Past history, especially that of what has now come to be widely referred to as “the tragedy of the commons”4, after a theory proposed by G. Hardin (1968) is illustrative of some of the complexities of a communal ownership model placed under the pressure of resource contention or scarcity. The major thrust of Hardin’s theory is that a common, renewable (but consumable) resource, without adequately overarching management, will be over consumed to the point of exhaustion. This intrinsic tension between the individual’s self-interest and the community’s best interests are a core problem that any scheme of social governance must address. West’s description is that of a scheme that is managed by a family authority. It works because the freedom of the individual to act in a purely self-interested fashion is constrained by group authority figures. The individual has no power to act on their own authority. One of the pitfalls of unmanaged, communally owned resources is the ability of an individual to incur costs (i.e. unregulated consumption of finite, shared resources) which are shared amongst all participants, instead of being accrued to the individual’s “usage account,” with concomitant direct cost to the user.
The problem faced by modern African countries is the need to integrate customary land usage approaches with the needs of modern economies. Part of this difficulty comes from the modifications of customary approaches during colonial occupations. This colonial legacy has left countries like Zimbabwe with especially difficult situations.
Footnotes:
- The notion of the tragedy of the commons has since come into common usage.
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