D. Feeny, S. bridge Univ. Press, New York, 1997), pp. 35–72; J. M. useful comments. Supported by NSF grant
Hanna, A. F. McEvoy, Land Econ. 72, 187 (1996); F. Orbell, A. van de Kragt, R. M. Dawes, J. Personality SBR-9521918, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Orga-
Berkes and C. Folke, Eds., Linking Social and Ecological Soc. Psych. 54, 811 (1988); E. Ostrom, Am. Pol. Sci. nization (FAO), the Ford Foundation, and the
Systems: Management Practices and Social Mecha- Rev. 92, 1 (1998). In these experiments, the formal MacArthur Foundation (E.O.) and by U.S. Department
nisms for Building Resilience (Cambridge Univ. Press, structure of a dilemma is converted into a set of of Energy grant AI DE-FC01-95EW55084 to the Con-
New York, 1998); A. C. Finlayson and B. J. McCay, decisions made by subjects who are financially sortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Partici-
ibid., pp. 311–337; R. Repetto, Skimming the Water: rewarded as a result of their own and others’ pation and National Institute of Environmental
Rent-seeking and the Performance of Public Irrigation decisions. See also J. H. Kagel and A. E. Roth, Eds., Health Sciences grant ESO 5022 ( J.B.).