Hardin was not describing a commons

Despite the long and robust history of the ecological commons, dating back to the Magna Carta, Justinian Rome, and beyond, modern economics has largely dismissed it as an archaic curiosity. Much of the neglect can be traced to an influential essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” a parable about the inevitable collapse of any shared resource that biologist Garrett Hardin published in the journal Science in 1968.

If you have a shared pasture on which many herders can graze their cattle, Hardin wrote, no single herder will have a rational incentive to hold back. And so he will put as many cattle on the physical commons as possible, take as much as he can for himself. The pasture will inevitably be over-exploited and ruined: A “tragedy.”

The tragedy narrative implied that only a regime of private property rights and markets could solve the tragedy of the Commons. If people had private ownership rights, they would be motivated to protect their grazing lands.

But Hardin was not describing a commons. He described a scenario in which there were no boundaries to the grazing land, no rules for managing it, and no community of users. That is not a commons; it is an open-access regime or free-for-all. A commons has boundaries, rules, social norms, and sanctions against “free riders.” A commons requires that there be a community willing to act as a steward of a resource.

Yet, Hardin’s misrepresentation of actual commons as a failed paradigm – a “tragedy” – stuck in the public mind and became an article of faith. Economists and conservative pundits saw the story as a useful way to affirm their ideas that private property rights and markets are the best way to manage shared resources. - David Bollier