We’ll simplify this discussion by using land as a proxy for property. Consider land tenure as a set of rights, in this case, to land. Land could be considered on type of property, and some refer to these issues under the broader umbrella of property rights. The rights to any given parcel of land could include the resources above the ground, rights to develop or change the use of that land, rights to sell or rent or lease, etc., as well as responsibilities that accompany those rights. There are a handful of basic categories of property types:

Other societies, especially countries of the Global South, have different conceptions and understandings of property and rights to it. These tend toward communal, customary arrangements, not based on legal documents, and much more complex than simply fee simple title as we mostly understand things in the West (although with the qualifiers above). Land tends to have meaning well beyond some monetized value. Especially when a culture’s ancestors are buried on the land. So evicting a village and relocating its inhabitants would face serious opposition, because of the importance, even spirituality, of place. When the European settlers clashed with indigenous tribal cultures in North America, those clashed often included disagreements or at least misunderstandings about property. One group was often willing to share where abundance prevailed (and in past centuries, there were fewer people and much less pressure on the resource base). The other had an economic tradition of claiming land as private property, one of the rights being to evict others who threatened or sought to use resources on that land without permission of the owner(s).

Rights

Land tenure can be thought of as a ‘bundle’ of rights. Think of a bundle of wood, each stick representing some right. These rights include use of land or a resource, control over its use (in the African example, women can harvest fuelwood, even try to manage its regeneration in how they harvest it, but can’t really control who else might collect it, making it . . . what kind of property type?), transfer (the right to inherit or bequeath, pledge, loan, lease–what is sharecropping?); alienate (the right to sell); disposal (of resources–what does this mean?); adjudicate (the right to settle disputes, be involved in dispute settlement); evict (the right to exclude, kick off users–think of slumlords and apartment tenants… ).

So Hardin, not a social scientist and not well-versed in property rights theory or research, was grossly underinformed about the notion that there was a ‘commons’, with no rules by which users were bound, and which was subject to ‘free riding’ by those who would take more than their fair share. He was referring to ‘open access,’ not ‘common property,’ which actually has functioned extremely well around the world where left to develop on its own. Imagine, for instance a group of irrigators dependent on a ditch for their water. They would have to come up with sets of rules governing how that water was available for irrigation, how upstream users would ensure downstream users had their fair share, and if the rules were violated, the users themselves would attempt to settle disputes. Occasionally, especially when family are involved (imagine a woman marrying and relocating to an adjacent village–their interests are now intersecting), it is easier to have a third party be an arbitrator, but that poses its own problems as well in terms of trust.

In any case, if some group is ‘free riding’ and using more than its fair share of common resources that are difficult to quantify–like air, water, fish, etc.–it is not the groups that Hardin is indicting through his ‘intolerable freedom to breed’ logic. It is the societies that have industrialized, use way more than their fair share of resources per capita, meaning they will depend on resources from outside of their borders.

This is not a Marxist analysis of the rich exploiting the poor. In any given country, these property rights dynamics play out, as well as internationally. What has been a pretty clear trend over time is that poor people, with only customary claims to the land they have lived on, sometimes for centuries, are vulnerable to governments that would claim ownership and possibly sell rights to other countries or multinational corporations.

What Hardin does ‘get right’ exists on a smaller scale. Local overpopulation will deplete the local resource base (he just doesn’t consider the external threats to further degradation of resource stocks). At that point people may begin to overuse, the land yields less over time, and conflicts can be expected to ensue. Add to these complications climate change and (for instance) water shortages, especially near international borders as rivers rarely respect those sorts of things, and you get a sense of just how nonsensically simplistic Hardin’s understanding of property rights was.

Now. If you’ve been paying attention here, one of the takeaways is that countries with power, money and corporate capital can leverage their advantages and secure resources around the world that farmers, herders, fishing cultures and others have been using relatively sustainably–often thanks to common property arrangements–for centuries. But to avoid the overshoot that authors think might have already happened, humanity may have to consider the wisdom of reciprocity and self-governance, which will be an enormous challenge to governments and the business interests that often heavily influence them.