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right for which they paid nothing - but they bore only a fractional cost of the eco-
logical damage and declining productivity caused by that additional cow. Since all
users of the common had the same incentives, the result would be that each would
bring more and more cows to graze on the common pasture until it was entirely
destroyed, leaving both the resource and its users ruined. Hardin popularised this
argument, but his version of it was hardly
sui generis
: the same argument had
already been developed with respect to fi sheries, about which it had often been
observed that each party fi shing had strong incentives to catch every fi sh possible,
engaging in an arms race of constant investment in larger boats, bigger nets and
other technological improvements in order to do so, because any fi sh any one of
them left behind could just be caught and sold by someone else. Thus, participants
in fi sheries would often race towards their own collective ruin. For Hardin, this was
the tragedy of the commons: that a resource freely available to all would inevitably
and inexorably be overexploited to the point of ruination, leaving all of those who
depended upon it devastated. He saw two viable solutions: privatisation or strong
state control. Turning commons into private property (i.e., enclosing them) would
leave their owners with strong economic incentives to manage resources sustainably,
while removing the ruinous competition with others for the last fi sh or blade of
grass that lay at the heart of the tragedy of the commons. Strong state control was
also a viable option; Hardin described this, a version of social contract theory, as,
'mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon'; people would, in effect, empower a sov-
ereign to enforce laws to protect their self-interest, even though the latter sometimes
curtailed the maximisation of their opportunities for accumulation.
Hardin's article became extraordinarily popular and infl uential; it is among the
most-cited academic articles ever, and its legacy remains strong among many envi-
ronmentalists, resource economists, and international lending agencies and NGOs.
Its basic logic can be and has been clearly and directly extrapolated to a range of
resources, and to pollution sinks as well as material sources. For instance, it is easy
to interpret atmospheric pollution as a tragedy of the commons (each user pollutes
freely and captures all of the economic benefi ts from the associated production, but
the costs of the pollution are distributed globally).
It also provoked immediate and powerful critiques, however, engendering a set
of debates about the commons that continues up to the present. Critics attacked
Hardin's argument on both empirical and theoretical grounds. Many geographers,
anthropologists, and other scholars of human-environment relations quickly pointed
out that Hardin's thesis regarding the inevitable degradation of common resources
was easily falsifi able empirically: many societies around the world and throughout
human history, up through the present, had managed common resources for genera-
tions without apparent degradation. In fact, some had even improved common
resources over time. Examples ranged from fi sheries to forests, from pastures in the
Swiss Alps to irrigation systems in Nepal. So, Hardin had clearly missed something.
Attempts to discern and explicate what he had missed - that is, what differentiated
the many cases of successful commons from Hardin' scenario - eventually developed
into a more abstract and systematic critique of the tragedy of the commons thesis,
and complementary theories regarding what was necessary for commons to operate
successfully.
First and most fundamental, perhaps, was the fact that successful commons were
not actually freely available to everyone; they were typically controlled by a fairly
small group of users who either faced no competition for the resource (e.g., because
