Is the Tragedy of the Commons Inevitable?
Eventually, many of the resources we depend on as a society will run out. The rate at which our environment is deteriorating and common awareness of the unsustainable nature of everyday practices has instilled this fear in many. When approaching how to consume shared but finite resources, individuals are faced with the option of acting selfishly or acting with a conscience. Garett Hardin (1968) argued that, in the face of unrestricted access to a shared limited resource, individuals will put their needs before those of the common good and thus create a ‘tragedy of the commons’. Eventually, the culmination of these individual decisions causes the resource to be lost.
In this dilemma, individuals who share a finite resource may either “defect” (put self-interest first and consume the resource in an unrestrained manner) or “cooperate” (keep others in mind and show restraint in consuming the resource). Furthermore, individuals can gain a higher payoff by defecting. If everyone defects, however, the payoff is lower than if everyone were to cooperate. The scenario where everyone defects is the tragedy of the commons.
Yet, an article by Emily Siff in Psychology Today cites the case of the Cape Town water crisis to show that a tragedy of the commons is not inevitable when faced with a resource depletion dilemma. Cape Town officials introduced the concept of ‘Day Zero’ in order to prevent their main freshwater source from drying up. Were overconsumption of the shared resource to continue, all taps would be shut off and water would be strictly rationed.
Thus, defection was no longer the only rational response— cooperators would have to offset the water consumption of defectors, and if everyone defected Day Zero would arrive. This is represented below:
By altering the payoffs associated with each choice, Cape Town officials were able to utilize self-interest to incentivize cooperation. It may be possible to avert similar resource depletion dilemmas by following a similar model. However, this would require governments and other authorities to take strict regulatory actions— and how humans tend to respond to such restrictions is a different matter. In the end, a day may come where it is the only way to prevent natural resources from being totally lost.
References:
- Hardin, G. (1968). The Tragedy of The Commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243–1248.
- https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-540-70587-1_3.pdf
- https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/one-among-many/201911/escaping-the-tragedy-the-commons