Common Sense and Common-Pool Resources
Author(s): MARI N. JENSEN
Source: BioScience, 50(8):638-644. 2000.
Published By: American Institute of Biological Sciences
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1641/0006-3568(2000)050[0638:CSACPR]2.0.CO;2
URL: http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1641/0006-3568%282000%29050%5B0638%3ACSACPR
%5D2.0.CO%3B2
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Features
Common Sense and
Common-Pool Resources
Researchers dec i ph er how communities avert the tragedy of the com m on s
MARI N. JENSEN
Despite more than 100 years of exploitation, Maine’s lobster fishery seems to be
doing relatively well, while many other fisheries are in trouble. Here, a lobster
fisherman from Cape Porpoise, Maine, baits a wooden lobster trap. Most of
today’s traps are wire rather than wood. Photo: Glenn Nutting, State of Maine
Department of Marine Resources.
T
here are no longer plenty of
fish in the sea. Off the coast
of Newfoundland, the famed
Grand Banks, once home to a vibrant
cod fishery, is all but closed for cod
fishing. Further south, the cod fishery
on the Georges Bank fares only a little
better. Worldwide, historically vigorous fisheries are collapsing. There
appears to be a common cause: too
many fishers continually taking too
many fish.
638 BioScience • August 2000 / Vol. 50 No. 8
The demise of ocean fisheries seems
a classic case of what Garrett Hardin,
now professor emeritus at the University of California–Santa Ba rb a ra ,
termed a “tragedy of the commons.” In
a 1968 article in Science (see box page
644 for references), Hardin presented a
chilling picture of how a group of
herdsmen inevitably destroyed the
shared resource on which they all
depended. Freedom to act in one’s
immediate self-interest meant that
each person put more and more cattle
onto a shared rangeland. Each herder
benefited from the additional cattle he
added to the range, while the cost of
overgrazing the land was shared by all.
“Each man is locked into a system that
compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited,”
Hardin wrote. Ultimately, the collective action of the herders degraded the
rangeland so much that it was of no
use to any of them. “Freedom in a
commons brings ruin to all,” he wrote,
adding that the only way to prevent
such tragedies was for resources to
either be privately owned or regulated
by the government.
Although Hardin’s essay, a product
of the environmental movement of the
1960s, was actually a call to limit population growth, its central metaphor
has been applied much more broadly.
His now famous paper has been
reprinted innumerable times, and its
grim scenario taught as gospel in ecology and environmental science courses. The term “tragedy of the commons” shows up in the indexes and
glossaries of textbooks and has
become shorthand for people’s proclivity to destroy a shared resource.
Elinor Ostrom,a political economist
at Indiana University–Bloomington,
says of Hardin’s essay, “It’s one of the
most dramatic paragraphs, I think,
that has been written in S ci en ce,”
adding that “it really is a masterful
piece of work, and it captures some
Features
truth. Nothing that has had that
impact would have existed that long if
there were not some truth to what he
said.”
But it’s not the whole truth.“Hardin
implied to many that people would not
self-organize and thus you had to have
either government or the market. Period.End of story. And it’s not the end of
the story,” Ostrom says. Her research
and that of others show that, under
many conditions, people can work collectively to manage resources well.
“We’re showing right and left that they
can,” she says. “They not only can
[manage resources collectively],” she
says, “but they can outperform a government—which was one of his solutions.”
That’s not to say that tragedies don’t
occur. They do. But government control or privatization of shared resources are not the only techniques for
preventing tragedies. Nor is either
approach foolproof. The Canadian
government regulated cod fishing, yet
the fishery crashed and has yet to
recover.
Although people have been studying
various aspects of common-property
resources for more than a century,
Ostrom says the first time researchers
discussed the issue across disciplinary
boundaries was at the 1985 Conference on Common Property Resource
Management, sponsored by the
National Research Council and held in
Annapolis, Maryland. Since then,
researchers from a range of disciplines
have been developing a picture of what
works, and what does not, when it
comes to sustainable use of a jointly
held resource. Some research has
focused on review and synthesis of
various case studies. Other insights
have come from laboratory experiments.
