Content area
Full text
Human institutions-ways of organizing activities-affect the resilience of the environment. Locally evolved institutional arrangements governed by stable communities and buffered from outside forces have sustained resources successfully for centuries, although they often fail when rapid change occurs. Ideal conditions for governance are increasingly rare. Critical problems, such as transboundary pollution, tropical deforestation, and climate change, are at larger scales and involve nonlocal influences. Promising strategies for addressing these problems include dialogue among interested parties, officials, and scientists; complex, redundant, and layered institutions; a mix of institutional types; and designs that facilitate experimentation, learning, and change.
In 1968, Hardin (1) drew attention to two human factors that drive environmental change. The first factor is the increasing demand for natural resources and environmental services, stemming from growth in human population and per capita resource consumption. The second factor is the way in which humans organize themselves to extract resources from the environment and eject effluents into it-what social scientists refer to as institutional arrangements. Hardin's work has been highly influential (2) but has long been aptly criticized as oversimplified (3-6).
Hardin's oversimplification was twofold: he claimed that only two state-established institutional arrangements-centralized government and private property-could sustain commons over the long run, and he presumed that resource users were trapped in a commons dilemma, unable to create solutions (7-9). He missed the point that many social groups, including the herders on the commons that provided the metaphor for his analysis, have struggled successfully against threats of resource degradation by developing and maintaining self-governing institutions (3, 10-13). Although these institutions have not always succeeded, neither have Hardin's preferred alternatives of private or state ownership.
In the absence of effective governance institutions at the appropriate scale, natural resources and the environment are in peril from increasing human population, consumption, and deployment of advanced technologies for resource use, all of which have reached unprecedented levels. For example, it is estimated that "the global ocean has lost more than 90% of large predatory fishes" with an 80% decline typically occurring "within 15 years of industrialized exploitation" (14). The threat of massive ecosystem degradation results from an interplay among ocean ecologies, fishing technologies, and inadequate governance.
Inshore fisheries are similarly degraded where they are open access or governed by top-down national...