The Commons Breakdown in Mayaland: Causes, Consequences, and Critical Responses

Abstract

"Much work on how humans manage their common-pool resources, such as forests, has been framed in terms of Hardin's parable of the commons, where 'rational' calculation of gains and losses for individual decision makers leads inexorably to overuse and ruin of resources. While this dilemma is often cast as one where cooperation is doomed in any confrontation with competition, case evidence is mounting of 'real-world' local commons having endured over the ages. From a cognitive vantage, findings in decision theory suggest that people are often more concerned with reducing risk than maximizing gain. Especially in fragile ecosystems, where feedback on the effects of resource mismanagement is readily apparent, mechanisms for sharing risk may be the rule, not the exception. Moreover, as long as actors maintain intimate relations with one another and their environment, they appear less likely to aspire only to self gain at the expense of others. They are also less prone to treat non-substitutable, 'context-sensitive' ecological resources as completely divisible and substitutable 'context-free' items, like money. Yet, often overlooked in general models of environmental management - including commons studies - are the underlying roles of information and communication. For actors seldom uniformly share knowledge of resources, nor is such information generally transmitted without 'noise' or modification. To remedy this oversight, we have begun using techniques to elicit the 'mental models' that allow differential access to ecological information within and between distinct cultural groups acting in the same territory. These models are intended to reflect people's 'tacit theories' of ecology. The information elicited targets conceptions of the causal role of species relationships, as well as edaphic and climatic zones, in 'making the forest live'and on short- and long-term relationships between human activities and species viability. We have also begun modeling the 'social networks' that communication of such information is likely to follow within and between groups in order to explore the implications of communication networks for commons management among groups."