Research in the field is blossoming,
as demonstrated by the wealth of
papers presented at the eighth biennial
conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP), held in Bloomington,
Indiana, in June 2000. In addition,
NRC has a project under way to summarize what has been learned in the
last 15 years and what key questions
remain to be answered.
The nastiest problem of all
Although the resources in question are
often loosely called “common property,” scholars say the term “commonpool resources” is more accurate. The
term common property describes who
has property rights over the resource,
whereas the term common-pool
resources refers to characteristics of
the resources themselves. Any type of
resource may be governed by different
property rights regimes in different
locations, because the property rights
are a function of the legal system’s
characteristics,not the resource’s characteristics.
Clark C. Gibson,a political scientist
at Indiana University–Bloomington,
says that if something is common
property, a specific group of people
may use the resource legitimately—
and equally legitimately prevent outsiders from using it. Gibson and other
researchers stress that although Hardin
used the term commons, implying
common property, the rangeland he
described was not common property.
It was actually something researchers
term open access—a situation in
which anything goes because no one
has defined rights to the resource.
Some types of resources, however,
are inherently problematic with regard
to management and enforcement of
property rights. Common-pool
resources are those for which excluding outsiders is difficult, no matter
who actually has the right to use the
resource. The other characteristic of
common-pool resources is what economists call subtractability: Anything
one user takes reduces what is available
for anyone else. Fisheries and rangelands are classic examples. Water can
also be a common-pool resource. “The
nastiest environmental problems are
about common-pool resources. They
are hard to defend, but they are
degradable,” Gibson says. “If I eat a
fish, you can’t use it.”
Notwithstanding the difficulties of
managing common-pool resources,
scholars have now examined thousands
Most Maine lobster fishers who catch
an egg-bearing female voluntarily
place a notch on the first flipper to the
right of center (as shown), and then
return the lobster to the water. In
Maine, it is illegal to take a lobster
that has a v-notched flipper, even if
she no longer carries eggs. After the
lobster drops her eggs, she will molt
out of her old shell. However, the
notch will remain in the flipper for
three molts, protecting the animal
from fishing for several years. Photo:
Glenn Nutting, State of Maine
Department of Marine Resources.
of situations in which resource users
have attempted various forms of selfgovernance, many of which have been
successful, Ostrom says. Indeed, presentation after presentation at the
Bloomington IASCP meeting discussed successful, as well as unsuccessful, group management of resources
such as local fisheries, forests, and irrigation projects.
Maine lobster fishers
govern themselves
Fisheries management is one common-pool resource problem. Making
rules about who can fish where helps,
but the resource itself—the fish—can
and does move around. So even if a
August 2000 / Vol. 50 No. 8 • BioScience 639
Features
fisher has exclusive rights to fish a certain spot,he or she still has to compete
with others for the same fish. And as
fisheries around the world clearly
demonstra te , the supply of fish is
finite. The more fish one person catches, the less there are for everyone else.
According to traditional fisheries
theory, Maine’s lobster fishery, which
has b een exploited for more than 100
years, should be an economic and biological basket case, says James Wilson,
a resource economist at the University
of Maine, in Orono. But the fishery
seems to be doing fine,he adds.
As one who 25 years ago predicted
the fishery’s demise, Wilson has
searched for an explanation to this
enigma. He now believes the key is
that, “for all practical purposes, [it is] a
fishery governed by fishermen.” The
rules governing the lobster fishery have
always been set by Maine’s le gislature,
although the initial suggestions often
come from the scientific or management communities. However, each
time a change in the conservation rules
is proposed, there are years of public
discussion and meetings, because rules
that seem reasonable for one part of
the coast may not be so good for other
regions. Ultimately, a consensus develops among the lobster fishers, and
masses of them troop to the capitol to
give the legislature their opinions
about the proposed change.“It’s always
been this protracted public negotiation,” Wilson says. The legislature, he
says, basically rubber-stamps the fishers’ decision.
