The Arboretum

Garrett Hardin

3 min read

Garrett Hardin

1915–2003

Hardin is in this arboretum because Elinor Ostrom built her life’s work on refuting him — and because understanding the argument he made wrong is necessary for understanding why commons governance works when it does.

The Tragedy

“The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968) is one of the most cited and most misapplied papers in environmental literature. The argument: a shared pasture will inevitably be overgrazed because each herder, acting rationally, adds one more animal. The benefit of that animal accrues to the individual; the cost of overgrazing is shared. Rational individual action, aggregated, destroys the shared resource. The tragedy is structural, not moral.

The conclusion Hardin drew — that commons require either privatization or government regulation — followed from an assumption he never examined: that the herders cannot communicate, make agreements, or enforce social norms among themselves. This isn’t a description of how commons actually work. It’s a thought experiment that erased centuries of documented commons governance.

What He Got Wrong

Ostrom’s Governing the Commons (1990) was the empirical answer. Actual commons — Swiss alpine pastures, Japanese forest villages, Spanish irrigation systems — had been managed sustainably for centuries by communities using locally developed rules. They weren’t tragedies. They were institutions.

Hardin’s error was assuming the commons was “unmanaged.” Real commons are governed. The governance is informal, local, and often invisible to outsiders — which is precisely why it gets overlooked. When development economists or theorists looked at commons and saw no recognizable property rights or state authority, they assumed there was nothing there. Ostrom showed that “nothing there” was often the most sophisticated governance in the room.

The Darker Thread

Hardin’s later work is harder to engage with charitably. He applied the same “tragedy” logic to immigration, arguing that wealthy nations were “lifeboats” that would be swamped by aiding poorer populations. These arguments have well-documented connections to eugenicist thinking, and Hardin was explicit about his sympathies in late interviews.

This matters because it suggests the tragedy framing wasn’t neutral. An argument that begins by denying collective governance capacity and ends by justifying exclusion follows a coherent internal logic — one worth naming. The assumption that ordinary people cannot manage shared resources without external control is not just empirically wrong. It does specific political work.

Why He’s Still Worth Reading

The original 1968 paper captures something real: in the absence of governance, shared resources do get depleted. Open-access resources — actual open access, with no community norms — are genuinely at risk. The mistake was treating “commons” and “open access” as synonyms. They aren’t.

Hardin is a useful interlocutor because he forces the question: what conditions make commons governance possible? Ostrom’s eight principles are, in a sense, a list of everything Hardin assumed away.

Key Works

  • “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968) — Science, vol. 162
  • Exploring New Ethics for Survival (1972)
  • Filters Against Folly (1985)

Connections

He was wrong about the commons, and right that the question of how shared resources get governed is the central political question of our time.

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