Tragedy-of-the-Commons | CONSERVATION OF ASIAN ELEPHANTS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

Tragedy-of-the-commons, coined by Garrett Hardin, is a process that plays a major role in causing most—if not all—the environmental problems the world now faces. Generally in tragedy-of-the-commons situations, behaviour that makes sense from the individual point of view, when repeated by enough individuals, ultimately proves disastrous to society.

“So, what does it have to with the endangerment of Asian elephants?” you may ask. Well, the collapse of the Asian elephant population clearly fits the tragedy-of-the-commons framework. Before we step through this logic, we would like you to note that in this section of the blog, the phrase:

Natural resources refers to both forest area and tusk of an elephant
Actors refers to individuals who engage in the over-exploitation of natural resources

Each actor, presumably, wants to maximize his own financial earnings. Each natural resource he obtains can be traded or sold and is worth a certain amount of money. On the other hand, each natural resource he obtains decreases the population of the Asian elephants as a lack of these resource will lead to dire consequences that threaten the survival of the elephants (see Threats for more information). However, the actor knows that the total, overall natural resources is large and that the dent he personally makes in it via environmentally destructive behaviour (i.e., illegal logging and elephant hunting) is small. In addition, the actor also knows that any natural resource he forgoes will eventually be harvested by others. Each actor is, therefore, driven by the logic of the situation to obtain as much natural resources as possible and as quickly as possible.

This pursuit of individual self-interest causes no problems as long as the total rate at which actors obtain the natural resources does not exceed the rate at which the resources can naturally replenish itself. However as the amount of natural resources exploited and the number of actors increase over time (perhaps due to an increase in global human population, affluence levels, and the efficiency of forest clearance and poaching methods), the amount of natural resources used will eventually exceed the rate of natural replenishment. When this happens, unrestricted access to the resources not only will inevitably lead to its total destruction, but also result in a range of interconnected problems that lead to the collapse of the Asian elephant populations.