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The design principles for solving the tragedy of the commons can be applied to all groups

2016 October 29

As an evolutionary biologist who received my PhD in 1975, I grew up with Garrett Hardin's essay "The Tragedy of the Commons," published in Science magazine in 1968. His parable of villagers adding too many cows to their common pasture captured the essence of the problem that my thesis research was designed to solve. The farmer who added an extra cow gained an advantage over other farmers in his village but it also led to an overgrazed pasture. The biological world is full of similar examples in which individuals who behave for the good of their groups lose out in the struggle for existence with more self-serving individuals, resulting in overexploited resources and other tragedies of non-cooperation.

Is the so-called tragedy of the commons ever averted in the biological world and might this possibility provide solutions for our own species? One plausible scenario is natural selection at the level of groups. A selfish farmer might have an advantage over other farmers in his village, but a village that somehow solved the tragedy of the commons would have a decisive advantage over other villages. Most species are subdivided into local populations at various scales, just as humans are subdivided into villages, cities and nations. If natural selection between groups (favoring cooperation) can successfully oppose natural selection within groups (favoring non-cooperation), then the tragedy of the commons can be averted for humans and non-human species alike.

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At the time that Hardin published his article and I was working on my thesis, this possibility had been considered and largely rejected. A book titled Adaptation and Natural Selection, written by evolutionary biologist George C. Williams and published in 1966, was on its way to becoming a modern classic. Williams described between-group selection as theoretically possible but almost invariably weak compared to within-group selection. By his account, attempts to explain evolutionary adaptations as "for the good of the group" reflected sloppy and wishful thinking. Hardin's article reflected the same pessimism about avoiding the tragedy of the commons other than by top-down regulation. My interest in rethinking the plausibility of group selection placed me in a very small group of heretics (see Okasha 2006, Sober and Wilson 1998, Wilson and Wilson 2007, and Wilson 2015 for more on the controversy over group selection, which in my opinion has now been mostly resolved).

Evolutionary theory's individualistic turn coincided with individualistic turns in other areas of thought. Economics in the postwar decades was dominated by rational choice theory, which used individual self-interest as a grand explanatory principle. The social sciences were dominated by a position known as methodological individualism, which treated all social phenomena as reducible to individual-level phenomena, as if groups were not legitimate units of analysis in their own right (Campbell 1990). And UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher became notorious for saying during a speech in 1987 that "there is no such thing as society; only individuals and families." It was as if the entire culture had become individualistic and the formal scientific theories were obediently following suit.

Unbeknownst to me, another heretic named Elinor Ostrom was also challenging the received wisdom in her field of political science. Starting with her thesis research on how a group of stakeholders in southern California cobbled together a system for managing their water table, and culminating in her worldwide study of common-pool resource (CPR) groups, the message of her work was that groups are capable of avoiding the tragedy of the commons without requiring top-down regulation, at least if certain conditions are met (Ostrom 1990, 2010). She summarized the conditions in the form of eight core design principles: 1) Clearly defined boundaries; 2) Proportional equivalence between benefits and costs; 3) Collective choice arrangements; 4) Monitoring; 5) Graduated sanctions; 6) Fast and fair conflict resolution; 7) Local autonomy; 8) Appropriate relations with other tiers of rule-making authority (polycentric governance). This work was so groundbreaking that Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009.

I first met Lin (as she preferred to be called) just a few months before she was awarded the prize, at a workshop held in Florence, Italy, titled "Do Institutions Evolve?" (recounted in Wilson 2011a). Similar events were taking place all over the world in 2009 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species. Multilevel selection theory, which envisions natural selection operating on a multi-tier hierarchy of units, had become more widely accepted by then, especially with respect to human cultural evolution, making me much in demand as a speaker. I had also cofounded a think tank called the Evolution Institute that formulates public policy from an evolutionary perspective, giving me a strong interest in the workshop topic. I had become somewhat familiar with Lin's work but having the opportunity to talk with her at length had a transformative impact.

I quickly realized that Lin's core design principle approach dovetailed with multilevel selection theory, which my fellow-heretics and I had worked so hard to revive. Her approach is especially pertinent to the concept of major evolutionary transitions, whereby members of groups become so cooperative that the group becomes a higher-level organism in its own right. This idea was first proposed by cell biologist Lynn Margulis (1970) to explain how nucleated cells evolved from symbiotic associations of bacteria. It was then generalized during the 1990s to explain other major transitions, such as the rise of the first bacterial cells, multicellular organisms, eusocial insect colonies and human evolution (Maynard Smith and Szathmary 1995, 1999).

