Trends and approaches to the commons in historiography

Next to last in our series on "The Tragedy of the Commons at 50" (the previous post, on Carol Rose's article, is here) is Giacomo Bonan's piece, "Confronting Hardin: Trends and Approaches to the Commons in Historiography". The abstract:

This Article analyses both the role of historiography in Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons (1968) and his paper’s impact on historiographical debates of the last five decades. Concerning the role of historiography in Hardin’s argument, the ‘tragedy of the commons’ itself derived from a pamphlet written by a nineteenth century supporter of English enclosures, who proposed a variant of Malthus’ theory. If Hardin inevitably dealt with previous historical interpretations of the commons, the reverberations aroused by his paper have strongly influenced subsequent historical research on this subject. It is possible to group the historiographical production of the last decades concerning the commons into three main lines of research. The first line has developed in the field of economic history and has been influenced by Elinor Ostrom’s principles for long-enduring institutions that efficaciously manage commons. The second line has focused on the conflicts caused by exogenous interferences in the management of common land, such as state or market intervention, and their social and environmental consequences. The third line has devoted attention to the role of common lands in the internal dynamics of the local communities and the conflicts over their use at the local level. The conclusion of this Article focuses on the role of Hardin’s legacy in the current debate on the global environmental crisis.

Thomas Malthus

The marine "commons" discourse

Next in the series of posts (the last one is here) on "The Tragedy at 50" (by the way, if anyone wants a hard copy of the journal issue, please email me), is Harry Scheiber's "The 'Commons' Discourse on Marine Fisheries Resources: Another Antecedent to Hardin’s 'Tragedy'". The abstract:

Throughout the fifty years since its publication, Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” has been regarded as a seminal paper in the environmental movement, although his emphasis on population control (which actually formed the core concern of the article) has been largely forgotten. Hardin argued that free access by a growing population to common resources would inevitably lead to the depletion of those resources, citing as one example how maritime nations’ belief in the freedom of the seas, combined with their belief in the inexhaustibility of marine resources, had brought whales and many species of fish close to extinction. Hardin failed, however, to take account of the extensive debates throughout much of the twentieth century by scientists and policymakers on the general problem of the ocean commons — what they generally termed the “dilemma of the commons” — as it applied not only to living marine resources but also to mineral resources. By mid-century, as improved fishing technology gave rise to ever greater catches, the notion of the inexhaustibility of fisheries was largely discredited; hence scientists as well as experts in both national and international law became focused on addressing the dilemma of the commons through fisheries management, and specifically by determining the Maximum Sustainable Yield. Some economists, arguing instead for maximum efficiency, urged that open access be abandoned in favor of limited entry. Such measures to resolve the dilemma of the commons were the subject of numerous conferences (including the second UN Conference on the Law of the Sea in 1958) and were widely debated in scholarly publications and, indeed, by the late 1960s had been practically implemented by a number of laws and treaties. By 1966, national control over a twelve-mile fishing zone offshore of coastal nations had been well established. These developments regarding the oceans commons, predating Hardin’s article, were apparently either of no interest to him or (if he knew of them) purposefully subordinated to his main polemical objective, which was his Malthusian analysis of the commons issue and his call for limits on “human breeding.”

Early environmental economics

Agnar Sandmo has posted "The Early History of Environmental Economics", an article surveying the thought of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economists on environmental issues, long before Arthur Pigou's famous work on taxing externalities and the late twentieth century blossoming of the field. Thomas Malthus is here, but so are many others whose writing on environmental issues is less well known, including the Marquis de Condorcet, John Stuart Mill, and Alfred Marshall, along with Edwin Chadwick, whom I had not thought of as an economist.

Some examples. Mill, the classical liberal, is quoted as writing the following regarding the proper role of government:

John Stuart Mill

Is there not the earth itself, its forests and waters, and all other natural riches, above and below the surface? These are the inheritance of the human race, and there must be regulations for the common enjoyment of it. What rights, and under what conditions, a person shall be allowed to exercise over any portion of this common inheritance cannot be left undecided. No function of government is less optional than the regulation of these things, or more completely involved in the idea of civilized society.

Marshall anticipated later fascination with the "fisherman's problem" in the late nineteenth century:

The Malthusian Moment

As H-Environment is re-posting all their old roundtable reviews, we'll be noting some of them here. Today I'd like to note the rich and fascinating discussion of Thomas Robertson's The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism (Rutgers UP, 2012). Said "moment", with its concerns about finite resources insufficient to support a growing world population, supplied at least some of the intellectual background to the new American environmental legislation of the 1960s and '70s, and included classics such as Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons".

An example of the interesting roundtable commentary, here from Saul Halfon:

...modern Malthusianism, often referred to as neo-Malthusianism, is not synonymous with Malthus’s original theory, which was focused more narrowly on food and England, and bound tightly to an existing theory of class. Malthus also understood birth control as a moral vice and as a detriment to capital and so preferred the inevitability of population boom and bust among the lower classes (Perelman 1979). Neo-Malthusians by contrast are a decidedly interventionist bunch, particularly when it comes to reproduction, and they conceptualize natural limits in a much expanded way. Nevertheless, this position remains associated with Malthus because of its continued focus on natural limits in relation to geometric population growth.

Thus, in the age of ascendant liberalism throughout the post-war period, the traditionally conservative Malthusian position took on the mantle of interventionist, progressive radicalism, challenging the very premise of growth and progress by appealing to a naturalistic argument about limits. This position appeared at first to align well with post-Marxist interventionism which was similarly challenging liberal and capitalist growth models. The progressive branches of both movements supported greater social equality, particularly for women. The weak coalition between these two sets of actors, however, was fractured by concerns over coercion, immigration, and racism as the post-Marxist focus on social justice and distribution of wealth encountered the non-negotiability of a neo-Malthusian emphasis on natural limits. From this macro-political frame, Robertson’s story sheds new light on how the focus on limits managed to gain a foothold in the otherwise solidly liberal progressivism of post-war America, laying part of the groundwork for modern environmentalism, and how liberalism was ultimately reasserted.