BOOK REVIEW 

Pauline E. Peters. Dividing the Commons: Politics, Policy, and Culture in Botswana. Charlottesville; London: University Press of Virginia, 1994.

Pauline Peters' book provides a fascinating, Foucauldian historicization of communal land in Africa, brilliantly marking out the ways that the British enclosures and ‘improvement’ discourses shaped land tenure policies in the colonies.

Peters also has a particularly insightful take on Garrett Hardin, placing him in the broader context of the rise of rational choice theory and neo-classical economic models.

She sites the way the Common Property Resource Management (CPRM) school has worked hard to disprove two empirical assumptions of Hardin's theories on the commons - (1) his confusion of open access for commons; and (2) his depiction of humans as inherently selfish and self-interested - though she does not go so far (as others I will site) as to identify the rational choice and analytical frameworks that persist in the CPRM school.

Here are some lengthy quotations that try to answer, "What was the power of Hardin?" In this section, i will post a diversity of answers to this question. But I am particularly sympathetic to this one:

What was the power of Garette Hardin? Peters asks. She answers that Hardin’s formulation “fit with prevailing intellectual currents”: "It felt so seductively right because it harks back to deeply entrenched notions in the English-speaking world about common properties and individual interests, and it meshes with a renaissance of individualist models and analyses. These are found especially in the “new institutional” economics and political science and in the embrace of game theory, rational choice, or rational action theories across a wide range of disciplines" (5).

“More empirical studies of commons have resulted from newer concerns about environmental decline and the role of communal resources and about the increasingly aggressive role taken by states, aided financially and conceptually by external donors like the World Bank, in promoting policies designed to convert systems of tenure from communal to private. Many of these policies are justified in terms of agricultural efficiency, growth, and ‘development,’ forcefully recalling the rhetoric about the need for agricultural ‘improvement’ that justified enclosure in England. This is no accident. Many of the current analytical frameworks and interpretive models, including the influential model of ‘The Tragedy of the Commons,’ are direct intellectual heirs of the propagandists for enclosure. Some things have changed: The modern models, based on ranching, invoke technical and scientific rationales more than moral. Others do not: Fences remain powerful as metaphor and reality of enclosure for both proponents and opponents” (3).

"Studies show that the reasons for the demise of the commons do not inhere in an overgeneralized and social abstracted conflict between individual interest and social obligation. They lie, rather, in historically specific conditions that include the effect of the state’s claiming authority over locally managed resources, the role of new technologies in changing patterns of use and assessments of value for different categories of users, and the increased disparity in wealth and influence within a community of users or between categories of users, which makes it more difficult to regulate use and to enforce rules. The conclusion to be drawn from a large literature is that where a tragedy of the commons occurs historically, it derives from a situation where competition over land and its products increases and where differential access to market opportunities and political control reduces the effectiveness of prior regulatory procedures. Tragedy in a commons is produced not by the inevitable confrontation between a self-interested, asocial individual and an impersonal group but by the inability of members of social groups to find (partial) solutions to competition and conflict. It is not the individual calculus that explains a commons system but the social and political relations entailed in a commons system that explains the individual calculus" (3).