Hunter-gatherer societies are famously egalitarian, not because everyone is nice, but because members of a group can collectively suppress bullying and other self-aggrandizing behaviors within their ranks - the defining criterion of a major evolutionary transition (Boehm 1993, 1999, 2011). With disruptive competition within groups held largely in check, succeeding as a group became the main selective force in human evolution. The entire package of traits regarded as distinctively human - including our ability to cooperate in groups of unrelated individuals, our ability to transmit learned information across generations, and our capacity for language and other forms of symbolic thought - can be regarded as forms of physical and mental teamwork made possible by a major evolutionary transition.

Lin's design principles (DP) had "major evolutionary transition" written all over them. Clearly defined boundaries (DP1) meant that members knew they were part of a group and what the group was about (e.g., fisherman with access to a bay or farmers managing an irrigation system). Proportional equivalence of costs and benefits (DP2) meant that members had to earn their benefits and couldn't just appropriate them. Collective choice arrangements (DP3) meant that group members had to agree upon decisions so nobody could be bossed around. Monitoring (DP4) and graduated sanctions (DP5) meant that disruptive self-serving behaviors could be detected and punished. Fast and fair conflict resolution (DP6) meant that the group would not be torn apart by internal conflicts of interest. Local autonomy (DP7) meant that the group had the elbow room to manage its own affairs. Appropriate relations with other tiers of rule making authority (DP8) meant that everything regulating the conduct of individuals within a given group also was needed to regulate conduct among groups in a multi group population.

The concordance between Lin's core design principle approach and multilevel selection theory had three major implications. First, it placed the core design principle approach on a more general theoretical foundation. Lin's "Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD)" framework emanated from political science and she was an early adopter of economic game theory, but her main case for the design principle approach was the empirical database that she compiled for common-pool resource groups around the world, as described in her most influential book Governing the Commons (Ostrom 1990). Multilevel selection theory showed how the core design principle approach follows from the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in all species and from our own evolutionary history as a highly cooperative species.

Second, because of its theoretical generality, the core design principle approach is likely to apply to a much broader range of human groups than those attempting to manage common-pool resources (CPRs). Almost any group whose members must work together to achieve a common goal is vulnerable to self-serving behaviors and should benefit from the same principles. An analysis of business groups, churches, voluntary associations and urban neighborhoods should yield the same results as Lin's analysis of CPR groups.

Third, the core design principle approach can provide a practical framework for improving the efficacy of groups in the real world. It should be possible for almost any kind of group to assess itself with respect to the design principles, address shortcomings, and function better as a result. This prospect was especially appealing to me as president of the Evolution Institute, since I was now actively engaged in formulating and implementing public policy from an evolutionary perspective.

Lin inspired me to begin several projects in parallel with each other. One was to collaborate with her and her postdoctoral associate Michael Cox to write an academic article, "Generalizing the Core Design Principle for the Efficacy of Groups" that established the three major implications listed above for an academic audience (Wilson, Ostrom and Cox 2013). Michael was the lead author of a 2010 article that evaluated the core design principle approach for the literature on CPR groups that had accumulated since Lin's original analysis (Cox et al. 2010). Our article was published in a special issue of the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization titled "Evolution as a General Theoretical Framework for Economics and Public Policy." Both the article and the special issue should be consulted for more on the theoretical framework that underpins the design principle approach.

In addition, I started to use the design principle approach in projects that involved working with real-world groups in Binghamton, New York. One was a collaboration with the City of Binghamton and United Way of Broome County called "Design Your Own Park," which used the opportunity to turn a neglected space into a neighborhood park. Neighborhood groups that formed to create a park would be coached in the core design principles and start to manage the affairs of their neighborhood in other respects. This project led to the creation of four neighborhood parks-and their groups-in our city (Wilson 2011b).

