Some reflections on Hardin's property rights solution to the tragedy of the commons

The tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or something formally like it. Unlike many who favoured government regulation as the solution to environmental problems, Garrett Hardin (1968) considered private property rights as the solution to the ‘tragedy of the commons’. However, he was pessimistic about population growth and considered big government, which tends to erode private property, as the way to protect national borders and deal with a perceived population problem. This article does not suppose that natural resource use, including that for a finite resource, is entirely a matter of property rights regimes as opposed to scientifically determinable constraints. Rather, it holds that private property rights are conducive to nurturing natural resources at any given ecological parameter. I use commercial aquaculture, enabled by zoning as a means to establish and assign private property rights, as a good example of Hardin's exclusive property rights solution in action. There is a common fear of environmental limits or capacity.1 This neo-Malthusian fear, often uninformed, leads to a policy bias favouring government restrictions on ordinary business activities and promoting new activities and technologies that are uncompetitive. The fear is influenced by the ‘tragedy of the commons’ popularised by Hardin,2 who took his life in 2003 after actively pushing to arrest world population growth. His most cited essay advocated restricting population, based on his axiom that “A finite world can support only a finite population” (Hardin, 1968, p. 1243). This ‘tragedy’, based on the examples of ocean fish depletion and livestock overgrazing, has led to a fixation amongst environmentalists on the phenomenon of over-exploiting natural resources rather than an awareness that it is really common property, as a property rights regime, rather than any scientific limit per se, which accounts for the problem. A common property rights3 regime has no commonly accepted rule of resource appropriation, so resources are open access. However, even communal or private property can become open access as a result of neglect, incompetence, or charity (Lai, 2023). Hardin's solution to the tragedy of the commons in fisheries and land resources is private property, not regulation. He knew that ‘commons’, whether de facto open access or communal (as in the case of ‘common pastures’), can become private. This point is pivotal in Smith (1981) and Hawkshaw et al. (2012), although the latter denied that Hardin meant what he said so unambiguously. Taking ocean fish and animal grazing as examples, Hardin (1968, p. 1245) wrote, “The tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or something formally like it”. In other words, private fish and animal farming is the solution to the over-exploitation of open-access resources. Paradoxically, the reader can easily find citations of Hardin (1968) in the literature of environmental protection and sustainability that are mistrusting of, if not hostile to, private property. One may be confused by Hardin's criticism of those who endeavour to feed a growing population. “They think that farming the seas or developing new strains of wheat will solve the problem [of an ever-growing population] – technologically” (1968, p. 1244). To Hardin, the solution is to enclose a threatened species against unrestrained exploitation. Many have regarded such passive access restrictions as essentially private property. But such observers do not see that exclusivity in the ‘commons’ (communal property) or private property is not an end but a means to the possible undisturbed enjoyment and betterment of the resource in question. The reality is that environmental limits at any time are not purely physically given, but dependent on property rights arrangements. Assignment of some form of private property rights does not only curb excessive use or exploitation of natural resources, but also enables innovations that can nurture and transform them. Successful institutional and/or technical innovations4 can, in time, push outwards a ‘finite limit’ that was initially technologically fixed. This economic understanding helps improve policymaking in the face of environmental concerns over oceanic and land resources. While the global ecological crisis is complicated, an informed understanding of aquaculture based on private property, something Hardin expressly supported, has flourished to help feed a growing world population. This understanding helps policymakers choose and develop policies towards sustainability in the face of tricky cross-boundary issues such as water and air pollution, which troubled Hardin and prompted even Robert Nozick (1974) to support some regulation of the enjoyment of private property in the presence of externalities. Policymakers' concerns over the ocean stem from the fact that it essentially serves as a common global sink for waste disposal, passage for shipping, and harvesting ground for food, minerals, and fuel. The heart of these concerns is less a problem of real environmental limits predicated on physical science per se than of ownership of the ocean and property rights rules regarding the use and extraction of its resources. As far as fishery is concerned, the limit to fishery resources is definitely not a matter of the quantum of exploitable resources subject to pollution, but one of ownership. Unconstrained sea hunting can exhaust all aquatic resources even if the sea is pollution-free.5 The point is that even when no other environmental limit is exceeded, the tragedy of the commons through human exploitation can still exist under non-exclusive property rights. The rise of aquaculture (FAO, 2024) as a result of the granting of a degree of private property rights to fish farms, largely through the licensing of fish culture zones in territorial waters, testifies to the economic and ecological benefits of private property. Oceanic pollution remains a major challenge, but the matter is again one of property rights rather than a purely scientific issue. Any meaningful attempt to address this global challenge cannot rely on attempts by individual political entities because the subject transcends boundaries. That it may be impossible to privatise the entire ocean does not mean that a ban on commercial fish hunting is the solution. To the contrary, such a ban would be doomed to fail because the costs of effective enforcement are too high. Fish farming in the sea, granted that it has a host of ecological management issues (notably overcrowding, diseases, cultured fish escaping into the ocean, fish medicine abuse, and water pollution), is nevertheless manageable. Figure 1 compares the outputs of inland and maritime fish farming versus fishing based on statistics of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO, 2024). It shows that, since the 1990s, fish catches have not increased as much as fish farming, so it is very likely that the latter will soon overtake the former as a source of seafood. Source: FAO (2024). What Hardin might not have realised was that his understanding of private property as a means to tackle the problem of open access was limited to the possessor's right to limit access instead of the consequences of exclusivity. Farms are not zoos which merely enclose species preventing them from escaping, but nurture them in captivity for human consumption. Otherwise, people would be eating the meat of wild rather than finely domesticated cattle and wild crops instead of delicate gardened produce. Like land farms, sea farms do not just enclose any fish they can