RESTRAINT????

BIO 4114 – HUMAN ECOLOGY

COMMON PRPPERTY RESOURCES
▪ According to Hardin, environmental problems are caused by overuse
of common property resources.

▪ All have equal rights to use these resources, because they are public
goods:

▪ No ownership of common property

▪ Non-exclusion, not possible to exclude others from using common

property. Expensive to stop others.

▪ Rival: one person’s use reduces availability to others.

 SELF ADJUSTMENT IN
ECONOMIC THEORY
▪ Micro theory assumes that price and cost will control the number of producers and
consumers.

▪ In Open Access system there are no self adjusting, controlling mechanisms.

▪ The use continues without constraints, leading to over exploitation.

▪ Each independent user, wants to maximise his own benefit.

▪ The total users will over use and exploit the common property.

▪ Hardin says, “Freedom in the Commons brings Tragedy to all.”

 SELF ADJUSTMENT IN
ECONOMIC THEORY
▪ Joint ownership is needed to control overuse.

▪ Membership and fees should be paid to reduce usage,.

▪ Restrict number of users/members.

▪ Payment for use, will increase individual costs, prevent overuse.

▪ Fines and penalties for over-using the commons.

 RESTRAINT YES OR NO?
▪ Hardin argues that individual short term interest - to take as much of a
resource as possible – is in opposition to societal good.

▪ If everyone was to act on this individual interest, the situation would worsen for
society as a whole – demand for a shared resource would overshadow the supply,
and the resource would eventually become entirely unavailable.

▪ Conversely, exercising restraint would yield benefits for all in the long-term,
as the shared resource would remain available.
 RESTRAINT
▪ Restraint is similar to conservation in that it refers to behavior that
limits resource use.
▪ The reasons may also be intrinsic or extrinsic.
▪ Restraint is fundamentally associated with self-management,
individual or collective behavior aimed at developing and
maintaining a predictable and dependable support system.
▪ In its most basic form, restraint is behavior integral to survival, it is
critical to self-maintenance, provisioning, and self defense.
▪ Its enactment does not depend on external policies but on internal
needs, that is, internal to, say, one's household or community or
organization.
 RESTRAINT
▪ Restraint occurs not because others say it is the right thing but because the very
functioning of one's system requires it.

▪ The effectiveness of that functioning increases with the compatibility between

one’s immediate environment (physical or social or both) and human actions,
including restraint (Kaplan, 1983).

▪ Restraint occurs not because new, externally provided knowledge and concerns
and incentives make it desirable, but because effective participation in one's
system makes it imperative.

▪ Restraint in resource consumption refers to an individual's choice to deliberately

consume less material resources than what is possible in the immediate term, given
available technologies.
 RESTRAINT
▪ The concept of restraint, as opposed to cooperation, efficiency seeking, recycling
and other behaviors generally assumed necessary to reverse environmental
degradation, has several advantages for addressing critical environmental issues.

▪ Restraint may be the only behavior that provides the necessary ecological
feedback between resource consumption patterns on the one hand, and resource
regenerative and assimilative capacity on the other.

▪ Human societies have created so much distance between production and

consumption decisions that it is virtually impossible to relate one's individual
decisions to collective and environmental impacts.
 ADVANTAGES OF PRACTICING
RESTRAINT
▪ It makes explicit the ecological difference between material and nonmaterial consumption.

▪ Restraint does not assume that individuals will, contrary to their evolutionary history, adopt a very longterm
term--i.e., ecologically long-term perspective.

▪ At the individual level, restraint implies a potentially positive tradeoff between material and nonmaterial goods.

▪ At the organizational level, restraint is more consistent with the resource implications of self-organization and
self-governance.

▪ At the collective, societal level, a focus on restraint encourages the intervenor and the policy maker to look for
mechanisms that reward nonmaterial activities.

▪ Restraint may be the only behavior that provides the necessary ecological feedback between resource
consumption patterns on the one hand, and resource regenerative and assimilative capacity on the other.
 RESTRAINT: YES OR NO?
▪ One possible solution is top-down government regulation or direct control of a
common-pool resource.

▪ Regulating consumption and use, or legally excluding some individuals, can

reduce over-consumption and government investment in conservation and renewal
of the resource can help prevent it's depletion.

▪ Many believe that each person is ethically obligated to reduce use of the commons
to the sustainable level.

▪ Our obligation is not fruitlessly to reduce individual use, but to support a collective
agreement to reduce everyone's use to the sustainable level.