Positivism, new institutionalism and
‘the tragedy of the commons’
I did not possess you, but I can blow up history.
Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum (1989: 435) History is more or less bunk.
Henry Ford
Introduction
The previous chapter introduced the idea that neo-classical theory has infl uenced the meta-theoretical aims and assumptions of development theory and research.
This chapter now explores the impact of neo-classical theory on a more specifi c literature concerning the management of natural resources, collective action and
‘the tragedy of the commons.’ Our central aim is to consider fi rst the tensions that exist between new institutional and historical approaches to the study of poverty, livelihoods and the commons, and second, the arguments marshalled for and against the practice of generalization in the social sciences.
As noted in Chapter One, the new institutionalism constitutes an important response to neo-classical theory. Assuming that individuals are ‘bounded’ in their ability to fi nd, assess and acquire the goods and services that would satisfy their (relatively stable) preferences, it marks an important departure from the idea that markets will emerge naturally to coordinate ‘with varying degrees of effi ciency’
(Gilpin 2001: 51) the needs and preferences of utility maximizing individuals.
However, as Geoffrey Hodgson (1993) has pointed out, the new institutionalism is still fi rmly wedded to the assumption that social outcomes may be understood and explained primarily on the basis of individual decision making and rational choice. Indeed, Hodgson (1993) has argued that a commitment to the rational choice theoretic is a defi ning factor that differentiates the ‘new institutionalism’
of Douglass North (1990) from the ‘old’ historical institutionalism of Thorsten Veblen (Hodgson 1993).
In what follows, I shall argue that ‘new institutional’ approaches to the study of the commons share with neo-classical theory a desire to understand and model society on the basis of individual decision making and rational choice. At the heart of this mainstream is a wider trend of positivism, methodological individualism
and formal modelling that has come to dominate American political science (a discipline that is home to leading fi gures in the fi eld, including Elinor Ostrom, Arun Agrawal and Robert Wade). The ‘poverty of history’ to which I refer in the title highlights two themes that underlie this chapter. The fi rst theme refers to the gap that exists between a literature that uses the past to develop general and predictive theories about what makes for durable common property regimes and one for whom the central questions and mechanisms of change are far more contextually specifi c.13 The second theme represents a wordplay on Popper’s (1957 [1997]) classic assault on ‘historicist’ thinking within the social sciences. Drawing upon the ideas developed in this thesis, I aim to explain the appeal of the scientifi c method on which the new institutionalists now make their most assertive claims, and the constraints that therefore prevent them from adopting a more historical mode of analysis.
The chapter proceeds thus: the following section fi rst outlines the methodological and meta-theoretical differences that exist between historical and positivist social science. Next I situate Hardin (1968 [2005]) and his critics in relation to neo-classical scholarship, arguing that a preoccupation with effi ciency and the management of tragedy of the commons scenarios constitutes the mainstream of new institutional work on environmental confl ict, collective action and the commons. Third, I explore the tension that exists between scientifi c and historical explanation, and make the case that ‘scientifi c approaches’ to the study of the commons are strongly infl uenced by – and deeply embedded in – a positivist social science, which has become particularly infl uential in American political science and the ‘new institutional economics.’ Finally, at the conclusion of the chapter, some general observations are made about the implications such tensions pose for the study of development.
The ‘problem’ of history in social science research
Debates about theory and methodology in the social sciences have long been concerned about the extent to which scientifi c principles may be applied to the study of social phenomena. The ‘problem’ of using history to understand the social world is that social phenomena do not lend themselves very well (or at all, some would say) to the central aims and assumptions of science (Collingwood 1946 [1992]; Carr 1951; Moore 1966; Hobsbawm 1987 [1989]). For one, the notion that historical processes and events may be ‘isolated’ and tested as if they were physical properties and processes understates substantially the possibility that the factors that led to one sequence of events and outcomes were completely unique, and that they can therefore never be compared or replicated again. In the words of one American scholar, historical narratives are like ‘Seussian explanations,’ in which ‘it just happened that this happened fi rst, then this, then that, and is not likely to happen that way again’ (Jack Goldstone, cited in Pierson 2004: 169).