trap, but cultivate selected species with feed and care through innovations that may fail or succeed, depending on consumers' willingness to pay for them. Sea farming, now an established branch of applied science and management, has generated products that meet consumer preferences and new ways of consumption over the years. By mass producing a stable supply of marine fish of different sizes and qualities, it enables the growth of new seafood product packages and catering outlets. New culture fish that overcome ecologists' concerns over the extinction of overfished species can be produced by culturing new or cross-breeding wild fish species to replace captured ones. Two Asian examples that meet Asian consumers' preference for steamed or fried whole fish purchased alive (as a sign of freshness and vitality) serve to illustrate this (Lai et al., 2005). One example is the culture of pompano (Trachinotus blochii) as a substitute for the caught silver pomfret (Pampus argenteus) and Chinese pomfret (Pampus chinensis). Pompano is marketed with a Chinese name chosen to be in the same class as the pomfret (Ong Che et al., 2022). The other is a hybrid grouper traded as ‘Sabah grouper’ (Epinephelus fuscoguttatus ♀ × E. lanceolatus ♂) (Lai et al., 2020). This hybrid is an innovative outcome of researchers at the University of Eastern Malaysia, Sabah. Cultivated in floating cages, it has proved to be an ecologically far better and far cheaper substitute for wild groupers captured from their coral habitats. No doubt Hardin held that private property can overcome the tragedy of the commons. What he actually sought to convince the world was that solving this problem – by replacing common and communal resources with private property (as a matter of technology in production) – could not solve the Malthusian population problem. Instead of appreciating with wonderment, if not gratitude, the benefits of private property, he fell victim to a population explosion phobia – like Malthus, he could not grasp how much innovations enabled by private property could push back the food doomsday scenario. Unlike Popper (1999), Hardin was a pessimist. In the critical literature on the European enclosure movement – privatising the communal land for exclusive farming or grazing – the mistrust of private property is often based on a contempt for greed. This social concern ignores the likelihood that the harm of greed under a common or other non-private property rights system, especially one imposed on rather than chosen by people, could be far worse in the absence of market constraints. The chance of capital formation under common property is zero, and the road to serfdom of one kind or another is guaranteed by any artificial alternative to private property. A big-government solution benefits rent-seekers, if not a tyrant, more than the silent majority, whose income and wealth are, like open access rent, subject to taxation. The neo-institutional economist's stress on the positive rights to exclude, derive income, and alienate often exacerbates the modern reaction to access restriction under private property, which confers these positive rights, but also supports the negative rights not to restrict, derive maximum income, and sell. More importantly, exclusivity in the use, derivation of income from, and alienation of private property has a social function – not so much in regulating access to, but the quiet enjoyment of and experimentation with, any resource in one's possession so that the betterment of that resource may generate greater output for distribution through commercial or other forms of exchange. Agricultural advancements in medieval Europe, for instance, were due to the private land ownership and governance rights of monasteries. These were voluntary associations, not collective farms. Today, the flourishing primary industry of aquaculture under maritime zoning makes a good case for a sober appreciation of the specific ways in which private property has contributed to the livelihood of the human community. It should be stressed that Hardin favoured big government while considering private property as the solution to the tragedy of the commons. His position was based on his fear of cross-border migration from low-income to high-income areas (Oakes, 2016). Logic and facts suggest otherwise. Big government tends to have greater animosity and hostility to private property. Out of self-interest and group interest, its rulers are prone to treat the possessions of ordinary people, if not the people themselves, as common property open to their unrestrained exploitation. The result would be long-term exit of human and financial capital and entry of welfare-seeking migrants. Hardin and his followers underestimated the contribution of private property to food production. Their despair centred on the distribution of environmental outputs fixed by some capacity constraints. Haunted by an ultimate or eventual Malthusian doomsday, some even deny that Hardin saw private property as a solution to the tragedy of the commons for fishery resources. This fatalistic mentality fuels a drive to control access by regulation, while ignoring the power of investment and innovation that can make distribution more efficient (i.e. less wasteful) and achieve greater output through superior production techniques. The success of world aquaculture is not just about curbing access to a formerly open access resource (i.e. a mere maritime enclosure movement), but also about attracting private investment that can bring about innovations in food production, distribution, and consumption by nurturing or even ‘inventing’ that resource. There is a tendency in a complex world to blame one thing for all perceived physical evils such as the eradication of species, human miseries and diseases, while assigning another thing as the solution. Malthusians have a fixation on population as the problem. Others focus on carbon emissions, drugs, social media and so forth. This results in extremist opinions and drastic government measures that prescribe a solution to the perceived, rather than to the real, problem. Malthus might have erred when he underestimated technical progress. Hardin correctly pointed out that exclusive property rights, which can constrain the tragedy of the commons (for common property or open-access resources), is not a technological matter. However, as a result of his Malthusian fear of population growth, he supported an interventionist big-government approach to control population growth as the solution. Other neo-Malthusians promoted ‘de-growth’. Furthermore, Hardin's boundary concept for exclusive property rights is a wall concept that, similar to a zone boundary in Pigovian spatial planning, stops short of preventing invasive and/or escape crossing. Few vocal theorists to the left or right of Malthus have bothered to examine how ordinary real-world practices, which have a boundary dimension and convert common (open access) resources into private property, may affect their critical problematics. Without hailing irresponsible communal or private ownership, this article has drawn attention to the case of aquaculture (Lai & Yu, 2002; Lai et al., 2020), which deals with the fishing example (of marine fish and whales) in Hardin's well-known work, which is in line with his property rights approach. My conviction is that if there is any Malthusian (or climate change) doomsday, it may arrive sooner in the absence of exclusive property rights. The author thanks the three reviewers of this article for their stimulating comments. He is indebted to Dr Rosita Ong Che for helping to collect fisheries data and produce Figure 1. All faults are his own.