Environmentalists Shocked That Local People Protect Forests Better Than Do Governments

Over at the New
Scientist Fred Pearce has a nice article, “Local
people preserve the environment better than government,” in
which he discusses an issue well known to Reason readers –
recognzing the property rights of local people protects resources
from overexploitation. Pearce is focusing on a new report from the
environmentalist think tank, the World Resources Institute. The
report,
Securing Rights, Combating Climate Change: How Strengthening
Community Forest Rights Mitigates Ciimate Change, surveys
the literature and finds that private ownership of land by local
communities greatly reduces deforestation. For example, the report
notes:

When Indigenous Peoples and local communities have no or weak
legal rights, their forests tend to be vulnerable to deforestation
and thus become the source of carbon dioxide emissions.
Deforestation of indigenous community forests in Brazil would
likely have been 22 times higher without their legal recognition.
In Indonesia, the high levels of carbon dioxide emissions from
deforestation are driven in part by no or weak legal rights for
forest communities. For example, oil palm concessions cover 59
percent of community forests in part of West Kalimantan.

The conclusion that local people are much better at managing
forests than are governments, according to Pearce, supposedly
flies…

…in the face of the “tragedy of the commons”, the idea that
collectively owned resources are doomed because everyone grabs as
much as they can until they are used up.

Not at all. It’s not the commons that is the problem.
Overexploitation arises from open access. Environmentalists have
long been misled by Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons”
fable, in which he argued that only government coercion can
forestall environmentally destructive private greed. Libertarians
have long known that government “ownership” almost always ends in
mismanagement, most especially in poor countries with little or no
democratic accountability. In most cases, government “ownership”
amounts to creating an open access commons.

As the
case of U.S. fisheries has sadly demonstrated, even with
democratic accountability, government management of resources often
ends up destroying them. On the other hand,
private collective ownership that limits access helps protect
them. Private ownership, either collective or individual, is the
key to the proper management of land, water, and nearly any other
resources.

I will
repeat my mantra: Wherever you see whatever you want to
call an environmental problem, catastrophe, screw-up, it’s
occurring in an open access commons. That is, since nobody
owns the resource, everybody exploits it as much as they can
because they know if they leave something behind, the next guy is
just going to take it. I live in hope that someday soon
environmental activists will heed this lesson.

For more background on how recognizing the property rights of
local people help protect the environment, see my article,
“The
Nature of Poverty: Property Rights Help the Poor Even More Than
Rich.“