On the seventh day... a question of ownership
Mon, 07 Dec 2015 16:01:00 GMT
On the seventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me ‘Seven Swans a Swimming’. This might have been a special surprise to you given the well-established myth that the Queen owns all the swans in her Kingdom. Although this is not the case, it does give us the tenuous opportunity of discussing the issue of public versus private ownership and how this influences environmental management.
One of the first to address this issue from a resource perspective was Garrett Hardin, in his 1968 essay, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. This influential paper argued that when a resource is owned collectively, it will become degraded. Hardin used the example of a commons situation, when all villagers have the right to graze animals on a communal piece of land, saying that as each individual sought to maximise the number of beasts they put on the pasture (in order to generate greater gains for themselves) this would ultimately lead to over grazing and a collapse of the resource. The ‘tragedy’ was that short term self- interest, if left unchecked, is in conflict with long-term interests and the common good. He then used this argument to advocate both privatisation and, more controversially, population control.
Resources that could be considered ‘common’ include lakes, fisheries and forests. The notion that private ownership will help to conserve these has been the dominant belief for the past thirty years, underpinned by the idea is that if something is owned then it will be looked after. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to work in a world where ownership is dominated by large corporations seeking to maximise shareholder profits, and when the resources, such as the air and the sea, are global and don’t lend themselves to ‘ownership’.
However, Hardin also introduced the concept of ‘mutually agreed coercion’, whereby local people work together to find effective ways of managing common resources. This can work, depending on various local conditions, and there are examples of successful initiatives that have embraced this approach including lobster fisheries in Maine, USA, http://geo.coop/node/654 and forests around the world http://www.pnas.org/content/105/36/13286.full.
However, there is a real question mark about whether this sort of cooperation can be achieved at the global level. This is really what the Paris Climate Talks (UNCOP21) is all about. The challenge is to find agreement on how governments around the world can come together to agree how to manage the greatest global commons of them all, the air we breathe.
If UNCOP21 is unsuccessful, and no agreement is reached on how global warming can be limited to 2C, we can expect deteriorating weather systems. One potential threat are ‘grey swans’ – not beautiful wildfowl, but major storms – storms so big that they will make Storm Desmond look like an April shower, and Hurricane Katrina look like a squall, http://news.mit.edu/2015/grey-swan-cyclones-storm-surge-0831
None of us would want to see any grey swans, let alone seven, and never as a Christmas gift!
