Collaboration

You would not be reading this article if it were not for some of our ancestors learning how to undertake collective action to solve social dilemmas. Successive generations have added to the stock of everyday knowledge about how to instil productive norms of behaviour in their children and to craft rules to support collective action that produces public goods and avoids “tragedies of the commons”. Elinor Ostrom

Humans have collaborated for millennia. We work together to protect houses and families, vulnerable people and children, put out fires and sandbag homes against floods. We cooperate on many more subtle levels too. To inspire, to educate, to entertain, just because we like to eat meals together. We social, we do better in groups.

Yet, bizarrely, working together, for mutual benefit, to protect common resources is often seen as a recipe for failure. What we do will be negated by others—how often, for example on climate, have we heard a leader say ‘our country only produces two percent of the world’s emissions, everyone else will take advantage of us if we change’? Or words to this effect.

However, there are many situations in which humans collaborate for the benefit of everybody. We created working systems. We do so voluntarily. Some last for thousands of years spanning generations, successfully protecting the commons. When such systems work they are characterized by trust, reciprocity and a level of communication.

Our climate emergency, fisheries and water resources are great examples of commons. In such cases, action creates better outcomes for everyone however, others can choose not to cooperate. The result of this non-cooperation is short-term gain for the defectors and longer-term loss for everyone.

A wide range of work looks at such collective action challenges. A specific substantive area of this research seeks to address environmental social dilemmas and how groups may seek to—and in many cases have acted to—protect common pool resources, resources that are shared, easily accessible and can be degraded through overuse.

With multiple users it is possible for an individual (or country) to take more than a fair share of what the resource can sustain. If this occurs, the overall utility of the resource can be damaged resulting in it becoming less productive. A common example: overfishing can dramatically impact future stocks. This reduces the productivity of the whole resource. These dilemmas characterize many other common resources, such as the world’s ability to absorb greenhouse emissions and the safe level of carbon dioxide and other global warming gases in the earth’s stratosphere.

So what works?

To protect such resources we commonly assume that government intervention, or privatization of the commons, is necessary. Common pool resource research demonstrates that individuals and groups can, and do, generate systems, behaviors, structures and standards that answer such dilemmas. Hundreds of studies document self-governed systems that manage such resources more effectively than government intervention or privatization although, equally, there are many cases where these efforts fail.

Successful, self-governing systems are characterized by formal and informal rules, norms and customs to manage the commons. Under such systems, community and group processes sustainably manage common-pool resources. The research highlights the ability of groups to self-organize and protect their own resources. It shows many groups organize on small and regional scales to develop enduring solutions to these social dilemmas.

The social dilemma represents the difficulties faced by anyone wishing to act on such issues. For example, if an individual user is seeking maximum returns over the long-term, the user needs the resource to remain optimally productive. For goods of this type, this means that multiple users need to act collectively so that the resource is not degraded. However, the individual’s dilemma is that incentives to collaborate are removed should other users exploit the resource beyond sustainable limits – they could overuse the resource as well and may lose out if they do not. Consequently, there is a conventional view that without externally imposed regulations, it is impossible to achieve the benefits of collective action.

Garret Hardin famously illustrated the dilemma with a pasture open to all. He argued, in a stable society, any rational herder would continually add to his [sic] flock or herd thus creating the tragedy:

Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.

A significant range of real-world situations and cases contradict this logical theory. Hardin is specific—a commons open to all cannot be sustainable in today’s world. The prediction that the system will force users into a headlong rush to deplete it is contradicted particularly when trust, communication and reciprocity can be established.