A second issue concerns the extent to which facts may be treated in isolation from the norms, assumptions and values we (i.e. researchers, respondents, students, readers, etc.) use to give them meaning (Morrow and Brown 1994; Flyvbjerg 2001;
Putnam 2002). As Bent Flyvbjerg (2001) has argued, attempts to emulate the natural sciences in the social sciences are problematic in the sense that scientifi c inferences about human behaviour can never approximate the ‘context-dependent’
factors that determine human motivation:
The problem in the study of human activity is that every attempt at a context-free defi nition of an action, that is, a defi nition based on abstract rules or laws, will not necessarily accord with the pragmatic way an action is defi ned by actors in a concrete social situation.
(Flyvbjerg 2001: 42) Third, as noted in Chapter One, the events of history are also subject to interpretation and manipulation. As E. H. Carr has argued, the idea that human societies may be studied ‘as if’ they were bound by the laws of physics underplays the notion that the subjects of history are conscious of their surroundings and of their past, and that their consciousness may affect the course of history. In his classic essay on The Historical Approach, he describes the problem as follows:
In science the drama repeats itself over and over again because the dramatis personae are creatures unconscious of the past or inanimate objects. In history, the drama cannot repeat itself because the dramatis personae are already conscious of the prospective denouement; the essential condition of the fi rst performance can never be reconstituted.
(Carr 1951: 5–6) For Carr (1951), a central issue of concern was the Enlightenment’s faith in the idea that society and history could be explained (and ordered) through the application of science and reason. Where natural scientists collected observations about physical processes and properties, he argued, the ‘modern historian’ aimed to establish through the ‘events of history’ basic and universal insights about the laws of progress, evolution and change. Influenced by the liberal norms of the French Revolution, for instance, Montesquieu and Condorcet looked into history to fi nd the causal forces that would lead to human liberation and progress (Carr 1951). After the publication of The Origin of the Species, historians began to look for processes and events that would conform to Darwinian assumptions about natural selection and evolutionary change. Finally, in the wake of the Holocaust and the Second World War, the historical context in which Carr was writing, the historical leitmotif became one of destruction, civilization and the end of empire (Carr 1951).
The basic problem of using scientifi c and evolutionary analogies to understand history, Carr (1951) argues, is fi rst that historical trends and forces cannot be replicated, and are therefore always subject to the values, subjectivities and classifi cations used to interpret the past. Second, although human relations certainly embody elements of power and intention, the notion that history may move or unfold in one way or another raises questions about the ways in which and the
degree to which these forces may be infl uenced by conscious efforts to avoid, replicate or repeat the past (also see Chapter Three).
History and positivist social science
Although scholars have, in recent years, tried to incorporate history into a scientifi c frame (see Chapter Six), the dominant strategy within positivism has been to resolve problems of interpretation and consciousness by relegating history to the margins of social analysis (Morrow and Brown 1994; Pierson, 2004). In Morrow’s words,
Knowledge about history is held to have no signifi cance for the evaluation of the validity of theories and to be largely peripheral for the discovery of better research strategies.
(Morrow and Brown, 1994: 67) Perhaps the most infl uential articulation of this kind comes from Karl Popper, whose Poverty of Historicism (1957 [1997]) shared with some positivists the view that historical narratives are exceedingly dependent upon personal biases and subjectivities,14 and that they preclude the testing and falsifi cation of factors other than the ones highlighted by the individual historian:
(The historicist) fi rmly believes in his favourite trend, and conditions under which it would disappear are to him unthinkable. The poverty of historicism, we might say, is a poverty of imagination.
(Popper 1957 [1997]:129–130) Underlying this approach is a foundational belief that historical narrative can be incorporated into a scientifi c frame, in which the inherent bias of historicist thinking is eliminated while still maintaining the context of past events.
Popper’s case against ‘historicist’ explanation stems from the distinction he makes between historical accounts that look for regularities and ‘innumerate facts
… in some kind of causal fashion,’ and those that argue that ‘unique events … may be the cause of other events’ (Popper 1957 [1997]: 146). In a thinly veiled assault on Marx’s and Marxist historiography, Popper argues that historicist accounts, in which causal explanations are made on the basis of ‘unseen’ laws of motion, are inconsistent with a scientifi c (and therefore falsifi able) understanding of reality:
The attempt to follow causal chains into the remote past would not help in the least, for every concrete effect with which we might start has a great number of different partial causes; that is to say, initial conditions are very complex, and most of them have little interest for us.
(Popper 1957 [1997]: 150) How one forms an original question or hypothesis was a matter of some diffi culty for Popper (cf. Hollis 1994), rectifi ed only partially by his belief that human beings
are ‘born with expectations,’ which are ‘prior to all observational experience.’ The most important of these, he argued, was the expectation of ‘fi nding a regularity’
(cited in Hollis 1994: 74). In his own words,
I do not believe that we ever make inductive generalizations in the sense that we start with observations and try to derive our theories from them. I believe that the prejudice that we proceed in this way is a kind of optical illusion, and that at no stage of scientifi c development do we begin without something in the nature of a theory, such as a hypothesis, or a prejudice, or a problem – often a technological one – which in some way guides our observations, and helps us to select from the innumerable objects of observation those which may be of interest.
(Popper 1957 [1997]: 134) Where experience and observation contradict our understanding of what constitutes normal or regular behaviour, Popper argues, we have a problem, for which new explanations are required:
We try; that is, we do not merely register an observation, but make active attempts to solve some more or less practical and defi nite problems. And we make progress if, and only if, we are prepared to learn from our mistakes: to recognize our errors and to utilize them critically instead of persevering in them dogmatically.
(Popper 1957 [1997]: 87; italics in original) Leaving for now questions about who defi nes what constitutes ‘a problem,’ Popper draws our attention to the idea that a hypothetic–deductive model may be used to frame and interpret history (and other social phenomena).
Broadly speaking, positivism tends to eschew the idea that social realities may be established on the basis of metaphysical causal forces, embracing instead the notion that the only (or primary) means of understanding the world is to identify patterns and regularities in empirical data. As Martin Hollis has argued,
The methodology is aimed at identifying regularities in the behaviour of particulars. It does not seek to detect underlying structures, forces or causal necessities, for the good reason that there are none. It involves theoretical abstraction and deductive reasoning but only for the sake of arriving at improved predictions. Inductive generalisations do the crucial work … The epistemology is as basic and simple a version of empiricism as will warrant the governing precept that only perception and the testing of prediction can justify claims to knowledge of the world.
(Hollis 1994: 64) Starting from the proposition that metaphysical assumptions about the external world are inherently unreliable, positivism therefore aims to structure the acquisition of knowledge in a way that emulates the basic principles of science. At the heart
of the scientifi c method is the notion that explanations about social and natural phenomena may be established on the basis of a methodology that adheres to principles of validity and reliability. Questions about validity concern the ability of concepts and methods to measure what they intend to measure (Peters 1998).
Reliability is the principle that ‘applying the same procedure in the same way will always produce the same measure,’ even when it is applied by different researchers (King, Keohane and Verba, 1994: 25).15
Whether inferences are made on the basis of deductive or inductive reasoning (or a combination of the two), the basic requirement is that the methodology adhere to a common set of principles (of deduction or induction) which can then be tested and replicated in multiple research settings.
In short, the methodology being advanced by positivism is one in which the assumptions, propositions and conclusions of formal theories are tested both in terms of their logical coherence and their consistency with empirical data. Framed in this way, knowledge is rooted in the practice of empirical observation, the falsifi cation of testable hypotheses, the inconclusive nature of theoretical statements, the central importance of method and the ‘public’ nature of social science and the ‘scientifi c community.’ Therefore, the basic aim of social science research is to structure social inquiry in a way that is oriented towards the generalization of insights about social phenomena (cf. Johnson 2006).
Debating positivism
Debates about the viability and desirability of using positivism to structure the acquisition of knowledge fi rst concern the assumptions we make about human behaviour and second, the ways in which we convert particular observations into general insights. Following Popper (1962), the notion that hypotheses may be tested and confirmed in social science research settings understates dramatically the challenge of isolating and evaluating the impact of multiple Box 2.1 Empiricism
Empiricism is a related theory of knowledge that emphasizes experience and sensory perception as a principal means of explaining social phenomena. An axiomatic assumption is that the words, theories and concepts we use to describe the world may exist in isolation from the facts that constitute reality, suggesting a distinction between what David Hume once called ‘relations of ideas’ and ‘statements of matters of fact,’ (cited in Putnam 2002: 13). Framed in this way, knowledge may be established on the basis of ‘sense data,’ essentially ‘the things that are immediately known’ through basic human sensation (Kanbur and Shaffer 2006: 186).
causal variables. Popper’s (1962) argument was that any theory will generate hypotheses that are so vast in number that they preclude testing and verifi cation.
