Tragedy of the Commons and Collective Action - Term Paper Example

? and Number: Tragedy of the Commons (and the Value of Collective Action) 26 August (estimated word count = 2,318) Introduction The health and state of the environment today has become uppermost in the people's minds because of the adverse consequences of man's activities. The sorry state of environment is manifested by fast dwindling natural resources, both the renewable and non-renewable. The manifestations of the harmful effects of activities on the environment is shown by pollution of water resources, which incidentally is a renewable resource but not inexhaustible as most of the people erroneously think. Other resources are also on the brink of near depletion such as fossil fuels indicated by the concept of peak oil, in which carbon-based fuels are already on the downward slope of decreasing production while no new reserves are no longer found. The fish stocks in the oceans are also over-exploited and not allowed time to replenish. The gravity of the situation in terms of environmental degradation has now captured the attention of scientists, academicians and government policy makers. This is because it has acquired a new sense of urgency due to the ill effects of man's continued harmful activities as experienced today in terms of the global warming phenomenon and extreme climate changes. Increased carbon emissions released into the atmosphere has created the now well-known and well-studied consequences of the greenhouse effect in which the sun's heat is not reflected back into outer space but instead retained in the upper layers of the atmosphere similar to a greenhouse. It resulted to warmer global temperatures not seen for centuries and causing ocean levels to rise annually from the melting of the polar ice caps, a potentially threatening development for populated low-lying places and other coastal areas of the world. Discussion The idea that man is an independent being is just an illusion; man is a social creature and has always been dependent on other humans for survival. This interdependency is related to the primordial needs of survival, even in early prehistoric times and up to the present. This is why men have banded together into tribes, then into larger societies and entire civilizations. Acceptance of the reality of interdependency is implicit idea that all kinds or types of natural resources are for the good of everybody. This means resources are safeguarded for a common purpose of use, exploitation and preservation for replenishment and eventual use of all future generations. This idea is called the global commons of natural resources (Nonini 164). Early or primitive human societies had latched unto this idea of the commons due to their own survival instincts. Every member of the tribe is tasked to help preserve all resources not only for today's present consumption needs but for the future requirements of succeeding generations as well. Because of this concept of environmental preservation, the tribe members had banded themselves together with some social, cultural or religious arrangements to ensure that resources are safeguarded from over-exploitation, allowed to recover and replenish and to make everyone aware that no one owns these resources exclusively but everybody owns it. It is this idea that is known as the commons with the added sense of good stewardship. People are supposed to take only what they need from their common-pool resources. A fertile or rich environment can support a population adequately to provide a comfortable life as long as this practice is enforced. Nobody is supposed to take more than what they need, such as exploiting a resource for profit because some people had become too greedy. This had been practiced by the native Americans before the white colonizers came along. In fact, this is shown to be viable, a sense of abundance even in marginal ecological zones (ibid.). Continued population growth had put pressure on natural resources, a grim reminder of the theory put forward by Malthus centuries ago regarding the limits of population growth. However, man has devised and discovered new ways of finding new sources of food through a combination of ingenuity and scientific advances in agriculture, such as the use of fertilizers to increase food production beyond what the normal output should be on a given plot of land. The previous agricultural society based on the political economy of feudalism had been in the past conscious of this limitation but an entirely new development in the last two centuries had upended this delicate balance between man and nature. This development which had begun in England is the Industrial Revolution which altered the ways by which man exploited natural resources and as a consequence, brought lasting and permanent environmental changes. It was the Industrial Revolution which started and fostered the trend in the over-exploitation of natural resources previously held in common and in trust by the stewardship arrangements to ensure continued use and exploitation without the threat of depletion. This is continued today in the neo-liberal trends in the growth of trade and commerce known as the globalization movement. One consequence of the Industrial Revolution was the rise of many factories which needed enormous amounts of raw materials, minerals and energy to ensure a continuous production of many industrial and consumer products. Feudalism gave way to new forms of economic structures, mainly capitalism anchored on profits for a few individuals. Capitalists and industrialists a few decades ago were primarily concerned with how to increase their profits by maximum exploitation of available natural resources for the benefit of their shareholders and themselves to exclusion of other stakeholders. Only lately did they realize the consequences of their actions, which are dwindling resources and the degradation of the environment. The end result is what is termed today as the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons best encapsulates and captures the sad situation today. It explains why people are suffering from hunger, malnutrition, global warming, severe droughts, disastrous floods, stronger typhoons, massive wildfires and other climatic changes as a consequence of these harmful activities that degraded the environment. The real tragedy is that this is entirely avoidable or preventable if people had only acted against these practices early enough. The tragedy is that everybody is adversely affected but some people do not want to lift a finger to help reverse the situation. A few people certainly had benefited from a resource exploitation but the allocation of the beneficial effects was not equal or even. The previously-held sanctity of the public realm as a resource held only in trust by a sense of stewardship had been breached by the harmful acts of capitalism and globalization. The actions of a few individuals affect everybody else, it means these people should not have behaved as they did and that all people must do something about it and not wait for someone to somehow rectify a bad situation (Hunt 2). The tragedy results from their inaction. People tend to wait for someone else to take initial action and see first what happens before doing. A usual tendency is to wait; people fail to act cooperatively for their mutual benefit. It is ironic that people are often apathetic to their own plight and wait for a leader to rectify things. The real world examples where a tragedy of the commons has occurred and which are very glaring are in the areas of mining, fishing and forest denudation. Mining has a very detrimental effect on the environment as it renders the land often unsuitable for agriculture. A