British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Partha Dasgupta: 'The Economics of the Environment'
Copyright © The British Academy, 1996
Printed in Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 90, pp. 165-221
6. Public Failure and the Erosion of Local Commons
There is a difference between global and local commons. The open seas are common-property resources, as are usually village ponds; but what is a problem for the former isn't necessarily a problem for the latter. Hardin's metaphor, even though applicable to global commons, can be misleading in the case of the local variety. For unlike global commons, the source of the problems associated with the management of local commons is often not the users, but other agencies. The images invoked by "the tragedy of the commons" are mostly not the right ones when applied to local commons. Local commons (such as village ponds and tanks, pastures and threshing grounds, watershed drainage and riverbeds, and sources of fuelwood, medicinal herbs, bamboo, palm products, resin, gum, and so forth) are not open for use to all in any society. In most cases they are open only to those having historical rights, through kinship ties, community membership, and so forth. Not surprisingly, those having historical rights-of-use tend to be protective of these resources. Local commons are often easy enough to monitor, so their use can be regulated by the community; either through the practice and enforcement of norms of behaviour, or through deliberate allocation of use (Section 12). The idea of "social capital", viewed as a complex of interpersonal networks (Putnam, 1993), is telling in this context.
Wade (1987, 1988) has conducted an empirical investigation of community-based allocation rules. Forty-one South Indian villages were studied, and it was found, for example, that downstream villages had an elaborate set of rules, enforced by fines, for regulating the use of water from irrigation canals. Most villages had similar arrangements for the use of grazing land. In an earlier work on the Kuna tribe in the Panama, Howe (1986) described the intricate set of social sanctions that are imposed upon those who violate norms of behaviour designed to protect their source of fresh water. Even the iniquitous caste system of India has been found to provide an institutional means of checks and balances by which communal environmental resources have been protected (Gadgil and Malhotra, 1983).
This said, it is important to caution against romanticising local common-property resource management. Beteille (1983), for example, contains examples of how access to the local commons is often restricted to the privileged (e.g. caste Hindus). Rampant inequities exist in rural community practices. I am laying stress on the fact the local commons are not unmanaged; I am not claiming that they are invariably managed in an equitable way.
The extent of common-property resources as a proportion of total assets in a community varies considerably across ecological zones. In India they appear to be most prominent in arid regions, mountain regions, and unirrigated areas. They are least prominent in humid regions and river valleys (Agarwal and Narain, 1989; Chopra, Kadekodi and Murty, 1989). There is, of course, an economic rationale for this, one that is based on the common human desire to pool risks (Dasgupta, 1993, Chapter 10). An almost immediate empirical corollary is that income inequalities are less where common-property resources are more prominent. However, aggregate income is a different matter, and it is the arid and mountain regions and unirrigated areas that are the poorest. This needs to be borne in mind when policy is devised. As may be expected, even within dry regions, dependence on common-property resources falls with rising wealth across households. The links between undernourishment, destitution, and an erosion of the rural common-property resource base are close. They have been explored analytically in Dasgupta (1993, 1996).
In an important and interesting article, Jodha (1986) used data from over eighty villages in twenty-one dry districts from six dry tropical states in India to estimate that among poor families the proportion of income based directly on common-property resources is for the most part in the range 15–25 per cent (see also Jodha, 1995). This is a substantial proportion. Moreover, as sources of income they are often complementary to private-property resources, which are in the main labour, milch and draft animals, cultivation land and crops, agricultural tools (e.g. ploughs, harrows, levellers, and hoes), fodder-cutting and rope-making machines, and seeds. Common-property resources also provide the rural poor with partial protection in times of unusual economic stress. For landless people they may be the only non-human asset at their disposal. A number of resources (such as fuelwood and water for home use, berries and nuts, medicinal herbs, resin and gum) are the responsibility of women and children. [note 16 (go to Notes)]
A similar picture emerges from Hecht, Anderson and May (1988), who describe in rich detail the importance of the extraction of babassu products among the landless in the Brazilian state of Maranho. The support such extraction activity offers the poorest of the poor, most especially the women among them, is striking. These extractive products are an important source of cash income in the period between agricultural-crop harvests (see also Murphy and Murphy, 1985; and for a similar picture in the West African forest zone, see Falconer, 1990).
