The management of common property resources: collective action as an alternative to privatisation or state regulation

Under what circumstances will villagers co-operate to supply themselves with goods and services that they all need but could not provide for themselves individually? In what circumstances are those who face a potential 'tragedy of the commons' able to organise a system of rules by which the tragedy is averted? Many writers on collective action and common property consider that these circumstances are very limited. A long line of collective action theorists has argued that people placed in a situation in which they could all benefit from co-operation will be unlikely to co-operate in the absence of an external enforcer of agreements. An equally long line of theorists on property rights has argued that common property resources are bound to be over-exploited as demand rises. The only solution is private enclosure, according to some theorists, or state regulation, according to others. In Robert Smith's words, 'it is by treating a resource as a common property that we become locked in its inexorable destruction' (1981, p. 465). My own research findings from South India are difficult to reconcile with these arguments. Within one small area, I found some villages with a more sophisticated set of arrangements for regulating canal irrigation and grazing (and for supplying other public goods as well) than had been previously reported for Indian villages. Other villages nearby, however, showed no sign of these arrangements. The research results have been reported at length elsewhere, and will not be repeated here (Wade, 1986 and forthcoming). Here, the aim is to show why the theories of collective action and common property to which I referred are not appropriately applied to village resource situations like those of the Indian villages; and to specify the questions which need to be answered in order to judge the likelihood that peasant villagers will be able to sustain locally-based rules of restrained access to common property resources. The dismal frequency of degraded grazing commons, despoiled forests, over-exploited groundwater and depleted fisheries shows only too clearly that collective action cannot be presumed to be always a viable