Uneven Development and the Tragedy of the Commons: Competing Images for Nature-Society Analysis

Abstract

The tragedy of the commons has become a core theoretical model for the analysis of natural resource problems, including those of depletion in the Southern Ogallala Aquifer underlying the Texas and New Mexico borderland. Converging lines of evidence indicate, however, that property externalities and individualistic noncooperation, the bases for the commons tragedy, do not exist in the Southern Ogallala. Instead, problems arise from change and instability, from the long transition from irrigated to dryland farming, and from the stresses on farm families and communities produced by declining profit per acre. These stresses result in political struggles over who will appropriate gains and who will suffer losses.

This picture of change and conflict can be rendered more comprehensible by the political-economic concept of uneven development. Uneven development is rooted in central processes of capitalist development. It incorporates, but goes far beyond, the problems of depletion to include the valuation and devaluation of resource-based production complexes resulting from technological and other social changes. A mosaic resource landscape of simultaneous differentiation and leveling results. Uneven development provides the structural basis for place-based political coalitions that organize to enhance and protect local resource and production complexes, to appropriate gains and to displace losses. We argue that the problems of uneven development exist alongside, and frequently overshadow, the tragedy of the commons. Toward this end, the analysis brings a number of distinct literatures into contact, using the history of water development in the Southern High Plains of Texas and New Mexico both to explore the ideas and to investigate a particular history.

Key words:

• political economy of natural resources
• tragedy of the commons
• uneven development
• Southern Ogallala Aquifer