Читать книгу Environment and Society - Paul Robbins - Страница 83

In this chapter, we have learned that:

 Many environmental problems appear intractable because they are prone to problems of collective action.

 Coordination around such problems fails owing to the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a metaphor describing the tendency of individuals to rationally seek their immediate gain at the expense of greater gains that might have been made through cooperation.

 Such failure to cooperate around environmental problems typically leads to a “Tragedy of the Commons” where collective goods (e.g. air, water, biodiversity) are degraded.

 Evidence exists from around the world, however, that people succeed at cooperating to preserve common property.

 Theories of common property have therefore emerged, which stress that Hardin’s tragedy might occur where there are absolutely no owners or responsible parties, but most commons are owned and controlled by groups as common property.

 By crafting and evolving social institutions that direct cooperative behavior on common property, communities can overcome commons tragedies.

 Barriers to institutional formation and collective action emerge from social, political, and economic inequities, which make cooperation difficult or impossible.