Bringing the Environment Back In: Overcoming the Tragedy of the Diffusion of the Commons Metaphor

Benjamin Cashore,Steven Bernstein

doi:10.1017/s1537592721002553

Abstract

Contrary to calls for increased relevance, the discipline of political science has had lasting impacts in shaping environmental policy analysis. The ideas and approach advocated by former APSA president Elinor Ostrom, most comprehensively articulated in Governing the Commons, have diffused to shape or reinforce generations of sustainability scholarship. We identify four “ideal type” problem conceptions that are distinguished based on their consistency or inconsistency with Ostrom’s inductive approach to problem structure and economic welfare emphasis, and four corresponding schools that reinforce each: commons (Type 1), economic optimization (Type 2), compromise (Type 3), and prioritization (Type 4). Whereas the prioritization school seeks to understand and identify lessons for minimizing the impact of human activity on the natural environment, the diffusion of the commons’ metaphor has led political scientists to champion frameworks that bias Type 3, 2, and 1 orientations. The latter all rest on moral underpinnings that promote human material interests as their goal, rather than recognizing them as also a primary cause of environmental degradation. A fundamental conceptual reorientation is required if social scientists in general, and political scientists in particular, are to generate an understanding of and identify tools for ameliorating rather than exacerbating today’s Type 4 climate change and species extinction crises.

Highlights

Contrary to calls for increased relevance, the discipline of political science has had lasting impacts in shaping environmental policy analysis
The economic optimization school requires application of quantitative and modelling techniques, including agent-based modelling and econometrics, to project future outcomes, and the production of quantitative surveys of consumers and the public’s “willingness to pay” so that concerns about species extinctions, wilderness, and the catastrophic ecological effects of climate change can be converted into economic values (Turner et al 2003)
What is evident from our review is that prevailing sustainability scholarship has narrowed an ability to ameliorate Type 4 problems to those that reinforce the moral frames of the compromise, economic optimization, and commons schools

Summary

Perspectives on Politics

The classic example concerns the eradication of slavery in which the very application of economic optimization or compromise approaches that turn attention to assessing whether or to what extent slavery might be allowed undermines the problem conception and outcome itself: that is, that no one, for any reason, ought to be allowed to own another human being This school incorporates three central analytical tasks: overcoming Types 2 and 3 and “commensurability biases” to rank or prioritize problems; developing—just like GTC—inductively generated solutions based on the key features of the problem at hand; and engaging in lexical or sequential policy analysis in which addressing lower-ranked problems are limited to solutions that do not undermine higher-ranked problems.

Methods

Conclusion