His solution was therefore to advance the notion that hypotheses can only be
‘falsified’ in relation to existing knowledge or ‘conjecture’ about the social world. Similarly, Thomas Kuhn (1962) argued that findings that contradict the predictions and regularities described by existing theories are said to contribute to knowledge by disproving or falsifying the assumptions of what we hold to be true.
The value of using positivism to structure the acquisition of knowledge is that it forces us to lay bare the assumptions we make about social phenomena, and subject them to critical scrutiny (cf. Laitin 2003). The drawback, of course, is that it pre-determines the questions, variables and hypotheses in question, creating an artifi cial distinction between the subjects and objects of social science research.
First, the assumption that positivist methodologies may be developed in isolation from the object of social science inquiry is clearly at odds with the view that language, concepts and ‘covering laws’ provide only a partial understanding of individual subjectivities (Morrow and Brown 1994; Flyvbjerg 2001; Johnson 2006). At the heart of this critique is a deep scepticism about the norms and assumptions on which researchers and respondents engage in positivist social science research. As John Harriss has argued:
The sorts of answers that people give to survey questions about attitudes and values may be interesting but there is very often a lot of doubt as to how
‘respondents’ have understood the questions which are posed to them, and how their answers are infl uenced by the context in which they are interviewed.
(Harriss 2002: 489) Whether the respondents understand or disagree with the questions being asked of them seems largely irrelevant. Moreover, the notion that reliability can be defi ned and achieved by replicating the methods and measurements laid out in positivist research methodology substantially underplays the subjectivities (of style, experience, language) that individual researchers may bring to the research process.
Second, there is a problem of context. As Paul Pierson has argued, the problem of using this kind of social inquiry is the notion that it simplifi es, misrepresents and excludes the complexity, diversity and details of history:
Too often, contemporary social science simply drops out a huge range of crucial factors and processes, either because our theories and methods make it diffi cult to incorporate them, or because they simply lead us not to see them in the fi rst place.
(Pierson 2004: 169) Third, the idea of moving to the general from the particular gives the impression that inference and generalization are the only meta-theoretical goals of social inquiry. However, as James Johnson (2006) has argued, the assertions being
advanced by positivism ‘obscure’ the nature and utility of qualitative research, reducing to quantifi able points of data the perceptions and insights of social science respondents, whose cumulative purpose is to test, support or refute research hypotheses (cf. George and Bennett 2004; Flyvbjerg 2001; Harriss 2002).16
Debates about positivism therefore raise a number of fundamental questions about the meta-theoretical aims of history and of social science research. First, do we study history in order to understand a particular event or series of events? Or do we aim to generate conclusions that can be used to understand a wider class of phenomena? Second, do we develop our understanding of these phenomena on the basis of inductive reasoning whereby observation and investigation are followed by classifi cation and theorizing? Or do we fi rst classify and theorize causal relations a priori and then investigate them in order to confi rm or falsify their validity? The fi rst question is essentially about the ethics and aesthetics of primary research. Do we investigate the Russian Revolution because we want to know how or why the Russian Revolution happened, or do we study it because we want to know why revolutions (in general) happen? The second concerns the means by which we arrive at our impressions about the world around us.
The following section explores the meta-theoretical tensions that exist between new institutional and historicist approaches to the study of the commons, making the case that ‘new institutional’ approaches to the study of the commons have been strongly infl uenced by – and deeply embedded in – neo-classical theory and positivist social science, which has become particularly infl uential in American political science.
The tragedy of the commons
Writing in 1968, Garrett Hardin published what would become an infl uential and highly controversial essay about the causes and nature of environmental problems, in which he argued that environmental pollution and resource depletion are primarily the result of three fundamental ‘gaps’ that exist between the utility individuals are assumed to derive from extracting and polluting natural resources, and the challenge of ensuring that resources are collectively managed and maintained. One relates to the distribution of social cost. Refl ecting upon the challenge of managing an open fi eld system of grazing, Hardin’s argument (1968 [2005]) was that resources owned by no one (res nullis) would by necessity fall prey to over-extraction because they allow individuals to extract resources without bearing the costs of managing and maintaining the resource. Lacking rules of management or private property individuals will therefore overuse or pollute the system when the (personal) benefits of overgrazing or pollution outweigh the (personal) costs of exercising restraint. Therein, Hardin asserts, lies the tragedy.
A second gap relates to the information that individuals have about the state of the resource. An important concern here is that individuals, lacking reliable information about the quality and availability of renewable resources, will continue pumping or depleting them until they are beyond repair. Take, for instance, the