In the mid-1970s, a young anthropologist, Steve Lansing, arrived in Indonesia to study the ancient rituals of the water temples on the volcanic slopes of Bali. In a less spiritual realm, the island’s agronomists were stumbling into an agricultural mess. Bali once had the highest rice yields in Indonesia, and throughout the 1970s, the Green Revolution brought new varieties of rice to the stepped paddy fields. Yet despite intensive training and expert advice, by the early 1980s the new crops were overwhelmed by pests.
The narrow technical problem was a trade-off between pest-control and irrigation. Farmers made careful use of the 170 rivers and streams flowing down the slopes of Bali’s sacred volcanoes; water conservation was most easily done with different communities – subaks – planting at different times. Pest control, in contrast, was best achieved by every farm going fallow at the same time, so that the pests were starved of food. The ideal compromise is a complicated and ever-changing schedule of regionally clustered rotation – and one which must be agreed or imposed in a system where one selfish farmer can damage many others. With the new rice crop, the government was centrally co-ordinating the rice planting, and the new system was failing.
For years, economists showed little interest in the subtleties of such resource-control problems, accepting the perspective of Garrett Hardin, an ecologist who coined the term “the tragedy of the commons”. Hardin argued that commonly owned resources, such as common grazing land or fish in the ocean, would inevitably be overexploited as each individual gobbled up resources like two children sharing a carton of popcorn.