The second project was a collaboration with the Binghamton City School District to create a "school within a school" for at-risk youth called the Regents Academy (Wilson, Kaufmann, and Purdy 2011). This was our most ambitious and best documented project because we were able to employ the gold standard of scientific assessment, the randomized control trial, which randomly assigns participants into an experimental group and a control group to identify significant variables that might affect outcomes. To the best of its ability, the Regents Academy implemented the eight core design principles and two auxiliary design principles deemed to be important in a learning context (a relaxed and playful atmosphere and short-term rewards for long-term learning goals). Not only did the Regents Academy students vastly outperform the comparison group, but they even performed on a par with the average high school student on the state-mandated Regents exam (see Wilson, Kauffman and Purdy 2011 for details). This is a strong indication that the design principle approach can be generalized beyond CPR groups and can be used as a practical framework for improving the efficacy of groups in our everyday lives.

The third project was a collaboration with a number of religious congregations in Binghamton to reflect upon the core design principles in relation to their faith and social organization. These conversations did not lead to a formal effort to change practices but they were invaluable for exploring how the success of religious groups can be understood in terms of the design principles approach.

All of these projects were instructive and broadly confirmed the relevance of the core design principle approach for any group whose members must work together to achieve a common purpose. They also showed how the design principles can be sadly lacking in some groups, such as disadvantaged neighborhoods and public schools. It is important to remember that Ostrom was able to derive the core design principles for CPR groups because they varied in how well the design principles were implemented. Some did well without needing to be taught, while others did poorly and might benefit from some coaching. Based on my own projects, I became convinced that all groups are likely to face similar challenges in implementing the core design principles.

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Sadly, Lin died of cancer in June 2012. I was with her only a few months before at a workshop, "Rules as Genotypes in Cultural Evolution," which we organized together and hosted at her Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, at Indiana University. She was simultaneously trying to care for her aging husband Vincent, satisfy the worldwide demand for speaking appearances, manage her projects and care for herself. I am grateful to be among the many who were touched by her and proud to contribute to her legacy by helping to generalize the core design principle approach and make it available to any group whose members must work together to achieve shared goals.*

Adapted from Patterns of commoning, co-edited by David Bollier and Silke Helfrich.
References
2016 October 29

*PROSOCIAL is the first Internet platform that enables any group, anywhere in the world, to evaluate itself and increase its efficacy based on a fusion of the core design principle approach and evidence-based methods from the applied behavioral sciences.

Boehm, Christopher. 1993. "Egalitarian Society and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy." Current Anthropology, 34:227 - 254.

---. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest: Egalitarianism and the Evolution of Human Altruism. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

---. 2011. Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. New York: Basic Books.

Campbell, Donald T. 1990. "Levels of Organization, Downward Causation, and the Selection-Theory Approach to Evolutionary Epistemology." In G. Greenberg & E. Tobach, editors, Theories of the Evolution of Knowing, 1 - 17. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Cox, M., G. Arnold & S. Villamayor-Tomas. 2010. "A Review of Design Principles for Community-based Natural Resource Management." Ecology and Society. 15.

Hardin, Garrett. 1968. "The Tragedy of the Commons." Science. 162:1243-1248.

Margulis, Lynn. 1970. Origin of Eukaryotic cells. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Maynard Smith, John, & E. Szathmary. 1995. The Major Transitions of Life. New York: W.H. Freeman.

---. 1999. The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Okasha, Samir. 2006. Evolution and the Levels of Selection. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

---. 2010. "Polycentric Systems for Coping with Collective Action and Global Environmental Change." Global Environmental Change. 20:550 - 557.

Sober, Elliot, & Wilson, D. S. 1998. Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Williams, George. C. 1966. Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wilson, D.S. 2011a. The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time. New York: Little, Brown.

---. 2011b. "The Design Your Own Park Competition: Empowering Neighborhoods and Restoring Outdoor Play on a Citywide Scale." American Journal of Play. 3:538 - 551.

---. 2014. "Introducing PROSOCIAL: Using the Science of Cooperation to Improve the Efficacy of Your Group." This View of Life.

---. 2015. Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Wilson, D.S., Kauffman, R. A., & Purdy, M. S. 2011. "A Program for At-risk High School Students Informed by Evolutionary Science." PLoS ONE, 6(11), e27826. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0027826

Wilson, D.S., & Gowdy, J. M. 2013. "Evolution as a General Theoretical Framework for Economics and Public Policy." Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. 90:S3 - S10. doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2012.12.008

Wilson, D.S., Hayes, S. C., Biglan, A., & Embry, D. 2014. "Evolving the Future: Toward a Science of Intentional Change." Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 37:395 - 460.

Wilson, D.S., E. Ostrom & M. Cox. 2013. "Generalizing the Design Principles for Improving the Efficacy of Groups." Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. 90:supplement, S21 - S32.