The current rules for the lobster
fishery were enacted in the 1930s in
response to depletion of the fishery
during the 1910s and 1920s, Wilson
says. Lobsters, to be a legal catch, must
exceed 3.25 inches across the carapace
but be no broader than 5 inches; only
lobster traps (pots) may be used; and
egg-bearing females may not be kept.
One more rule, the v-notch rule,
gives egg-bearing females a chance at
an additional get-out-of-jail-free card.
Most Maine lobster fishers voluntarily
notch a specific tail flipper on any eggbearing female they catch.A v-notched
female is not a legal catch, and it takes
640 BioScience • August 2000 / Vol. 50 No. 8
several years for the notch to disappear. If a female lobster gets large
enough during that time, she becomes
too big to be legally harvested.
“The fishermen believe these rules
work,” Wilson says. “They’ve argued
them out publicly over the years. From
their point of view, they are dead certain [the rules] have a good conservation effect.” The rules have traditionally been enforced by the fishers
themselves in what Wilson calls “an
extralegal process.” Wrongdoers receive a series of escalating warnings.
Social pressure from the community,
in other words, keeps everyone in line.
Wilson’s son Carl, head lobster biologist with Maine’s Department of
Marine Resources, agrees. “The conservation rules are kind of like motherhood and apple pie.”
But the fishers are not so happy with
some other rules the state issued, says
Dave Cousens, president of the Maine
Lobstermen’s Association. In 1997 the
fishers wanted a moratorium on issuing lobster-fishing licenses, but instead
the state limited the number of pots an
individual could put in the water to
1200.“It’s like putting up a big posterboard saying, ‘If you want to go lobstering, do it now!’” Cousens says.
Fearful of future limits on lobstering,
those who used fewer pots in the past
started fishing the maximum allowable
number of pots. In addition, more
people entered the fishery.
Additional federal limits on lobstering dictated that in 2000, the maximum number of traps a fisher could
use is 800, Carl Wilson says. Cousens
says about having to reduce his string
to 800 traps,“I took 400 traps out, and
where I fish there are probably 16 more
fishers. It was a net loss as far as conservation [goes],” Cousens says. “All we
do is untangle traps—it’s a mess.”
That increase in the number of fishers is going to cause pain down the
road, he says, because lobstering is a
cyclical business. When last year’s
record haul of 52 million pounds
returns to the historic average of 20
million pounds—and Cousens says it
surely will—people will go out of
business.
Carl Wilson agrees that one of the
unintended consequences of the trap
limit was ending up with a greater
number of traps in the water. In the
past,he says,there was de facto limited
entry into the lobster fishing industry
because local tradition dictated who
could fish and where. Those old t raditions, he says, are eroding.
To provide a legal mechanism for
the lobster fishers to collectively manage the fishery, in 1996 Maine set up
regional lobster management zones
and gave locally elected councils of
lobster fishers authority to manage
each zone. The local councils set the
lobster fishing rules for that zone,
including the rules on equipment and
on day and time of fishing. James Wilson chaired the state committee that
put together the original series of
zones.Fishers are quite happy with the
result, he says, and will never give
authority back to the state.
Although Cousens would not agree
that the fishers are quite happy, he does
think that the zones have potential.
“They will probably do a lot of good in
the future. Right now they’re in their
infancy, there’re growing pains. I
wouldn’t say it’s a cure-all, but it’s a
step in the right direction. Before, if
you had a rule change, you had to go to
the legislature.” One of the rule
changes being considered by four of
the seven management zones, Carl
Wilson says,is limiting entry of fishers
into those zones.
What motivates people to
protect resources?
The case of the Maine lobster fishers
exemplifies the qualities Ostrom says
are crucial for robust self-governance
systems. By examining thousands of
case studies of common-pool resource
management, she has identified eight
design principles (see box page 642)
for successful self-governance. They
include clearly identifying rightful
users, involving most of the participants in most rule changes,monitoring
whether users follow the rules, having
a graduated set of penalties for those
who break the rules, and having governments recognize the right of the
Features
participants to manage the resource
themselves.
