The Tragedy of the Commons and Property Rights

Garrett Hardin's (1968) influential essay,‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ describes how a portion of unregulated communal land used for cattle pasture is fated to devastation. The common property Hardin refers to is property that is not owned by any individual, and this is what encourages overuse of the property because no one assumes the costs borne from its misuse. The property also allows non-excludability of its resources as there is open access to a public good. This means that it is almost impossible to prevent others from using that resource but the message of Hardin's essay is that thinking about it in this way can help to influence a right course of action. In effect the problem rests with a lack of well defined property rights; their distribution and/or enforcement.

The significance of Hardin's essay is that he managed to effectively popularise a way in considering environmental problems. As a metaphor it is applicable to any environmental resource covering land, forests, oceans and the atmosphere. 'The Tragedy of the Commons' is in a way a precautionary tale where the pursuit of self interest in an open access commons will lead to its ruin for the whole. This is where the pertinence of regulation and policy from international agreements, like the Kyoto Protocol for the mitigation of climate change, is formed with the goal of preventing a tragedy. It is very much a political process in managing an open access commons. As Hardin shows with the example of how the herders will add more sheep out of self interest to the detriment of the pasture commons, there is no interest group that has the interest of the whole over the few and is why we still face this problem of the tragedy of the commons today.

The barriers for global action lay in the vagueness of the ‘commons’ concept, implementing multilateral agreements, market imperfections and wealth inequality between nations which cause further implications for future policy and management of the global commons. As it is difficult to justify natural resources as part of the global commons, a clear definition of resources of the global commons and rights to commons need to be developed particularly as misplaced property rights can create perverse incentives. In Hardin's view, he suggests securing well defined property rights to individuals that place responsibility on behalf of the community as an incentive to behave as stewards of the environment which he believes will deter mismanagement. However, the issue with ‘common property’ is that it is a right to a benefit that is only secure in its duty to others and protects that resource, but inevitable resource degradation is not caused by ‘common property’ issues, it is with unrestricted open access regimes.

Pursuit for a property rights definition that can be universally applied will be difficult, but not impossible. What we are seeing now is that property rights of open access resources is important for economic prosperity and ecological sustainability, which are not as previously viewed, mutually exclusive. The role of property-based institutions is vital for the adoption of resource management where sustainable practices result. Future management will need to overcome the cultural divide which will raise the role of institutions collaborating with government and community to reconcile the interests of different stakeholders for appropriate resource management.