Wilson, D.S., & E.O. Wilson. 2007. "Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology." Quarterly Review of Biology. 82:327 - 348.

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The Tragedy of the Commons: How Elinor Ostrom Solved One of Life's Greatest Dilemmas - Evonomics

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The World Peace Game Foundation is dedicated to teaching children the work of peace. Guided by the life work of educator John Hunter, The Foundation uses the World Peace Game to foster the concept of peace not as a utopian dream but as an attainable goal to strive for, and to stimulate the creative development of educational tools for this effort. It supports development of collaboration and communication skills for resolving and transforming conflicts, and the development of the skills of compromise, all while accommodating different perspectives and interests.

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Supporting Facilitators certified by the Foundation with the tools, resources, networks, and advanced training opportunities

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The World Peace Game Foundation is dedicated to teaching children the work of peace. Guided by the life work of educator John Hunter, The Foundation uses the World Peace Game to foster the concept of peace not as a utopian dream but as an attainable goal to strive for, and to stimulate the creative development of educational tools for this effort.

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Zoobiquity is an approach to finding innovative solutions to the most challenging issues in our human lives, from physical and mental health to social change. Finding and understanding the vulnerabilities we share with other species on Earth allows us to translate this information into strategies to help improve the lives of humans and other animals.

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Zoobiquity is an approach to finding innovative solutions to the most challenging issues in our human lives, from physical and mental health to social change. Finding and understanding the vulnerabilities we share with other species on Earth allows us to translate this information into strategies to help improve the lives of humans and other animals.

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Welcome to Good Natured, a Conservation Optimism podcast, where you can join us for uplifting chats that shine a light on conservation challenges. In each episode, we interview an inspiring conservationist. Our guests come from a variety of backgrounds - artists, scientists, business owners, and activists - and engage with conservation in a variety of ways. We talk about their challenges and successes, and their hopes for the future of nature.

Episode 7:

On this episode, Sofia and Julia talk to Jessie Panazzolo the founder of Lonely Conservationists, an online platform which supports conservationists. We discuss the importance to save those who are saving the world, the feeling of impostor syndrome and the liberation that comes with being able to share stories of difficulty and failure.

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On this episode, Sofia and Julia talk to British theatre maker and director Tom Bailey about the ways he integrates conservation topics in his pieces, the inspiration behind his work and the importance of creativity to reach different audiences. Full transcript available .

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On this episode, Sofia and Julia talk with Indian conservationist Purnima Devi Barman about her fight to protect the greater adjutant stork, the importance of involving women in conservation and the power of creating new traditions!

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On this episode, Sofia and Julia talk with Carl Jones, a Welsh biologist renowned for saving multiple bird species in Mauritius. We discover that saving a species is not that straightforward as Carl discusses the challenges he faced along the way and we get a glimpse of his vision for the future of nature.

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On this episode, Sofia and Julia talk with the founder and CEO of Key Conservation, Megan Cromp. Key is a transformational new app that aims to help empower conservationists around the world. Full transcript available .

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On this episode, Sofia and Julia talk to climate psychologist Caroline Hickman about eco-anxiety, climate grief and the power of young climate activists. Full transcript available

Episode 1:

On this episode, Sofia and Julia talk to Caleb Ofori-Boateng about his inspiring work conserving amphibians in Ghana and learn about the concept of conservation evangelism. Full transcript available .

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Reckoning with Our Past,
Present, and Future

WCS President and CEO Cristián Samper sent a message to all WCS staff on Juneteenth, 2020. In this letter, he sought to cast a necessary light on our past, examine our present, and commit WCS to doing its part to help the long arc of the moral universe bend further toward justice.

As the United States has in recent months confronted the systemic racism in our nation, and as we at WCS recognize our 125th anniversary, we have been looking inward, examining our history, and asking if there is more we can do to ensure that persons of differing races, languages, cultures, and economic status feel welcome and enjoy equal opportunity at our zoological parks in New York City and our field conservation sites across the globe.

In the name of equality, transparency, and accountability, we must confront our organization's historic role in promoting racial injustice as we advance our mission to save wildlife and wild places.

Two episodes from our history demonstrating unconscionable racial intolerance demand particular attention.

