THE TRAGEDY OF THE “UNMANAGED COMMONS” ONLY. (important concept) (minor discussi

http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmonsITS THE TRAGEDY OF THE “UNMANAGED COMMONS” ONLY.

(important concept) (minor discussion of big box retailer phenom.)

Philip Saunders : —“Read “Governing the Commons” by Elinor Ostrom. Very good explanation of the logical/game theoretic issues around managing common pool resources. Also refutes Garett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” argument.”—

8 Principles for Managing a Commons

1. Define clear group boundaries.

2. Match rules governing use of common goods to local needs and conditions.

3. Ensure that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules.

4. Make sure the rule-making rights of community members are respected by outside authorities.

5. Develop a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members’ behavior.

6. Use graduated sanctions for rule violators.

7. Provide accessible, low-cost means for dispute resolution.

8. Build responsibility for governing the common resource in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system.

In economics, a common-pool resource (CPR), also called a common property resource, is a type of good consisting of a natural or human-made resource system (e.g. an irrigation system or fishing grounds), whose size or characteristics makes it costly, but not impossible, to exclude potential beneficiaries from obtaining benefits from its use.

Unlike pure public goods, common pool resources face problems of congestion or overuse, because they are subtractable. A common-pool resource typically consists of a core resource (e.g. water or fish), which defines the stock variable, while providing a limited quantity of extractable fringe units, which defines the flow variable. While the core resource is to be protected or entertained in order to allow for its continuous exploitation, the fringe units can be harvested or consumed.

The Tragedy of the Commons refers to a scenario in which commonly held land is inevitably degraded because everyone in a community is allowed to graze livestock there.

This parable was popularized by wildlife biologist Garrett Hardin in the late 1960s, and was embraced as a principle by the emerging environmental movement.

But Ostrom’s research refutes this abstract concept once-and-for-all with the real life experience from places like Nepal, Kenya and Guatemala.

“When local users of a forest have a long-term perspective, they are more likely to monitor each other’s use of the land, developing rules for behavior,” she cites as an example. “It is an area that standard market theory does not touch.”

(Garrett Hardin himself later revised his own view, noting that what he described was actually the Tragedy of the

Unmanaged Commons.)

Hardin explicitly stated that we should exorcise the “dominant tendency of thought that has… interfered with positive action based on rational analysis, namely, the tendency to assume that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire society” (Hardin, 1968). The Tragedy of the Commons argument

was a reaction against – not for – the contemporary laissez-faire interpretation of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of the marketplace”!

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CURT’S EXPANSION ON THE MATTER:

ie: proposing the choice of anarchic commons vs private property is just another a deception by framing: a false dichotomy.

The problem is created when the shareholder agreement is unenforcible, or because no shareholder agreement is in place, or (which Ostrom Does Not Address) when credit (or fiat money) can be used to sufficiently compensate the existing users (shareholders) so that they will permit exhaustion of the resource under their management.

This last example is what the ‘big box retailer’ phenomenon does that local communities object to. By destroying the local micro-economy, then growing until they bust the big box retailer created fragility to which the local economy could not recover.

This scenario violates the natural law requirement that one cannot take any action that in the event of one’s failure, one cannot perform restitution for. If that were the case, all ‘ugly commercial architecture’ would have to be insured such that in the event of a collapse it was returned to natural state (clean land).

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine