Let’s Play Checkers
Have you ever wondered why Native American Lands remain undeveloped in many instances? Many tribes have thousands upon thousands of acres that could be used but the land sits idle. Why? One reason is Checkerboarding, a situation where large portions of land are parceled into grids and the small parcels of land are then transferred (or “allotted”) to many different people. In the case of Native American lands, some of the parcels were unilaterally allotted to non-Native Americans by the US Government. What does this do? It creates, what Columbia professor Michael Heller calls, “gridlock”. Observe the figure below, an illustration of Checkerboarding a tribe’s lands. The yellow squares are allotted by the US government to Native Americans for private use and the red squares are allotted to non-Native Americans for private use. The problem: they are all jumbled up. Should a group of Native Americans want to pool their lands together for farming, building a large commercial park, or other investment, they have to get permission from any non-Native American who has a parcel within the area. Accomplishing this is not easy and is costly in terms of time and money. Like a mass of automobiles congested on the interstate, Native American lands are congested because of the US government’s property rights’ allocation method.
(source: http://www.iltf.org/land-issues/checkerboarding.)
That’s My Balloon!
Now we turn to a coalition of Geo-engineers on the other side of the world in the UK involved in the Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE) Project. This UK public-private partnership, composed of the state, universities, and Marshall Aerospace, investigates ways of reducing global warming effects through Geo-engineering. The product of this project was a large balloon that sprays particles into the atmosphere with the hope of cooling down a geographic region (see figure below). The balloon’s launch is possible by dozens of smaller innovations generated jointly by different science teams funded by public and private institutions. While collaboration was initially successful and the balloon manufactured, as of May 2012, the balloon sits in a warehouse and its launch is indefinitely suspended.
The reason for the project’s suspension is an overtaking of credit by several science teams on the new shared technologies used in the balloon launch. Several science teams sought to secure the taking of credit through patenting processes and technologies. The problem here is that the more credit a science team takes – and holds the related intellectual property rights – the more social and economic rents and control they enjoy from the balloon’s launch and future related innovations. However, the more credit one team takes the less there is for another, and the taking of credit also creates the necessity of receiving permission to use and distribute the resources’ rents. The inability to determine fair governance and, more generally, whether it is fair to patent portions of a collaborative technology leaves any global sustainable value from this partnership currently gridlocked.
(source: http://www.nerc.ac.uk/press/releases/2011/22-spice.asp)
The Connection: The Tragedy of the Anti-commons
Both of these stories share some common threads. Both involve the management of shared resources and both involve multiple individuals being able to restrict access to others from using the full resource; e.g., competing patent holders claiming ownership versus owners of portions of shared land with competing preferences over how it should be used. Forty years ago, Garrett Hardin coined the phrase the “tragedy of the commons” to identify collective action problems where open access to shared limited resources results in ruin because of the commons being exhausted beyond its ability to restore itself (e.g., fisheries, forests). However, what happens when the resources remains shared (or in common) but users can restrict its access to others? We come then to another collective action problem that Michael Heller termed the “tragedy of the anti-commons”. Whereas the tragedy of the commons is a tragedy about overuse, the tragedy of the anti-commons is tragedy about underuse: because one person can restrict another from utilizing the shared resource to its fullest, the added value of using the entire shared resources is never realized. The resource lays gridlocked (in Heller’s words).
No Way Out? A Dual-sided Dilemma at a Lake
To leave you with a fascinating puzzle, consider the following situation facing some family members of mine. Many years ago a miner acquired a large portion of land around a lake, which he parceled and sold off until only a few acres remained. From what I understand, these acres he bequeathed to his six children, each with equal ownership, no specifications were given regarding how the property was to be maintained, and a clause in the land’s trust stating that any changes to the property or trust had to be agreed upon by all owners of the property.
(Source: http://www.state.nj.us/dep/wms/bfbm/lakes.html)
What is the result of such a property rights scheme? The property is under-developed in terms of updates and usability compared to the surrounding properties owned by single families or a company. In fact, some of the siblings have to foot the bill for maintaining the property while the other siblings come and go from the property as they please without contributing to its maintenance. (Nobel Prize winner Moncur Olson warned of this collective action outcome forty years ago: those that love a resource or cause the most will shoulder the load while others standby and free ride.) The catch however is that the only way to make the property better (e.g., improve the two-roomed cabin, put in a water system, or even impose fines for not helping to maintain the property) is for EVERY owner of the property to say “yes”. Thus this beautiful little piece of heaven remains gridlocked AND under-developed. In the end, a few family members have shouldered the weight of caring for the property but cannot make substantial changes to it without consent and a lot of their own money. To make matters more interesting, as these six siblings pass away they will leave their ownership rights to their children thus starting an exponential increase of owners. If six people cannot reach consensus, then what about 36 or eventually 96? Is there no way out?
Bibliography
Cressey, D. 2012. Geoengineering experiment cancelled amid patent row, Nature: News.
Daily Mail. 2011. Machines that suck up CO2 and aerosol injections into the sky: The geoengineering techniques that have got support of the public. London, UK.
Graham, W. J., & Cooper, W. H. in press. Taking credit. Journal of Business Ethics: 1-23.
Heller, M. A. 2008. The gridlock economy: How too much ownership wrecks markets, stops innovation, and costs lives. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Marshall, M. 2012. Controversial geoengineering field test cancelled, NewScientist.
Olson, M. 1965. Logic of collective action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard College Press.
Social Dilemmas of Organizing 