Anthropologists from both sides of the social-biological interface have long been interested in natural resource use, its myriad methods and meanings. One particularly fruitful branch of study has been that concerned with common property resources, which can loosely be defined as a class of resource for which (a) exclusion is difficult and (b) joint use involves subtractability (Feeney et al. 1990). In his 1968 article The Tragedy of the Commons, Garrett Hardin, articulating conventional wisdom, prophesised a bleak fate for such resources. He invites us, famously, to ‘picture a pasture, open to all’:
It will be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal war, poaching and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally however comes the day of reckoning, that is the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy (Hardin 1968:1244).
Beyond the crude Malthusian logic – Hardin was interested primarily in population growth – The Tragedy of the Commons presents a coherent and persuasive argument. Re-cast in economic terms, the tragedy is the inevitable result of rational calculus by self-interested actors, for whom the individually accrued benefits of ‘free-riding’ always outweigh the shared costs of such behaviour. Modelled using game theory, this tragedy plays out repeatedly.
But over the last four decades, scores of researchers, including anthropologists of diverse persuasions, have compiled empirical evidence that challenges Hardin’s model. Studies have emerged from throughout the world of cases where common property is collectively managed by communities, shifting theoretical attention to questions of how, why and under what conditions the tragedy is averted. In this paper, I will explore some of ways in which anthropologists – both social and biological – think about these questions, making reference to my own research on commons management in Rajasthan, India.
Diverse Perspectives on Collective Action
Common property resource dilemmas are examples of the broader problem of cooperation. For evolutionary biologists, human ecologists and institutional economists, collective action in resource management is best understood through the application of rational choice theory and game theoretic models. Adapting Hardin’s analysis, these researchers note how tragedy ‘game players’ can watch outcomes unfold and change their decisions in later ‘rounds of play’ (Robbins 2012:53), thereby demonstrating the underlying logic of collective action. Much of the focus has been on institutions – the ‘rules of the game in society’ (North 1990:3) – which provide constraints on action. Theorists such as Ostrom (1990) emphasise the way in which institutions or rules can be purposely crafted to produce collective action; through detailed case studies they aim to discern the conditions under which communal resource management ‘evolves’, such as clearly defined resource boundaries and graduated sanctions.
A second school of thought on collective resource governance – what I shall call ‘the social approach’ for the purposes of this paper – emphasises the force of tradition, value systems, social rights and moral codes in promoting and preserving communal management, what Scott (1976) termed ‘the moral economy’: the group conscience derived from a community’s mutual dependence on resources and its need to deal with shared risks.
These two perspectives – the biological and the social – involve opposing conceptions of the individual: the self interested actor of Adam Smith and Thomas Hobbes (Homo economicus) and the primarily social being (Homo sociologicus) of Durkheim. But as David Mosse (1997:469) has observed, despite their differences, ‘within the discourse on common property resource development, both “rational choice” and “moral economy” schools construct rather similar images of community and indigenous collective action’. Likely biased by development policy, both schools examine resource management schemes through a lens that is apolitical, ahistorical, synchronic and unchanging (Meinzen-Dick & Zwarteveen 1998). Exhibiting oversimplified concepts of social relations and traditions, they are often ‘narrowly utilitarian and economistic’ (Mosse 1997:470), divorcing resource management from the rest of social life. It is my contention also that the distinction between these schools’ apparently antithetical conceptions of human motivation – self-interest vs. social interest – is itself illusory. Upon close examination, it can be seen that Scott’s explanation of the ‘moral economy’ of peasant culture is also based on the theory of individual rational calculation. Values and ‘the subsistence ethic’ develop, he argues, because poor peasants are aware that their situation is so precarious that it is essential that they cooperate, thus the norm of reciprocity. Adherence to shared norms is therefore the ‘rational’ strategy.
An Embedded Approach
It is clear that many attempts at understanding collective action are undone by a failure to furnish individuals with credible social identities, to contextualise everyday practices. This has led many scholars to employ an ‘embedded’ approach to common property management, and particularly to institutions (see e.g. Cleaver 2000, 2002; Lund 2001; McCay 2002). In examining – and in economic analysis, operationalising – the role of history, politics and ‘social capital’ in collective resource management ventures, this body of research invokes questions on the much-contested relationship between structure and agency. At its most simple, one may ask: Does social structure determine individuals’ actions, or does human agency rule supreme? The methodological individualism of most institutional economic and evolutionary approaches to collective action grants primacy to agency, while the early functionalism of Durkheim exemplifies the belief in the ultimately constraining effects of structure. Since the 1970s, much scholarship – notably the work of Giddens and Bourdieu – has emphasised the complementary and recursive relationship between agency and structure, individuals and institutions, with behaviour both enabled and constrained by social structures. Viewed in this way, it can be argued that individuals have freedom, but that this is circumscribed by institutional structures that are historically and spatially specific, that may be partial or invisible, and that may serve to reproduce relations of power and dominance. This potential subliminality of constraint is apparent in Foucault’s concept of discourse, the systems of thoughts, beliefs and practices that systematically construct subjects. According to Foucault, people’s apparent agency – and even their belief in it – is ultimately a product of power/knowledge relations, of discursive constraint. I will now consider some of these positions with reference to my own research in India.
Sacred Ecology in Rajasthan
In Alwar district of Rajasthan, village commons are characterised by distinct environmental outcomes. More often than not, the landscapes surrounding settlements feature patches of dense, multi-tiered forest lying side-by-side with heavily denuded tracts of pasture and woodland. The former, it emerges, are sacred forests, or orans, conserved by the community in the name of a local god, goddess or saint. Exploitative use of such forests will not go unnoticed by the residing deity, who furnishes transgressors with maladies, accidents and other supernatural chastisements. Outside the orans, meanwhile, common forest lands are visibly degraded. What explains this environmental disparity?