Clark Gibson says that Ostrom’s
design principles are great benchmarks for any study of common-pool
resources and common property. In
his own work on forest governance,he
looked at two very similar
Guatemalan communities, Las Cebollas and Morán, to see how they managed their forests. Gibson says comparing places as similar as Las
Cebollas and Morán can help:
researchers figure out why people
manage to prevent tragedies in some
places and not others.
The two communities have the
same property rights structure, elevation, forest type, and ethnic makeup,
Gibson says.Each community is located far from urban areas and is reached
via a rough dirt road that is not always
passable even for 4-wheel-drive vehiA comparison of two rural Guatemalan communities, Morán and Las Cebollas, by
cles. Both communities have experiClark Gibson and his colleagues at Indiana University–Bloomington’s
ence creating organizations and institutions and have little interference multidisciplinary Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental
Change, provided insights on why people manage to prevent “the tragedy of the
from external governments—characcommons” in some places but not in others. Both communities use the forest for
teristics some researchers think are
fuelwood and timber and for grazing livestock and horses, but some areas of Las
prerequisites for developing self-govCebollas’ forest are protected from such uses. Here, horses graze in Morán’s forest.
ernance. Yet one community banded
Photo: C. Gibson, Indiana University–Bloomington.
together and developed a protected
area in its forest; the other did not.
The communities both practice subTo figure out what was going on, a
researchers concluded that although
sistence agriculture and depend on the
multidisciplinary team of researchers
both communities depend on their
forest for fuelwood, timber, and livefrom Indiana University–Bloomingforests for fuelwood, timber, and grazstock grazing. However, Las Cebollas
ton’s Center for the Study of Instituing, the community members do not
has designated part of its forest offtions, Population, and Environmental
perceive those resources as scarce,
limits for any of those uses. In the proChange; FLACSO–Guatemala (a social
whereas they do regard agricultural
tected area, the forest looks pretty
sciences research institution); Centro
land as valuable and scarce. However,
good, Gibson says. The protected forUniversitario de Oriente; and Univerthe people in Las Cebollas believe that
est has more diverse vegetation, more
sidad del Valle de Guatemala spent
keeping some specific hillsides forested
groundcover, and the largest trees.“It’s
about a month at each community
will maintain the river water needed
a great example of people managing
interviewing residents and taking biofor their agricultural fields, whereas
their resource on their own,” he says.
physical measurements to assess the
people in Morán do not share that
But where the communities use the
condition of the forest. To collect the
belief.Gibson says focusing on scarcity
forest, the forest clearly shows the
data, the teams used standardized proand necessity helps explains why the
effects of fuelwood gathering and livetocols developed by the International
two communities treat their forests
stock grazing. “Parts of Las Cebollas’
Forestry Resources and Institutions
differently. He describes his study in a
forest and all of Morán’s forest are
Research Program, a worldwide
chapter in the forthcoming book, Pro threatened by the tragedy of the comresearch program that studies forests
tecting the Commons: A Framework for
mons,” Gibson says. What’s even more
and forest communities.
Resource Management in the Americas.
puzzling, he says, is that in Las CebolGibson and his colleagues found
las’ forest, “there’s an area where there
that only when community members
Computer games
is a tragedy, and an area where there
view a resource as both necessary and
Self-governance does not occur only in
isn’t,” and the two areas are managed
scarce do they put in the effort resmall communities that depend on
by the same people.
quired to protect it from overuse. The
traditional rural livelihoods such as
August 2000 / Vol. 50 No. 8 • BioScience 641
Features
A scene in Las Cebollas, Guatemala, shows a patchwork landscape of agriculture,
fallow fields, and forest. Las Cebollas has designated part of its forest off-limits for
gathering fuelwood or timber and for grazing livestock because community
members believe that keeping some specific hillsides forested will maintain the r iver
water needed for agricultural fields. Photo: C.Gibson, Indiana
University–Bloomington.
fishing or agriculture. College students
recruited to play common-pool resource games on laboratory computers
can also, under the right circumstances, band together for collective
benefit.
