Who gets the material gain of an efficiency gain?
(See Lankford, B.A. and Scott, C.A. 2023. The paracommons of competition for resource savings: Irrigation water conservation redistributes water between irrigation, nature, and society. Resources, Conservation and Recycling 198: 107195.)
In a resource-scarce world, society is increasingly interested in the efficiency of resource use; how to get more from less. The efficient use of natural resources, especially water, is behind the idea of a green economy and of recent initiatives by the European Commission in their Horizon 2020 programme. The combination of burgeoning demand and increasing variability of water supply (due to climate change) has led to a major new emphasis on efficiency. Yet the promise of efficiency hides significant challenges and opportunities for current resource users to further entrench their consumption of resources.
Using the coined word ‘paracommons’, I highlight how different parties might compete over resources ‘freed up’ by an increase in efficiency. This also points to the difficulty of raising efficiency in ways that are measurable and traceable.
Efficient resource use implies the level of efficiency is increased to one that is more efficient. For example, farmers who consume less water this year than last year and produce the same yield as the previous harvest are improving their productivity and ‘water efficiency’. A necessary condition for an efficiency improvement is that the per-hectare consumption of water is reduced and this lower consumption allows more of the resource to be ‘saved’ for other purposes. Yet if we ‘save’ a resource, what does that mean and who gets the ‘saved’ resource? In other words who gets the material gain of an efficiency gain? In a recently published book, this question of the competition over future resources newly ‘freed up’ by efficiency gains is considered by introducing the concept of the ‘paracommons’.
While the ‘commons’ is about competition over existing resources, the ‘paracommons’ covers competition over salvaged resources from yet-to-be conserved (more efficiently consumed) resources. The prefix ‘para’ indicates that the paracommons sits alongside ‘the commons’ (e.g. fish/fisheries in seas or trees in a forest). In this case, ‘para’ has a similar meaning to ‘parallel’; that the paracommons stems from the commons.
However, the concept of the paracommons also encompasses paradox. In the latter case, para means ‘against’ (para = against, doxa = belief). The reason that paradox is so central to the theme of efficiency is because without careful planning and forethought, the material gains of the efficiency gain do not end up where we would ideally want them to. In other words, the material savings do not return to nature and therefore, paradoxically, do not reduce natural resource consumption. A version of this paradox was described in the 19th Century by William Jevons, but the difference between the two is that price and economics shape the Jevon’s paradox while resource cascades and pathways during consumption affect the paracommons of natural resources.
Comments