Triumph of the Commons: Sustainable Community Practices on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Abstract

The history of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) has long been framed as a parable for how societies can fail catastrophically due to the selfish actions of individuals and a failure to wisely manage common-pool resources. While originating in the interpretations made by 18th-century visitors to the island, 20th-century scholars recast this narrative as a “tragedy of the commons,” assuming that past populations were unsustainable and selfishly overexploited the limited resources on the island. This narrative, however, is now at odds with a range of archaeological, ethnohistoric, and environmental evidence. Here, we argue that while Rapa Nui did experience large-scale deforestation and ecological changes, these must be contextualized given past land-use practices on the island. We provide a synthesis of this evidence, showing that Rapa Nui populations were sustainable and avoided a tragedy of the commons through a variety of community practices. We discuss this evidence in the context of Elinor Ostrom’s “core design principles” for sustainable communities and argue that Rapa Nui provides a model for long-term sustainability.

Island-wide characterization of agricultural production challenges the demographic collapse hypothesis for Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

“…Issues of low accuracy warrant the creation of new analyses that can improve estimates of rock gardening. Improving these estimates is especially important because these data have been used to estimate population sizes at different points in the island’s human history as part of the ongoing debate over whether Rapa Nui represents an ecological success story or an example of a Malthusian trap where population exceeded the carrying capacity and fell into social and ecological collapse ( 6 , 37 , 38 ). Accurately determining the extent of rock gardening is one essential component in calculating likely population sizes and the island’s carrying capacity, along with better estimates of nonrock garden soil productivity and the longevity of other cultivation strategies on the island.…”

Enhancing employee advocacy of the firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities

“…This focus by Boards of Directors on a wider group of stakeholders is increasing globally (Porter and Kramer, 2011). For instance, the world's largest private investment firm, Blackstone, made clear its intentions in 2021 by requiring all companies within its global portfolio to report annually on sustainability (DiNapoli, 2021). This increasing business interest in social and environmental responsibility is also evident in developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region (Moyeen and West, 2014;Wijeweera et al, 2022).…”