Imagine you go fishing for a living. Every year more fishing boats join you at sea and every year the methods used are more professional. This leads to overfishing. What you observe is at first a slow drop in the amount of fish available. You need to work harder, buy bigger nets, fish deeper while actually catching less. There starts to be some complaining but people just proceed in the daily struggle. The problem then accelerates towards pending fish stock depletion. It’s not a secret anymore now. Everybody knows that everybody knows. Everyone starts seeing the other as competition for what is left. Would you invest in breeding more fish if none of the others do but can still catch yours? Or would you rather feel motivated to catch as much as you can now that it’s still possible (and knowing that the others will probably do the same)? You will probably not disadvantage yourself if the cause is hopeless anyway. And the others, they will think alike.

Why it is a tragedy

For those who are new to this topic, the so-called Tragedy of the Commons refers to the perverse economic effects observed in the use of common resources. Aside from fishing grounds, another good example is grazing lands. The problem has also been observed in groundwater use, forestry, air pollution and therefore has a direct link with the decline of nature. What if you lived in or around a forest that will disappear over the coming 10 years and your source of income is low? Would you be motivated to also quickly take what you can out of this scramble? The tragedy is that there is no incentive around for anyone to go against the impending destruction.

From pessimism to optimism

The typical solutions put forward to mitigate the perverse effects of the tragedy of the commons are government regulation, collective actions and privatization¹.

Government regulation only works as well as the consequences of not complying. If the effect of ignoring the regulation is small enough, the regulation will be nonexistent in reality. Implementing regulations is costly, and demands capacity over several dimensions, going from monitoring, over intervention to justice. Aside from that challenge, it is easy to overlook the importance of involving the local communities that live from the resource at stake. If any stakeholder gets overlooked, regulation is usually short lived or ineffective.

Collective actions can be a powerful instrument, especially when those who benefit from a resource have a close proximity to that resource². Within collectives large enough, the emergence of local elites within that community may lead to a majority of members feeling uninvolved. Collective actions can be sufficient to mitigate internal challenges but may still experience persistent external pressure.

Private ownership makes people own the effects of their investments. They have a direct feedback loop of their actions. This makes that abuse of the resource will be entirely felt by the abuser. Privatization is not always relevant. You may try to own a few coordinates of the sea, you cannot fence it. You have no control over what swims in your part. You also won’t have a rainforest on your 2 hectares of land, if everything around it is gone. There is something like a minimal critical mass needed for a relevant privatization effort.

A remarkable example is the privatization of rhinos. Yes, the animal suffering from poaching can be privately claimed³. The setup works. Our only remark on this is that it over-favours one species in an ecosystem, which in some cases may lead to extinction of other species in that same setting. We prefer to see the ecosystem as an indivisible whole and therefore consider critical mass at ecosystem level only.

From tragedy to strategy

Forestbase does not privatize forests. We focus on lands that are already on the private markets, but that can be sold freely to companies for logging, agriculture, etc. Despite that private setup, the tragedy of the commons still applies, since the owners of forests and the people living from the forests are often not the same. The owner may be far away and not have much control over the daily life on the ground. That same owner will most likely develop the forest for personal economical benefits, while local communities do not have any grip on this. From their point of view the forest is experienced as a common resource, with all the usual consequences.

The one exception here is probably the native communities that wish to harmoniously live with the forest. In their context the tragedy of the commons does not apply, since there is no structural depletion of a resource. Native communities rather suffer from external interference and a lack of legal power to own their own environment.

Given that we acquire already-private forest land, our effort is not a privatization effort. It is very much a democratization effort: access for everyone to co-own, rather than seeing it in the hands of a few high and mighty. The philosophy is centered around a conservation-and-benefits model with the local communities that live in, around and from the forest. We aspire to be a hybrid that combines collective action on a global scale by leveraging privatization.

Why we are not a big fan of the ‘National Park’ status, you can read here.

(1) https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tragedy-of-the-commons.asp
(2) https://wle.cgiar.org/news/elinor-ostrom-“non-tragedy-commons”
(3) https://fee.org/articles/save-the-rhino-by-privatizing-it/

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