About Module 4

In Module 3, we learned some basic ethical principles related to what actions we should take with respect to the environment. In this module, we’ll learn some fundamentals of actually achieving successful (or unsuccessful) actions.

There are two main types of action: individual action and collective action. This module discusses both. In addition, through the Written Assignment associated with this module, we’ll address an imaginary situation where collective action is needed to avoid the depletion of natural resources.

Note that a lot of what we’ll learn in this module is applicable to a broad range of actions, not just actions related to the environment. How can you get your roommates to keep your apartment clean? How can societies get everyone to contribute to public services? These topics and many others are informed by the content in Module 4.

What will we learn in Module 4?

By the end of Module 4, you should be able to:

• explain the difference between individual action and collective action;
• define collective action problems, as well as a specific type of collective action problem, "the tragedy of the commons";
• explain the three types of solutions to collective action problems: government regulation, private ownership, and community self-organization;
• explain the relationship between collective action and social norms, as well as the influence of social norms on individual actions.

What is due for Module 4?

There are several required activities in this module. The chart below provides an overview of the activities for Module 4. For assignment details, refer to the location noted.

Questions?

If you have any questions, please post them to our Course Q & A discussion forum in Canvas. I will check that discussion forum often to respond. While you are there, feel free to post your own responses if you, too, are able to help out a classmate. If you have a more specific concern, please send me a message through Inbox in Canvas.

Individual vs. Collective Action

Your actions affect the environment. For example:

• When you use a car, bus, or airplane, oil is burned, sending greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and changing the global climate. Fueling these vehicles also involves extracting oil from oil wells in the ground. (There are some exceptions: vehicles that use electricity or natural gas instead of oil, though both of these typically involve emitting greenhouse gases and extracting resources from the ground.)
• When you eat meat or other animal products that come from “factory farms” – which are most meat/animal products sold in the United States – the farming process causes several environmental impacts, including deforestation, water pollution, and greenhouse gas emission.
• When you choose where to live – including which city to live in and which neighborhood to live in within the city – there are several environmental impacts, including how much energy your residence and transportation uses and how heavily you will stress water supplies.
• When you exercise your voice or your vote in a democracy, you influence the policies that the government will take, including policies it takes on the environment.

But for each of these actions, you’re not the only person doing it. Other people drive, ride buses and airplanes, eat meat and other animal products, choose certain cities and neighborhoods, and speak up and vote in any given democracy.

Individual action refers to the actions taken by one individual person, acting based on his or her personal decisions. Collective action refers to the actions taken by a collection or group of people, acting based on a collective decision. For example, if you choose to walk instead of drive, then you are taking an individual action. Or, if you are part of a neighborhood that chooses to install sidewalks to help people there walk more, then you are involved in a collective action. Collective action often involves larger scales, since there are more people involved. However, it is possible to take individual action on large-scale issues, such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions to reduce global climate change.

One question that often comes up in the context of collective action, especially for big global environmental issues, is: Given that there are so many other people whose actions are affecting the issue, what difference do my own individual actions make?  The answer is that an individual’s actions almost always still make a difference, even if there are many other people involved. For example, if you reduce your greenhouse gas emissions, there will be less climate change. To be sure, there still will be climate change. No one can prevent something as big as climate change without any collective action. But there will be less climate change, and that is something we can care about.

But an individual can also influence what collective actions are made. When you get involved in your government, or your neighborhood, or an organization, or even just a group of friends or family, you often influence what actions other people take. Likewise, other people are often influencing what actions you take. There are specific steps you can take to influence collective action. We’ll learn some of these later in this module.

Collective Action Problems

Two concepts from ethics that we did not touch on in Module 3 are altruism (selflessness) and selfishness. Perhaps we should be altruistic and make personal sacrifices to help others. But, for better or worse, people often are at least somewhat selfish. Collective action problems arise when people are selfish and thus fail to achieve successful collective actions.

