Tragedy of the Commons

This phrase is the title of an article by the biologist and social commentator Garrett Hardin, first published in 1968. The article and the concepts regarding the conservation of resources it presents are still widely debated by scholars in the social sciences. The problem that Hardin describes, the proper management of resources held in common, represents a dilemma that has been addressed by philosophers and economists since ancient times. Hardin uses the metaphor of a “commons,” a communal pasture, to illustrate how individual self-interest may be in conflict with community interests when utilizing a common resource.

In Hardin’s example, a pasture is held in common by a group of farmers, where each farmer is allowed to graze as many cows as he/she wishes. Because there is no cost to any farmer to graze an animal, each will attempt to place the maximum number of animals on the land to gain the greatest amount of “profit” in the form of additional livestock. As each user adds additional cows, the quality of the pasture steadily declines due to overgrazing, but because none of the farmers actually owns the land, and there is no greater authority that can limit the pasture’s exploitation, the land is degraded to the point that it can no longer support livestock. This occurs because the users of the resource (the pasture) have no motivation to conserve it, only to maximize their individual gain from it, and the damage from placing additional cows on the land is shared with the other users. According to Hardin, such abuse of a common property is in the rational economic interests of each individual farmer, because the advantage each receives, even after the pasture has been badly overgrazed, is still greater than any costs associated with using the “commons.” The “tragedy” in Hardin’s title refers to his view that such behavior is inevitable when humans attempt to utilize a “common” resource for which there are no associated costs.