Colombo, Sri Lanka, March 23, 2006

Garett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" resulted in a massive, Orwellian sweep of the language previously used to attack collectivization and forms of communalism.  Rather than attacking communism directly, thinkers such as Hardin and the Chicago school of economists, led by Milton Friedman, led an attack against the unsustainabilities and instabilities of collective governance.

In a news item posted on the World Bank site earlier this year, Peter Harrold, Country Director for the World Bank Colombo Office, proclaims the need for economic growth to solve Sri Lanka's poverty. Harrold blames Sri Lanka's problems on the mismanagement of resources, in particular those resources managed collectively.  Paraphrasing Hardin, Harrold states that, "The freedom to consume the commons without cost leads to the ruin of all."

The problem as the WB sees it, and as embodied here by Harrold, is that those resources, for example, the air or water, that need to be most carefully managed are those that are most difficult to price and to commodify into a more "efficient" supply-demand dynamic.

Interestingly Harrold frames the problem as one where corporations are the major exploiters of the commons. In order to stave off these producers' greedy consumption of public goods, though, Harrold proposes that, "The regulation and management of environmental resources held in common, such as air, water, land and biodiversity require public or government intervention as well as assignment of proper rights and prices, to ensure that services are allocated fairly and efficiently."

This sentiment is part of a broader trend to privatize regulation through the commodification of grades and standards, or in this case, through the propertization of natural resources, turning acts such as breathing and drinking into "services" and commercial exchanges. What naturalizes this effort can in part be attributed to the compelling pseudo-truths espoused by Hardin and normalized over decades by the Chicago School, the powerful think-tanks that emerged by Chicago School economists, and the lack of a broader framework presented in which to situate the starvation, degradation of resources, and ecological crises underway in the developing world.

If you set up a market to sell the air, why would it be any more fair, just, and distributive than the markets that sell labour? Property rights are the answer to the question: how can we integrate the environment into capital circulation while increasing the GDP of a developing country, instead of, how do we address the problems that the global economy has wrought upon nations, without subjecting them to further exploitation?

World Bank News