Why are environmental problems hard?

Overgrazing...(Northern Australia)

Tragedy of the commons

In England, very few farmers own their own land. It is rented or leased to farmers by landowners (historically the aristocracy).

• Map of Newcastle upon Tyne

The "commons" referred to the land set aside for grazing by the landlord. Anyone could use it.

The Tragedy of the commons is an attempt to:

• explain overuse of common land (which is in no-one's interest)
• as a result of individual rational economic decisions...

1. A herder who adds one more animal to those grazing the common land gets a benefit.
2. But the cost of that benefit is spread out, and shared by the whole community.

What are "the commons" when it comes to global warming? What are the individual benefits, and the shared costs?

Two approaches to resolving this dilemma: which we can think of in terms of top-down and bottom-up approaches...

• An external agent ("the government") imposes regulations, limiting how much each farmer can use. Or...
• Private property: The commons should be split up, and each herder gets the same amount. Now each farmer will have an incentive to take care of their own plot.

But, Elinor Ostrom argues that frequently groups will self-organize to find a solution other than those above. See also:

• "A General Framework for Analyzing Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems" - Science, 325, 419 (2009) [pdf]
• "How to design the Commons": Jeremy Adam Smith's summary of the factors that Ostrom thinks make it more likely for a group to self-organize to manage common resource pools (CRP).