James Walker, an experimental
economist at Indiana University–
Bloomington, along with his Indiana
University colleagues Elinor Ostrom
and Roy Gardner, has used computer
games to test how people manage
common-pool resources under varying conditions. Just as in the real
world, players get tangible benefits
from participating; they earn varying
amounts of cash depending on what
decisions they make during the game.
Like Gibson and other researchers who
dissect and compare various field situations, Walker is trying to find out
what conditions encourage or discourage cooperation.
In one experiment, eight players sit
at computer terminals and make decisions in private. Each player gets an
endowment of resources (tokens) to
allocate to one of two markets. The
first market pays a nickel per token
entered. The second market, the common-pool resource, initially pays better, but the per-token payoff declines
as more and more tokens are added to
that market. Walker presents the players with a series of scenarios in which a
specific allocation of tokens between
the two markets will bring the greatest
payoff to the group as a whole. If
Characteristics of successful cases of self-governed common-pool resource management
1. There is a clear definition of who has the right to use the resource and who does not. The boundaries of the resource
are clearly defined.
2. Users must perceive that their required contributions for managing and maintaining the resource are fair in light of the
benefits received. Rules governing people’s obligations and rules about when and how the resource is used are adapted
to the local conditions.
3. Most of the individuals affected by the rules can participate in changing the rules.
4. Use of the resource and adherence to the rules is actively monitored, often by the users themselves.
5. People who violate the rules are disciplined in accordance with a graduated set of sanctions.
6. Local institutions are available to resolve conflicts rapidly.
7. External government authorities do not interfere with resource management schemes developed on a local level.
8. Common-pool resource management systems that are part of larger systems are organized as a series of nested
enterpri s e s ,e ach level of which possesses characteristics one through seven.
Adapted from Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons. The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
642 BioScience • August 2000 / Vol. 50 No. 8
Features
most players allocate their tokens at
the level that yields the maximal group
payoff, any individual who instead
puts more than “his share” into the
common-pool resource market will
earn even more. However, when that
happens, the total earned by the others
suffers.
This is exactly what happens when
the players are barred from communicating with one another, Walker says.
As more and more players follow the
strategy of looking out for themselves
rather than considering the welfare of
the group as a whole, the payoff per
token in the second market goes down.
“It leads to a result that’s [economically] inefficient from the group’s perspective.”
But if the players discuss what is
happening, the results are different.
People cooperate for their own good
and that of the group. “If you let them
communicate every decision round,
they form verbal commitments and
tend to keep those commitments,”
Walker says. Sanctioning defectors
helps,he says, but only if communication is allowed. “Sanctions alone work
miserably.”
Communication, then, seems to be
the essential factor for developing a
system of self-governance in the laboratory. In a paper in the April issue of
Southern Economic Journal, Walker and
his doctoral students Pamela J. Schmitt
and Kurtis J. Swope described what
happened if six people could communicate and two could not. The result?
Without communication between all
the players, the system o f cooperation
unravels, Walker says. He says the
research shows that communication
among all participants is essential for
developing systems o f self-governance
and cooperation.
A delicate balance
Hardin, common-pool resource scholars like to point out,was dealing with a
specialized case—one in which users
had neither the ability to exclude other
users nor whatever it takes to work
together. As Ostrom puts it, Hardin’s
herders were “very self-centered, selfish individuals who didn’t care a hoot
for the community.” She says research
shows that, although there are such
people out there, “there are a large
number of people in any set who have
interest in reciprocity, trust, and joint
gain.” Whether those people can work
together depends on the situation.
Even people who are inclined to cooperate, she says, will do so only when
they feel they won’t be played for suckers.
