Based on some economists’ perceptions, some dilemmas do not have any technical solution. Such issues if addressed by the great powers using technology and science only get worse. The scholars state the commons problem as one of the tragedies that lack a technical remedy. The technical remedy entails a formula that requires changes in its natural science techniques, requesting little or no change in the human ideas and value of mortality. In the present day, technical solutions are highly welcomed because they do not rely on prophecies or opinions from different people. It is heartening to witness that there is not remedy for the commons problem. However, few suggestions have been made concerning a considerable solution. One of them is the utilization of common property. This essay establishes a link between the use of the common property as the solution to the commons problems.
According to Seabright (115), common assets encompass a wide range of resources whose fundamental feature is collective management. Its definition must comprise of two aspects: conceptualizing about common property and distinguishing the local assets from other types of shared resources. The common property includes assets that possess property rights, but the rights must be expressed collectively by a group or community. The resources must exercise rivalry, that is, a rise in the consumption of one person reduces the amount given to another individual. What actualizes the rights as collective is that none of the members of the groups has chosen who gets or does not get to enjoy the property. The aspect signifies the absence of contractual obligations in the community.
Types of local commons include resources owned by a small society. The assets are distinguished from the global commons in two prominent ways. First the members of the group are few; hence, they can be observed easily, and they have the skills and incentives to create reputations for acting in a particular way. Contrastingly, some global issues such as global warming affect billions. The use of local commons is; therefore, an effective technique for reducing and eliminating the tragedies of the commons. Population tends to grow in an exponential manner. The phenomenon in a finite world would mean that the per capita of the world’s assets should also increase. Unfortunately, the globe is infinite based on two arguments. One is that it is mathematically impossible to maximize the features of two variables at the same instant. The second reason emanates from biological facts Seabright (127).
The tragedy of the commons is brought about by the uncontrollable population increase in an infinite world. Everyone rushes to pursue his or her best interests in a community that believes in the notion of the commons. The freedom provided in the commons eventually leads to ruins to the entire society. Some individuals refuse to believe this rational establishing a psychological denial through the ideology of natural selection even though the community they live in suffers at their expense. Interventions are necessary to counteract the shallow-minded perceptions of such people. Common property raises a valid problem concerning how to resolve conflicts regarding the contributions of various members towards consolidated management. Another issue that emerges from commons is the absence of a binding contract because the consumption of a resource by one party imposes externalities on the other one (Hardin, 1244).
Since people rarely take into account the externalities in common property, the inefficiency levels in the consumptions are relatively high leading to the tragedies of the commons as depicted by Hardin (1246).Collective management involves a degree of involvement of various parties. The utilization of common property suggests that the management should be delegated to an agent who will control the resources on behalf of the others. The allocation of tasks can at times lead to economies of scope between those who are managing and monitoring. The advantages of the delegation only depend on the extent that the conflicts of interests between the principals and agents can be minimized through articulate remuneration processes. The lesson depicts why the state is mostly delegated the duty of controlling common property.
The research provided by Cinner shows the socioeconomics characteristics of different communities that result in the variation of the commons problem. To date, findings concerning the influences of heterogeneity of the maintenance and development of common assets remain inconclusive. The aspect of heterogeneity that entails different and interrelated religious, cultural, and economic resource use has had negative, positive, and minimal impacts on common property. The study derives that a society with highly exclusive tenure and financial institutions which is related to the perspectives of high social capital possesses an essential element of maintaining the management regimes of common property. The cultural heterogeneity connected to immigration acts an instigator that increases the transaction expenses of enforcing, developing, and maintaining the tenure policies (Cinner, 2).
According to Cinner (5), a positive relationship exists between common resource arrangements and property dependence. Societies with the high dependence are willing to employ tenure institutions to ensure livelihood security. The problem of the commons requires human beings to assess their values and moral ideas to realize that overexploitation of unregulated resource pools affects other people in the society. There are three ways of focusing on commons: the welfare state, earth’s natural elements, and the human population. Economists argue that if people opted to rely on themselves instead of the relationship between the community and man, the number of kids gotten by different households would not be an issue. Parents who breed at a high rate leave fewer descendants because they cannot provide for them adequately. The adverse feedback is prevalent in the animal kingdom.
The suggestion for eliminating overbreeding being to allow the children of the improvident guardians to succumb to death due to starvation so that overbreeding becomes its own punishment. Through this, they would be no public interest to control the breeding rate of families. The effort is insensitive because it does not provide a humanistic approach in eliminating the problem of the commons. Understanding the factors that lead to the tragedy does not ensure that people can avoid it easily. The nature of the common assets is fixed. While agents may limit consumption of the units of a particular resource, it is impossible to make an unsubtractable asset subtractable. The management of the access of the common property requires a complex task of excluding others from using the asset. Such restriction poses a substantial behavioral challenge (Cinner, 6).
The eradication of the commons problem depends on either Hardin’s strategy of coercing people using external agents or utilizing common property to provide a self-organized method of management. The suggestion made by Hardin is quite extreme since it involves the privatization of the common property or the establishment of a common authoritarian base to control the resources. Following his prescription, governments have come in to privatize and centralize certain common assets (Hardin, 1247). The preferred strategy of the use of the common property to solve the commons tragedy aims at allowing individuals to have the capacity to acquire insight and coordinate the efforts so that they can manage the assets successfully without any exterior intervention (Cinner, 9). Some of the self-governing and self-organizing techniques have worked properly especially under crucial social and environmental circumstances.
Works Cited
Cinner, Joshua. Socioeconomic factors influencing customary marine tenure in
the Indo-Pacific. Ecology
and Society 10(1): 36. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol10/iss1/art36/, 2005.
Hardin, Garrett. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, New Series, Volume 162, Issue 3859, pages 1243-1248, 1968.
Seabright, Paul. Managing Local Commons: Theoretical Issues in Incentive Design. The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 7, No. 4. (Autumn), pp. 113-134, 1993.
