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they were isolated), or were able to exclude any other potential users (e.g., from
nearby villages). Thus, critics suggested that Hardin had made the mistake of con-
fusing commons with
open-access regimes
, with the latter being truly available to
anyone. For resources that fi t the latter description - fi sheries in international waters
and the ability to emit pollutants into the atmosphere are frequently invoked as
examples - the tragedy of the commons is far more likely to occur.
Second, Hardin made a number of assumptions about the users of the commons,
both as individuals and as a group; these assumptions, although unstated, turned
out to be both critical to his argument and quite debatable. He assumed that each
user of the commons would seek to maximise their short-term income and their
wealth, that they would engage in near-constant calculations (conscious or other-
wise) about their daily activities in order to do so, and that they would continue to
do so even once they realised that they were harming other users and the resource.
In short, he assumed that they would behave as the 'economic man' of neoclassical
economics. But this allegedly universal model of human behavior is in fact quite
parochial and culturally situated; much evidence demonstrates that it does not
describe the actual practices of people in many societies throughout history. Even
more questionably, Hardin assumed that small numbers of people living in close
proximity and depending upon the same resource for their livelihoods would not
talk to each other, even as their shared environment degraded, and that they would
not act to sanction the individuals most responsible. It is here that actual commons
most directly contradict Hardin's vision: most functioning commons are in fact
governed by complex and well-articulated sets of rules designed to maintain the
viability of the resource over extended periods (recall, for instance, the precision
and diversity of 'the commons' discussed in the previous section). Such rules typi-
cally defi ne not only who has rights to that commons, but users' responsibilities as
well, with provisions for varying levels of access, adjudicating disputes, punishing
violators, resting the resource when needed and adjusting the rules over time. Thus,
far from being asocial and ungoverned spaces, successful commons are highly struc-
tured relationships between human communities and biophysical environments.
Certainly, commons have not always succeeded in producing and maintaining
sustainable human-environment relationships; a review of the literature in envi-
ronmental geography and related fi elds reveals many instances of failures of
commons alongside the successes. Yet the same is true of privatisation and cen-
tralised state control, which brings us to a third major criticism of Hardin's
argument: it is not at all clear that his preferred approaches to environmental
governance necessarily produce better outcomes. Many instances of environmental
degradation and collapse can be traced to excesses of privatisation or state author-
ity. Patterns of suburban sprawl in the United States, for instance, have been
likened to a tragedy of the commons brought about by excessive deference to
private property and individual self interest, with millions of households seeking
to maximise their utility through actions in private property markets collectively
destroying the very environmental qualities each is seeking, and producing land-
scapes that nearly all fi nd undesirable (Donahue, 1999; McCarthy, 2005). A glance
at the environmental records of the former Soviet Union or contemporary China,
meanwhile, is typically enough to make the point that centralised state control is
no guarantor of environmental quality either, a point that has also been well
demonstrated through documentation of the failures of state-centred sustained
yield forest management.
