Leaving Room for Hope; the problems with privatization.

The conversation surrounding the question of resource privatization is an extremely complex one. One side, the private sector, argues that through privatizing our natural resources we place them in the hands of the most efficient of stewards; that with profits to be made and stock holders to be satiated, the privatization of natural resources leads to the most economically efficient handling of these limited and valuable resources. The other side, those battling for public and shared ownership of these resources (usually in the form of government municipalities), claims that these resources are best managed by the demands of the community; that these resources are for the community and should be managed with the community’s best interests in mind and under their control.

Both sides have their weaknesses. Certainly, the pro-public sector advocates are correct, and statistically supported, in arguing that the private ownership of natural resources leads to the formation of monopolies and that private ownership only considers profit and a select portion of community (the stock holders) when they make decisions concerning the management of these goods. Yet, on the other hand, the private sector does extend a compelling argument against the inefficient managing strategies that are inherent to public management of these resources—especially during times of economic strain.

For me, however, this question may be resolved by the assumptions and guiding principles that underlie these two arguments. For the arguments behind privatization, there lie a several assumptions, but the most important are the idealizing of economic efficiency as the highest aim of efficient resource management and the belief that natural resources are capable of actually being owned. The counter argument holds, obviously, different assumptions, these assumptions, instead of idealizing economic efficiency and private ownership, place communal access to resources and the belief that natural resources are a communal (un-ownable) resource. In my evaluation of these assumptions, only one strategy seems to ensure the most efficient and morally sound management of natural resources: public and shared ownership.

Only through public and shared ownership are we able to provide access to these resources to the largest majority of people, the disenfranchised are still represented in this very democratic system of resource management and seems, in my opinion, to most closely embody the proper use of these resources. Being human, we tend to only evaluate these resources in an anthropocentric vein, and what we often fail to realize, is the importance these resources have in their overall ecosystem—more than just humans depend on these resources and (just as importantly) humans depend on more than just these resources (i.e the maintenance of the ecosystems around them). Privatization only considers the human element in its cold calculations that assume anthropocentric utility and profit are the only measures of value that can be assigned to these resources, but what it fails to consider in its measures are the values that go beyond simply profit making.

Coca Cola in India declines to recognize the importance of water for agricultural uses, insisting the profits made from their non-essential (luxury) product is just as worthy a cause as the production of food or the maintenance of a precariously balanced ecosystem that relies on the cyclic nature of the water cycle to maintain itself. This example highlights only a couple of the several potential miscalculations that are made when we consider only profit making and when we suppose that conscientious stewardship applied to resources through profit minded private owners is powerful enough to ensure the consideration of the resource in its larger environement. Profit concerns and obligations to stock holders do not protect the disenfranchised; from the poor to the larger environment, private ownership’s inherent limited scope makes room for too many abuses of these other groups to be considered a legitimate proposal for sustainable and efficient resource management.

Of course, in making this argument, I may seem to be implying that cooperative and public ownership protects the rest of the natural world (including ourselves) from this selfish, limited, and ultimately utilitarian use—but I would like to take this opportunity to state that I am not making this claim. Public ownership does not guarantee the survival of limited and common pool resources, it does not guarantee that we wont abuse the rest of nature and its fragile ecosystems, it does not even guarantee that we will not abuse our fellow humans—but what it does offer is the possibility for all of this. The examples that Ostrom points out in her case studies of various successful CPR management strategies reveals this possibility, and although it is true that most CPR collapse and that abuses still do occur, the possibility for hope is what we can take from these case studies. Instead of resigning to our, apparently, inherent selfish natures, by resisting this urge to own and utilize anything and everything we can get our hands on, and by continually insisting on the foresight and goodness in people, we can hope for a better future and a spread in the ideals of sustainable and responsible stewardship of these resources. Privatization does not leave room for this hope. Privatization is a resignation into our inherently selfish natures; it’s the ceasing of aspiration for a higher moral good and in the end provides us only with a temporary solution to the problems that we are facing. As Hardin insists (somewhat contradictorily, in my opinion) the solution to our problems with the commons and natural resources lies not in any simple solution, it requires a shift in morality. Privatization only gives us more of the same, whereas communal ownership of resource, at the very least, leaves room for a hope in the realization of this moral shift.

So despite its obvious short comings, I find that public and shared ownership of common resources is the only legitimate strategy of management that leaves any room for hope in a better future and management policies that will situate humans more sustainably in the environment around them.