First, we apologize for and condemn the treatment of a young Central African from the Mbuti people of present-day Democratic Republic of Congo. His name was Ota Benga. Bronx Zoo officials, led by Director William Hornaday, put Ota Benga on display in the zoo's Monkey House for several days during the week of September 8, 1906 before outrage from local Black ministers quickly brought the disgraceful incident to an end and the Reverend James Gordon arranged for Ota Benga to stay at an orphanage he directed in Weeksville, Brooklyn. Robbed of his humanity and unable to return home, Ota Benga tragically took his life a decade later.

We further apologize for and condemn bigoted actions and attitudes in the early 1900s toward non-whites-especially African Americans, Native Americans and immigrants-that characterized many notable institutions at the time, including our own.

Specifically, we denounce the eugenics-based, pseudoscientific racism, writings, and philosophies advanced by many people during that era, including two of our founders, Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn, Sr. Excerpts from Grant's book "The Passing of the Great Race" (with a preface by Osborn), were included in a defense exhibit for one of the defendants in the Nuremberg trials. Grant and Osborn were likewise among the founders of the American Eugenics Society in 1926.

We deeply regret that many people and generations have been hurt by these actions or by our failure previously to publicly condemn and denounce them.

We recognize that overt and systemic racism persists, and our institution must play a greater role to confront it. As the United States addresses its legacy of anti-Black racism and the brutal killings that have led to mass protests around the world, we reaffirm our commitment to ensuring that social, racial, and environmental justice are deep-rooted in our conservation mission.

To that end, we will build on the goals of our diversity, equity, and inclusion plan approved by our board in February, 2019. We are hiring a Diversity Officer to work directly with the CEO and COO to coordinate the implementation of the goals and actions in this plan and report on our progress. We will continue working to ensure diverse pools of candidates for recruitment, promotion, and succession planning, including our board and leadership.

We will publicly acknowledge the mistakes of our past. Today, we are making all known records we have related to Ota Benga available online, as we have to researchers visiting our Archives. We will develop additional projects to make our history accessible and transparent, especially to outside writers and researchers.

Today we challenge ourselves to do better and to never look away whenever and wherever injustice occurs.

Letter from President and CEO Cristián Samper to WCS Staff

In Our Archives

The WCS Archives collects, identifies, and preserves records created throughout the history of WCS. Among our collections are materials related to the Bronx Zoo's exhibition of Ota Benga for several days in September 1906. We have digitized these and are now making them available online here. These materials originate from WCS Archives Collections 1001 and 1012. More information about these collections is available in their finding aids, which are accessible here.

Among the correspondents in this online collection are William Hornaday, who served as Bronx Zoo Director from the park's opening in 1899 to 1926; Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn Sr., then WCS Secretary and Vice President, respectively; and Samuel Verner, who first forcibly brought Ota Benga to the United States in 1904 to be displayed at the St Louis World's Fair and then brought him to the Bronx Zoo in September 1906.

We have previously made these materials available to researchers, and we are now putting them online here as a first step toward fulfilling WCS's commitment to making this history accessible and transparent. These are the materials related to the Bronx Zoo's exhibition of Ota Benga that researchers and WCS Archives staff have identified over the years. Should we identify any other related records, they will be added here.
*More information about collections of materials created by Madison Grant that we hold in our Archives is in our finding aids here. Our staff will continue to review these materials, and we are committing to digitizing and making public anything relevant to these subjects as it arises.
Additional Materials

Related books that have referenced WCS Archives collections include:

Other recent articles that have explored Grant, eugenics, and the history of racism and conservation include:

"When W. E. B. Du Bois Made a Laughingstock of a White Supremacist," The New Yorker, August 19, 2019.

"White Nationalism's Deep American Roots," The Atlantic, April 2019. Also discussed on the NPR show Throughline in May 2019.

"A Century Ago, America Built Another Kind of Wall," The New York Times, May 3, 2019.

"Environmentalism's Racist History," The New Yorker, August 13, 2015.

"The Measure of America," The New Yorker, March 1, 2004.

Additionally, in 2018, PBS's American Experience produced The Eugenics Crusade, a documentary that traces the influence of the early-twentieth-century eugenics movement, including Grant's role in it.

For assistance with obtaining any of the resources listed here, please contact library@wcs.org.

Read more about WCS Today

The program provides support for graduate education opportunities for exceptional conservationists from Asia/Pacific, African, Latin American, and North American Indigenous groups.