Given the need for concision, I will focus here on the orans alone, considering various explanations for the survival of these common property resources. Let us begin with an institutional-economic perspective. According to theorists such as Ostrom, ‘robust’ institutions are necessary to mediate against the profit-maximising strategies of rational actors. This equates to transparent systems with graduated sanctions, strict rules, clear incentives, and so on. Yet few of these ‘facilitating conditions’ are apparent in the institution of the sacred forest. It can be argued, moreover, that the apparent primacy of ethical and spiritual considerations mediating use of orans renders rational choice models of decision making quite empty. Rather than allowing for the fact that people make decisions based not solely on narrow, productive considerations but also on history, political concerns, religious beliefs, and so on, institutional theory presents us with an individual who blindly conforms to the logic of economic calculus. Get the sums right, it promises us, and people will never stray far from the flock.
In this example, social order is viewed as the unintended consequence of self-interested action being mediated by a compulsion to conform in relation to dominant groups and authorities. A methodological holist perspective, to the contrary, would reject self-interested action as a route to order. Indeed, applying Durkheim’s functionalism, which held that religion maintained the social order, might lead one to conclude that it is the sacred character of orans (and associated religious beliefs) that explains their persistence. Such a thesis echoes early work in ecological anthropology by researchers such as Harris (1966), Harner (1972) and Rappaport (1984), who viewed religion as a medium through which groups interact with their environment and examined how religious practices helped to maintain ecological stability.
Neither of the approaches detailed above, which crudely represent the opposing poles of a structure-agency spectrum, appears to adequately explain the persistence of orans. In my research, I look instead to Bourdieu’s practice theory, Giddens’ concept of structuration and Foucault’s work on discourse to understand commons use in Alwar. A comprehensive discussion of these various studies is beyond the scope of the present paper, but I offer the following précis in order to advertise the need for a more politicised, historicised model of collective action.
The principal castes in Alwar district are Meo, Gujar and Mina. A review of the historical literature pertaining to the region of Mewat, of which present-day Alwar district was a part, indicates that political confrontation has been something of a defining theme over the last few centuries. Gujars and other peasant-pastoral castes mounted widespread and long-lasting resistance against Mughal invaders, and participated in the major agrarian revolts of the 17th and 18th centuries, during which time they refused to pay land revenue, plundered highways and looted from traders (Lal 1995). Many groups in the region also took place in the 1857 mutiny against the British, after which the Gujars and others were labelled as ‘Criminal Tribes’. Indeed, descriptions of Gujars by authors of the British colonial period typically draw attention to this criminal character, emphasising their habit of lifting cattle, their ‘turbulent and quarrelsome nature’ (Imperial Gazetteer of India 1908:114) and their ‘readiness to take advantage of disorder in Mewat’ (Bingley 1978 [1899]:44).
This reported volatility of Gujars and Meos must of course be taken with a pinch of salt. What these writings make apparent, though, is that the history of the peasant castes that today are predominant in eastern Rajasthan is one characterised by displacement, dispossession and marginalisation. The region’s curious caste composition – nomadic Gujars, tribal Mina and Muslim Meos – was not typical of the princely states of Rajputana. Elsewhere in north India Hindu mythology had been writ large on the landscape or weaved into royal lineages; in Mewat, for so long a rugged no-man’s-land between the Rajput kingdoms and Mughal Delhi, rural communities enjoyed little in the way of cohesive cultural continuity. Certainly the notion of ‘sacred’ would have had very different connotations here among disparate creeds compared to in other, more ‘orthodox’ regions. Bhasin (1999:330) suggests that ‘[w]hat is sacred can only be expressed according to the collective forces and relations in both historical and mythological time’. In Mewat, solidarity was drawn from the ‘collective forces’ of subjugation and marginalisation. Myth, too, seems to have been born of a common heritage of oppression. Consider the case of Bherunathji, whose oran serves the people of Bakhatpura village in Alwar district:
Legend has it that during his lifetime this devtar was a much-respected saddhu [holy man] who frequented the forest around Bakhatpura. He was held in such high esteem that even the erstwhile Maharaja expressed reverence by donating a fine white horse. Bherunathji proceeded to tour the region on his new steed, but soon realised from the local people that he had been wrong to accept the gift. The Maharaja refused to take back the horse so, consumed by ignominy, the elderly saddhu rode to the hillock that is now Bherunath ki Bani and, along with his mount, buried himself alive.[1]
This tale’s allegorical motifs of honour and autonomy are widely understood and transcend gender, caste and creed. The sanctification of the ‘martyr’s’ resting place, occurring as it did at a time of popular protest over increasing state claims to land, is evidence perhaps of Sivaramakhrishnan’s (1995:33) assertion that by implementing a policy that denied property rights to tribals and other rural poor, the state effectively ‘divested the affected populace of material claims to the forest, leaving them no recourse other than to assent a religious affinity to the forest’.
Conclusion
The example presented above highlights the need for a fine-grained analysis of human-environment interactions, one that takes into account not only productive concerns but also the dynamic influence of historical discourses, political representation, social meaning and power relations. For those seeking to understand – and indeed shape – resource-use behaviour, including policy makers and practitioners in the fields of development and conservation, attending to such factors is crucial. It is only by viewing human action as socially embedded that one can hope to account for the diversity of environmental practices witnessed across time and space, let alone to replicate those considered more desirable.
References
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[1] Personal communication with people of Bakhatpura, Alwar district.