That is where monitoring and
enforcement come in, Ostrom says,
noting that “monitoring done right
enhances reciprocity.” By “done right,”
she means that people do not feel
excessively scrutinized, yet they know
their activities are noticed. Institutions
can be built that “support, enhance,
help people trust one another so they
can really protect resources for the
future,” Ostrom says. But institutions
can also convey the sense that “nobody
trusts you, so you might as well cheat
any time you think you can.” She says,
“It’s a delicate, delicate balance.”
And it’s a balance that researchers
are still sorting out. Studies suggest
that common-pool resource management works best in what could be
called a small-town setting; one in
which people regularly interact faceto-face, have and will continue to have
long-term relationships, and are relatively homogeneous with regard to
characteristics such as caste, ethnicity,
and wealth. Two big unanswered questions, Ostrom says, are the effect of
group size and the eff ect of group heterogeneity. Those questions become
more important, she says, “because we
are tackling ever-larger resource systems,” and larger size means more
complex institutions. Another question that still needs to be answered,
says Arun Agrawal, a political scientist
at Yale University, is how commonpool resource manag ement is affected
by uncertainty and unanticipated fluctuations in the resource base.
Those and other questions are being
addressed by NRC’s Committee on the
Human Dimensions of Global Change
project,“Institutions for Managing the
Commons.” The NRC project dovetails
nicely with the mission o f the Interna-
Student members of a
multidisciplinary research team from
two universities in Guatemala, Centro
Universitario de Oriente and
Universidad del Valle de Guatemala,
and from Indiana
University–Bloomington measure trees,
saplings, and amount of groundcover
in a randomly selected area of the
communal forest in Las Cebollas,
Guatemala, to assess the forest’s
condition. Photo: C. Gibson, Indiana
University–Bloomington.
tional Association for the Study of
Common Property. Bonnie J. McCay,
president of IASCP and professor of
anthropology and ecology at Rutgers
University, in New Brunswick, New
Jersey, says that “one part of the mission is to further the study and understanding of the ways human beings
use, manage, and mismanage common-pool resources. The other is to
use that knowledge and understanding
to help local communities and governments improve management of common-pool resources.”
August 2000 / Vol. 50 No. 8 • BioScience 643
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Further reading and online resources
Bromley DW, ed.1992. Making the Commons Work: Theory, Practice, and Policy. San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies.
Burger J, Ostrom E, Norgaard RB, Policansky D, Goldstein BD, eds. In press. Protecting the Commons: A Framework for
Resource Management in the Americas. Washington (DC): Island Press.
Hardin G. 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Science 162: 1243–1248.
Hardin G. 1998. Extensions of “The tragedy of the commons.” Science 280: 682–683.
Ostrom E. 1990. Governing the Commons. The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press.
Ostrom E, Gardner R, Walker J. 1994. Rules,Games, and Common-Pool Resources. Ann Arbor (MI): University of Michigan Press.
Ostrom E, Burger J, Field CB, Norgaard RB, Policansky D. 1999. Revisiting the commons: Local lessons, global challenges.
Science 284: 278–282.
Schmitt P, Swope K, Walker J. 2000. Collective action with incomplete commitment: Experimental evidence. Southern Economic Journal 66: 829–854.
International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP) <www.indiana.edu/~iascp>
International Forestry Resources and Institutions Research Program <www.indiana.edu/~ifri>
Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University– Bloomington <www.indiana.edu/~workshop>
McCay, Ostrom, Agrawal,and other
leaders in the field presented papers on
those topics to the research community at special sessions held during the
IASCP meeting. Feedback from those
sessions will be used to refine and
enrich the NRC project when the lead
researchers reconvene for more discussions in September. A book detailing
the NRC group’s findings is slated for
publication in 2001.
McCay says, “The lesson is not that
everything should be done by local
people. The lesson is not that if left
alone people can do a p retty good job.
The lesson is that under some conditions people can do it. The policy lesson is to find out what those conditions are and to try and give p eople a
chance to do that.”
❑
Mari N. Jensen is a freelance science writer
based in Tucson, Arizona.
644 BioScience • August 2000 / Vol. 50 No. 8