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Week 1 Lecture 1b Recognising The Need For Restraint
Week 1 Lecture 1b Recognising The Need For Restraint
Week 1 Lecture 1b Recognising The Need For Restraint
▪ All have equal rights to use these resources, because they are public
goods:
▪ The total users will over use and exploit the common property.
▪ If everyone was to act on this individual interest, the situation would worsen for
society as a whole – demand for a shared resource would overshadow the supply,
and the resource would eventually become entirely unavailable.
▪ Conversely, exercising restraint would yield benefits for all in the long-term,
as the shared resource would remain available.
RESTRAINT
▪ Restraint is similar to conservation in that it refers to behavior that
limits resource use.
▪ The reasons may also be intrinsic or extrinsic.
▪ Restraint is fundamentally associated with self-management,
individual or collective behavior aimed at developing and
maintaining a predictable and dependable support system.
▪ In its most basic form, restraint is behavior integral to survival, it is
critical to self-maintenance, provisioning, and self defense.
▪ Its enactment does not depend on external policies but on internal
needs, that is, internal to, say, one's household or community or
organization.
RESTRAINT
▪ Restraint occurs not because others say it is the right thing but because the very
functioning of one's system requires it.
▪ Restraint occurs not because new, externally provided knowledge and concerns
and incentives make it desirable, but because effective participation in one's
system makes it imperative.
▪ Restraint may be the only behavior that provides the necessary ecological
feedback between resource consumption patterns on the one hand, and resource
regenerative and assimilative capacity on the other.
▪ Restraint does not assume that individuals will, contrary to their evolutionary history, adopt a very longterm
term--i.e., ecologically long-term perspective.
▪ At the individual level, restraint implies a potentially positive tradeoff between material and nonmaterial goods.
▪ At the organizational level, restraint is more consistent with the resource implications of self-organization and
self-governance.
▪ At the collective, societal level, a focus on restraint encourages the intervenor and the policy maker to look for
mechanisms that reward nonmaterial activities.
▪ Restraint may be the only behavior that provides the necessary ecological feedback between resource
consumption patterns on the one hand, and resource regenerative and assimilative capacity on the other.
RESTRAINT: YES OR NO?
▪ One possible solution is top-down government regulation or direct control of a
common-pool resource.
▪ Many believe that each person is ethically obligated to reduce use of the commons
to the sustainable level.
▪ Our obligation is not fruitlessly to reduce individual use, but to support a collective
agreement to reduce everyone's use to the sustainable level.