A collective action problem is a scenario in which there is conflict between the individual interest and the group interest. In the scenario, each individual in the group faces a choice to either act selfishly or cooperate. In a collective action problem it is always in the individual’s best interest to act selfishly, regardless of what the other individuals do. However, if all individuals act selfishly, then they all get worse outcomes than if they all cooperate. In other words, it is in the individual’s interest to act selfishly, but it is in the group’s interest to have everyone cooperate. This is the conflict between the individual interest and the group interest.

Environmental Collective Action Problems

Collective action problems are widespread throughout environmental issues. Usually, they involve scenarios in which individuals want to act selfishly in a way that would harm the environment, but groups would benefit from environmental protection. Here are some examples:

• Individuals often want to do things that emit a lot of greenhouse gases, but society overall may be better off with less climate change.
• Individuals often want to drive cars so as to get around faster, but driving causes more air pollution that harms the whole group. Additionally, driving can cause traffic jams, whereas public transit avoids traffic jams. The car/transit decision is often a collective action problem for travel time: each individual travels faster by driving regardless of what other individuals do, but the group will overall travel faster if everyone takes transit than if everyone drives.
• Individuals may want to harvest scarce natural resources that are up for grabs, but society overall may be better off if everyone avoids using too much of these resources.

This last example is closely related to the "tragedy of the commons". This concept has an important connection to sustainability and is worth considering in greater detail.

Have you ever been to Boston, Massachusetts? Did you visit the Boston Common?

Today, the Boston Common is a public park in downtown Boston. It is used in the same ways as any other city park: for leisurely walks, for sports, and for community events.

Figure 4.1: Boston Common, Boston, Massachusetts

Credit: Boston Commons 7 by AlexiusHoratius from Wikimedia is licensed under (CC BY-SA 3.0)

But the Common was not always used in this way. In the 1600s, long before Boston was a big city, the space was shared as a grazing pasture for cows. The cows were owned by families who lived in the area.

The cow grazing caused a collective action problem. Each individual family wanted their cows to eat as much grass from the Common as they could because then the cows would grow more and be worth more to the family. However, the Common had a finite amount of grass that could be eaten at any one time. Soon the cows were eating the grass faster than it could regrow. At this point, the grazing became unsustainable, and it was only a matter of time before the Common ran out of grass, forcing families to cease grazing their cows.

One could reasonably argue that if the families had collectively established rules for grazing and exercised moderation in their grazing practices, then the grass would not have been depleted, and the cows could have continued grazing indefinitely. However, the original idea behind the "tragedy of the commons" is that the depletion of a shared resource like the Boston Common is unavoidable due to individuals' selfish behavior.

Defining the Tragedy of the Commons

The term "tragedy of the commons" was coined by Garrett Hardin in his 1968 article published in the journal Science, titled "The Tragedy of the Commons". Hardin argued that in the absence of private property rights or strict government regulation, shared resources (i.e., the commons) would ultimately be depleted because individuals tend to act selfishly, rushing to harvest as many resources as they can from the commons.

Often, but not always, certain kinds of limited natural resources are shared by communities because there are significant challenges to establishing and enforcing private property rights. These are called common-pool resources. Fish, forests, and water are good examples of common-pool resources and they are often managed by local communities with or without some government regulation.

What happened in the Boston Common is one example of the tragedy of the commons. Another important example of the tragedy of the commons is overfishing. Fish can be found in lakes, oceans, rivers, and streams, which are typically not owned by any one person. Anyone can fish in these places, so the places are a “commons" and the fish are a common-pool resource. But there is never an infinite supply of fish. Each individual fisher may want to catch as many fish as they can, but if everyone does this, then the supply of fish will be depleted. The depletion is the “tragedy," and it is unsustainable. Eventually, there will be no more fish, and no one will be able to fish anymore. On the other hand, if everyone exercises restraint and doesn’t remove too many fish, then the fish will be able to reproduce, the supply of fish will not become depleted, and fishing can persist indefinitely.

