Two cultures and tragedy of the commons

In 1959 the scientist, administrator and novelist C.P. Snow gave a lecture in Cambridge entitled ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’ in which he said that ‘intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly split into two groups’, which he identified as literary intellectuals and scientists (Snow, 1998). The ‘Two Cultures’ theme was taken up again 9 years later in another famous paper ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ written by the biologist Garrett Hardin (Hardin, 1968). This time however the polarization was between social and natural scientists. Here we will use the case of land management in Africa to show that this divide is alive and well. We will start by describing recent criticisms of the research agenda incurred by the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID) and then look at the sweeping land tenure reforms underway in Africa. Finally we will discuss why this is significant for ecology and emphasize how important it is for African ecologists to be interdisciplinary and avoid policy pitfalls associated with the two cultures divide. On the 26 October 2004 the U.K. government International Development Committee published a report on science in British-funded international development (Gibson, 2004). The committee is appointed by parliament to oversee the spending, administration and policy of the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID), so the findings were of particular interest for ecologists in Africa whose work includes development issues. The report was sharply critical of the lack of science in DFID, so much so that the U.K. Royal Society issued a statement that said: ‘‘The report into the use of science in U.K. International Development policy highlights the Royal Society’s concern that the Department for International Development’s (DFID) efforts to tackle the pressing issues facing the world’s poorest countries have been hampered by a failure to harness the full potential of science and technology. ’’ (Royal Society, 2004) The type of science envisaged by the Royal Society is for ‘‘robust vaccination programmes and drought-resistant crops’’ achieved through recent innovations such as biotechnology. The expectation is that improved yields will play a major role in poverty alleviation through enhanced agricultural productivity. In many ways the criticism is remarkable. For the last 10 years DFID has been funding a Renewable Natural Resources Research Strategy (RNRRS) at a cost of over £190 million with 56% of this money spent in Africa. In June 2005 the RNRRS was evaluated (LTS International, 2005). The reviewers found that the science supported by the programme was of a high quality, saying that the ‘‘RNRRS has established itself globally as possibly the leading research programme in natural resource management’’ (LTS International, 2005 p. 27). In particular the review emphasized the important changes that the livelihoods approach (Carney, 1998; Scoones, 1998) embraced by DFID had created in the research, with an increased emphasis on social sciences and multi-disciplinary work. So it is pertinent to ask why there is such a marked difference in opinion between the U.K. government select committee report and august bodies such as the Royal Society, and the independent evaluation of the research funded by DFID. One possible explanation is the classic academic divide between social and natural sciences. Returning to Hardin’s, 1968 paper we can see that, although published nearly 40 years ago, it perfectly captures the gap in thinking between the views expressed by the select committee report on Science and International Development as endorsed by the Royal Society, and the research carried out by DFID under its RNRRS. Hardin described the gulf thus: ‘‘An implicit and almost universal assumption of discussions published in professional and semi-popular scientific journals is that the problem under discussion has a technical solution. A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human