similar situation is happening in the oceans where fish stocks are over-fished to the extent the fish catches are declining for a good number of species. Fish stocks require a good time for its recovery and replenishment yet many mangrove areas in the world where the fish lay eggs are being reclaimed for development. Forests are being cleared for housing and agriculture. On the other hand, there is immense value in taking collective action. This is needed in most local communities where many multinational companies operate with impunity. The local people themselves have to take the initiative whenever their environment is degraded by the activities of global firms whose sole motive is to exploit and extract natural resources and then leave afterwards to take their investments elsewhere without making any effort to restore the environment back to their original condition. Diverse marginalized groups can take action collectively to counteract the power and influence of the global corporate alliance out to take a disproportionate share of the world's fast-dwindling natural resources and then move on to other areas of the world to repeat their nefarious ways of damaging the environment. The tragedy of the commons came into the world consciousness because of the very influential article written by biologist and ecologist Garrett Hardin back in 1968 published in the scientific journal Science. This is essentially the dilemma presented when the supposedly rational actions of people, but acting independently of each other and for their self-interest, end up depleting a commonly-shared but limited natural resource to the detriment of everyone when this is not supposed to happen at all. This sad situation can be considered as the reverse side of the same coin of the famous “invisible hand” in economics first postulated by the great Adam Smith, where individuals acting on their own for their self-interest end up promoting a common benefit, the betterment of society and creating the wealth of their nation. The invisible hand is the beneficial side of this same concept of individual actions to benefit everyone because of the profit motive promoted by capitalism and free markets. There is also a bad side to the same principle of individuals acting on their own singly and this is the tragedy of the commons, resulting in the over-exploitation of a common resource or what is called as open-access resources, whether owned or not by the government or someone else. The tragedy of the commons has sent the message that everybody must cooperate or a bad situation can turn into a worse scenario. This has been amply illustrated by the so-called Pakistani Paradox in studies made by the World Bank in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Ceylon or Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh) in which an ordinary Pakistani farmer will strive to have more children because these kids can help him when they grow up to farm the small plot he has. It is termed a paradox because when this supposedly beneficial action is multiplied a million times all over across Pakistan, each farmer trying his best to have more children, will end up making everybody worse off, because the same plot gets subdivided into smaller and smaller plots later on, resulting in minimal or sub-optimal production results. It is obvious some form of population control has to be imposed and while this option is clear to policy makers in the government, it is not that obvious or clear-cut a choice to the individual Pakistani farmer. It is interesting to note at this point that before corporate social responsibility (CSR) acquired some currency as a viable form of corporate conscience, big multinational firms had been in a sort of a predatory mode when it came to extraction of natural resources. Their only concern was profit maximization with no regard to renewing the local communities in which they had operated, by establishing schools or clinics, pay only a token amount of taxes and no more beyond what is required by law and by their contracts, cleaning up the water resources rendered useless by pollution due to mining activities and in general, do not invest in socially responsible projects, which are seen as additional but unnecessary expenditures. Corporations do not see communities as renewable in terms of replenishment of the talent and the people in them. Capitalism and globalization have created their own twin problems of how to invest its excess capital profitably when in a related development, the widespread degradation of all the environments in which multinationals now operate have led to a much smaller world for them. Local people aware of their inherent and natural rights to the bounties of their local commons will no longer tolerate the previous acts of capitalists described as cut-and-run. The people today can band together to make their common resources not only substractive but also additive, in which exploitation and conservation can be mixed beneficially for a sustainable development that benefits everybody not only for the short term but in the long run as well. It has been shown to work in cases where people given selective incentives can be induced to participate collectively to secure public goods if they work together collectively. An example is the World Bank, in which its sacred policy formula for Third World development had been anchored on financing giant dams but where the environmental effects are not so beneficial as dams create more problems, like displacement of the people and free-flowing water is silted that affects rivers and delta where ecology ends up being altered in unexpected ways. This is a key element in President Obama's unusual nominee for the WB presidency (Lowrey 1). Conclusion Good governance today demands consent, cooperation and commitment from people and the old ways of using coercion is no longer an acceptable alternative when imposing some form of social contract in managing common-pool resources (CPR). In fact, this was what the Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom advocates, using her recommended seven principles on the best ways on how to govern the commons while privatization is also considered but it has its limitations (Ostrom 193) but an important point is that socio-economic models for sustainable extraction of resources can be implemented using the old ideas of liberal democracy (Doyle & Kellow 25). Global commons has been shown to be generative as well if done right, such as in music, literature, new medical technologies, hybrid seeds and in computer software where the intellectual rights are recognized and protected by copyright and patent laws (Ascher 116). Works Cited Ascher, William. Guide to Sustainable Development and Environmental Policy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Print. Doyle, Timothy, and Aynsley John Kellow. Environmental Politics and Policymaking in Australia. Melbourne, Australia: Palgrave MacMillan, 1995. Print. Hunt, Lester H. “Is Bad Conduct Always Wrong? The Ethics of Environmental Effects.” The Commons: Its Tragedies and other Follies. Ed. Tibor R. Machan. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2001. 1-25. Print. Lowrey, Annie. “College president is Obama's pick for World Bank chief.” New York Times. 23 Mar. 2012. Web. 26 Aug. 2012. < http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/business/global/dartmouth-president-is-obamas-pick-for-world-bank.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=World%20Bank%20nominee%20Jim&st=cse> Nonini, Donald M. “The Global Idea of the Commons.” Social Analysis 50.3 (Winter 2006): 164-177. Print. Ostrom, Elinor. The Drama of the Commons. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2002. Print. Read More