Overfishing is a major global issue. Many fish populations have become severely depleted due to overfishing. One example is the population of cod off the Atlantic coast of the United States and Canada.

Case Study: Atlantic Cod

Figure 4.2: Atlantic Cod

Credit: NOAA Fisheries (Public Domain)

Between the mid-1970s and early 1990s, a series of poor management decisions and inadequate understanding of complex marine ecosystems led to the collapse of the cod fishery, devastation of livelihoods, a flux of environmental refugees, and long-term impacts on the northwest Atlantic ecosystem off the coast of the northern United States and Canada.

The graph below shows the amount of cod captured and taken ashore (fish landings) between 1850 and 2000. The spike in landings beginning around 1960 was caused by innovations in detecting and capturing cod.

How does that relate to the I=PAT equation?

The smaller increase in landings beginning around 1978 follows the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO)'s new program to manage fisheries by adopting fish capture quotas and determined minimum mesh sizes. Notice how both attempts to increase landings were short-lived, and today landings are as low as they've ever been.

Figure 4.3 Collapse of Atlantic cod stocks off the East Coast of Newfoundland in 1992

Click for a text description of Figure 4.3

The ollapse of Atlantic cod stocks off the East Coast of Newfoundland in 1992. Fish landings had been relatively steady from 1850-1960 (under 300,000 tons yearly), climbed rapidly and peaked at over 800,000 tons in about 1970; after a sharp decline followed by a very minimal rise (to well under 300,000) from 1970-1990, the cod stocks collapsed entirely in 1992.

Credit: © Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (Program). (2005). Ecosystems and human well-being. Washington, D.C: Island Press.

Individual action can help avoid overfishing. For example, you as a consumer can choose to not eat fish whose populations are threatened. The Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, California maintains a Seafood Watch program which explains which fish populations are threatened and which are not. The program makes simple guides for each region of the country, available online. (Ask yourself this question: Why does the Seafood Watch program produce different guides for different regions of the country?)

Overfishing can result in permanent collapses in fish supplies. If a population of fish gets completely wiped out, then it cannot reproduce and regrow its numbers, even if people stop fishing entirely. In other words, the collapse can be irreversible. Irreversible collapses can be found in other instances of the tragedy of the commons, including biodiversity loss and certain ecological disruptions. But not all instances of the tragedy of the commons are irreversible. For example, overgrazing in Boston Common causes only a temporary loss of grass, since people can always grow more grass there.

Also importantly, Hardin's arguments about the tragedy of the commons have been thoroughly analyzed and critiqued. While there are several examples of the tragedy of the commons, there are also numerous counterexamples--cases in which common-pool resources are managed successfully by self-organizing communities of users, without private property rights or strict government intervention. Read on.

A Second Look at The Tragedy of the Commons

As with the neomalthusian IPAT argument, there are many critiques of Hardin's view of the inevitable depletion of the commons. The first question you should ask when considering a scenario involving the human use of a shared resource is: what is really driving resource depletion? Hardin argues that it is individual selfishness. But take a second look at the Atlantic cod example. It is true that the fishery was massively overfished, leading to a significant collapse of the cod population. But was the overfishing really driven by the individual actions of private fishers, or was it global market forces, large corporate interests, and lax environmental regulations? Remember, the fishers that were bringing in cod in the North Atlantic were not families fishing for subsistence like those keeping a few cattle on the Boston Common. Nor are they small-scale fishers. Commercial fishing like that of the North Atlantic cod is a highly capital-intensive enterprise that involves large boats, significant resources for the time at sea, and corporate contracts. So is this resource degradation a tragedy of the commons, or an inherent problem of capitalism? If you read Hardin's article in Science, you will notice that he favors, when possible, the enclosure of common resources in favor of private holdings, which is a hallmark of capitalist market economics. This is not to say that capitalism is evil, just that like any other economic system, it is not perfect. And looking past the individual fishers toward larger economic forces is a classic example of using scale in a geographic inquiry. Was it the fishers living and working in the North Atlantic that depleted the fishery, or was it economic processes operating over much larger scales? Or was it some of both?