It isn't difficult to see why common-property resources matter greatly to the poorest of the rural poor in a society, or therefore, to understand the mechanisms by which such people may well get disenfranchised from the economy even while in the aggregate the society enjoys economic growth. If you are steeped in social norms of behaviour and understand communitarian obligations, you do not calculate every five minutes how you should behave. You follow the norms. This saves on costs all round, not only for you as an "actor", but also for you as "policeman" and "judge". [note 17] It is also the natural thing for you to do if you have internalised the norms. But this is sustainable so long as the background environment remains pretty much constant. It will not be sustainable if the social environment changes suddenly. You may even be destroyed. It is this heightened vulnerability, often more real than perceived, which is the cause of some of the greatest tragedies in contemporary society. They descend upon people who are, in the best of circumstances, acutely vulnerable.
Sources that trigger destitution by this means vary. The erosion of common-property resource bases can come about in the wake of shifting populations (accompanying the growth process itself), rising populations and the consequent pressure on these resources, technological progress, unreflective public policies, predatory governments, and thieving aristocracies. There is now an accumulation of evidence on this range of causes, and in what follows I shall present an outline of the findings in three sets of studies.
1. In his work on the drylands of India, Jodha (1986) noted a decline in the geographical area covering common-property resources ranging from 26 to 63 per cent over a twenty-year period. This was in part due to the privatisation of land, a good deal of which in his sample had been awarded to the rural non-poor. He also noted a decline in the productivity of common-property resources on account of population growth among the community. In an earlier work, Jodha (1980) identified an increase in subsistence requirements of the farming community and a rise in the profitability of land from cropping and grazing as a central reason for increased desertification in the state of Rajasthan. Jodha argued that, ironically, it was government land reform programmes in this area, unaccompanied by investment in improving the productive base, that had triggered the process.
2. Ensminger's (1990) study of the privatisation of common grazing lands among the Orma in northeastern Kenya indicates that the transformation took place with the consent of the elders of the tribe. She attributes this willingness to changing transaction costs brought about by cheaper transportation and widening markets. The elders were, quite naturally, from the stronger families, and it does not go unnoted by Ensminger that privatisation has accentuated inequalities.
3. In an earlier, much-neglected work on the Amazon basin, Feder (1977, 1979) described how massive private investment in the expansion of beef-cattle production in fragile ecological conditions has been supported by domestic governments in the form of tax concessions and provision of infrastructure, and loans from international agencies, such as the World Bank. The degradation of vast tracts of valuable environmental resources was accompanied by the disenfranchisement of large numbers of small farmers and agricultural labourers from the economy. At best it made destitutes of traditional forest dwellers; at worst it simply eliminated them (see also Barraclough, 1977; Hecht, 1985). The evidence suggests that during the decades of the 1960s and 1970s protein intake by the rural poor declined even while the production of beef increased dramatically. Much of the beef was destined for exports, for use by fast-food chains.
The sources that transformed common-property resources into private resources, as described in these studies, were different. Consequently, the ways in which they had an impact on those with historical rights were different. But each is understandable and believable. Since the impact of these forms of privatisation are confirmed by economic theory, the findings of these case studies are almost certainly not unrepresentative. They suggest that privatisation of village commons and forest lands, while hallowed at the altar of economic efficiency, can have disastrous distributional consequences, disenfranchising entire classes of people from economic citizenship. They also show that public ownership of such resources as forest lands is by no means necessarily a good basis for a resource allocation mechanism. Decision-makers are in these cases usually far removed from site (living as they do in imperial capitals), they have little knowledge of the ecology of such matters, their time-horizons are often short, and they are in many instances overly influenced by interest-groups far removed from the resource in question.
All this is not at all to suggest that rural development is to be avoided. It is to say that resource allocation mechanisms that do not take advantage of dispersed information, that are insensitive to hidden (and often not-so-hidden) economic and ecological interactions, that do not take the long-view, and that do not give a sufficiently large weight to the claims of the poorest within rural populations (particularly the women and children in these populations) are going to prove environmentally disastrous. It appears that, during the process of economic development there is a close link between environmental protection and the well- being of the poor, most especially the most vulnerable among the poor. Elaboration of this link has been one of the most compelling achievements at the interface of anthropology, economics, and nutrition science.
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