The second thing to keep in mind when considering the tragedy of the commons is that it has been shown more often than not to be the same sort of doomsaying that we encountered with the IPAT predictions of future human tragedy. It is true that groups of humans do sometimes overuse and exhaust natural resources that could be renewable. But at least as frequently, we see examples of effective institutions for resource governance and stewardship (which we will read more about in the next section). So when seeing something that looks like a tragedy of the commons - like global climate change - perhaps it is not just a problem of individual selfishness. Perhaps an equally significant problem is that the existing systems of governance are not matched to the scale of the problem and are therefore not able to effectively foster successful cooperation.

Solving Collective Action Problems

Fortunately, as we learned at the close of the last section, we are not doomed to suffer the consequences of failing to cooperate on collective action problems. People can and often do act collectively, even if they still hold selfish ethical views.

There are three major types of solutions to collective action problems:

• Government regulation: A government can declare it against the law to act selfishly and require individuals to cooperate.
• Private ownership: If someone owns a resource, then he or she can restrict access to it. Furthermore, it will be in his or her interest to prevent the resource from collapsing.
• Community self-organization: Groups of individuals can work together to foster cooperation.

Historically, academic research on collective action problems focused on government regulation and private ownership. Researchers often assumed that without the formalized mechanisms of government and private property, individuals could not come together to cooperate. As we noted in the last section, Garrett Hardin - author of The Tragedy of the Commons - was advocating for privatization (he was also, incidentally, a neomalthusian). However, over recent years, research has shown that community self-organization can be successful – and often is. Furthermore, we now know that in many cases government regulation and private ownership fail to solve collective action problems. Much of what we know about community self-organization comes from the research of Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom was a political scientist who spent most of her career at Indiana University and Arizona State University before she passed away in 2012. For her work, Ostrom was a co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics – the first woman ever to receive this award.

The viability of community self-organization is especially important because it is often the only option available. Governments have busy agendas and cannot consider all collective action problems. Some resources cannot be owned privately. But we can often connect with each other outside of government channels and work together to foster effective collective action.

Social Norms

One important component of community self-organization is the establishment of social norms.

Social norms are views or practices that a group of individuals considers to be normal. They are “unwritten rules” that a group of people, a community, or society adhere to. Social norms define our default behaviors. Tipping your server in a restaurant in the U.S. is a good example of a social norm. You are not required to leave a tip by law, and it is generally not included in the bill, but it is so expected that servers are often paid very low hourly wages based on the assumption that they will earn tips. And failing to tip - even if you are from another country where tipping is not the norm - can be taken as an offense.

The fact that the citizens of Copenhagen achieved so much is encouraging to citizens of other cities who are interested in achieving similar results. While the car has become the dominant mode of transport in today’s society, one of the keys to the establishment of a new social norm is the integration of public and stakeholder engagement in creating an enabling environment for normalizing cycling as part the culture of the city.

This simple procedure can be very effective in small communities, such as the ones we live in. But what about our home planet? Do the procedures work at larger scales? Big global environmental issues like climate change (Module 9) and biodiversity loss (Module 10) present very challenging collective action problems due to their massive scale. These issues involve billions of people across the entire planet. We simply cannot establish one single social norm for so many people! However, we can still use social norms to promote cooperation, even if the social norms affect only a small portion of the relevant individuals.

Summary

Our actions have large impacts on the environment. These actions include individual actions taken by one person and collective actions taken by groups of people. While we can make a difference through our individual actions, collective actions pose some distinct challenges worthy of dedicated attention. In particular, collective action problems occur when individual interest conflicts with group interest. One type of collective action problem is the tragedy of the commons, which involves the sustainability of natural resources. Collective action problems such as the tragedy of the commons can be avoided. The three main types of solutions are government regulation, private ownership, and community self-organization. Depending on interactions with larger-scale factors, such as global market forces and climate change, any of these basic solutions may not be sufficient on its own.