The goal of the WCS Education Program is to inspire a diverse, inclusive movement of conservation advocates. We are committed to disrupting preconceived notions of who scientists and conservationists are, what they do, and who can be one.

Today, across the planet, we collaborate with Indigenous Peoples and local communities to achieve a shared vision for a more secure and resilient future. To do this, we help these groups gain, exercise, and benefit from their rights.

Join more than one million wildlife lovers working to save the Earth's most treasured and threatened species.

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Reckoning with Our Past, Present, and Future

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On a warm morning last September, a dozen Herero men and women paid a visit to the American Museum of Natural History, in Manhattan. The men wore dark suits and ties, like guests at a funeral. The women wore colorful dresses and hats, following a tradition from Namibia, their home country, in southern Africa. They had come to view relics of a tragic episode in their nation's history, and to ask the museum, after almost a century, to give them back.

Kavemuii Murangi, an education researcher who lives in Maryland, arrived wearing a gray suit and dark glasses that hid his gentle eyes. Inside the museum, several curators led Murangi and his companions to a private room upstairs. A table was covered with cardboard boxes, which the curators invited them to open when they felt ready. Inside the boxes were human skulls and skeletons. On many of the skulls, four-digit numbers had been scrawled above the eye sockets. Many of the visitors wept at the sight. "We looked at each other, we talked to each other, we hugged each other," Murangi told me afterward. They were staring at remains of their own people.

A little more than a hundred years ago, German colonists stole these bones from what they called German Southwest Africa, following a Herero rebellion, in 1904. General Lothar von Trotha had moved quickly and brutally to put down the uprising. "Within the German boundaries, every Herero, with or without firearms, with or without cattle, will be shot," he wrote in his Vernichtungsbefehl, or extermination order. "I won't accommodate women and children anymore." In what has been called the first genocide of the twentieth century, colonists pushed Herero into the desert and forced others into concentration camps. Sixty-five thousand Herero died. Similar tactics killed ten thousand Nama men and women. (Both groups have called on Germany to pay reparations, and will appear in U.S. federal court on January 25th in an attempt to force the country to do so.)

In 1906, Felix von Luschan, an Austrian-born anthropologist, sent letters to colonial officers asking that they gather bones and ship them to him in Berlin, for research. In a letter discovered by the historian Andrew Zimmerman, one of the officers replied, "In the concentration camps taking and preserving the skulls of Herero prisoners of war will be more readily possible than in the country, where there is always a danger of offending the ritual feelings of the natives." In response to one anthropologist's request, the German overseers of a concentration camp gave Herero women shards of glass and told them to scrape the flesh from the corpses of Herero men. Luschan eventually sold his entire personal collection, including the skulls of thousands of people from across the world, to the American Museum of Natural History. The purchase doubled the museum's physical anthropology holdings and helped establish the A.M.N.H. as a leader in the field.

In August, 2017, Christian Kopp, a post-colonial activist in Berlin, learned from Konradin Kunze, the author of a play about bone collecting in German colonies, about the existence of the von Luschan Collection in New York. Shocked and angry, he sent an e-mail to Herero descendants he knew in the U.S., including Murangi, and they contacted the museum. The A.M.N.H. stores human bones in two offices and several storage cabinets on the fifth floor. "That's our most heavily utilized collection," David Hurst Thomas, a curator of anthropology at the museum who was present for the Namibians' visit, told me. Thomas is also the author of "Skull Wars," a candid and critical history of human-skeleton collections. "We have scientists researching those materials almost on a daily basis," he added. Many scientific papers in evolutionary biology have cited the von Luschan Collection. Nonetheless, the A.M.N.H. has gradually come to acknowledge the troubling origins of many remains in its possession. The museum does not deny that its Namibian remains, from eight individuals, may include the products of genocide; the bones of two people, collected at an unspecified date, were taken from locations where Germans killed Herero in concentration camps. At least one skull shows damage that may have resulted from violence.

I spoke with Murangi and his companions immediately after the meeting, at a small park outside the museum. He seemed shaken and spoke slowly, struggling at times to find words for what he had seen. Hunching his broad shoulders, he told me that, when he was a student at Columbia University, in the eighties, he considered the A.M.N.H. an esteemed place of learning. Now he wonders whether his own ancestors are in a cardboard box somewhere. "Because the genocide was so absolute, it could be any one of our relatives," Murangi told me. Mekahako Komomungondo, a Namibian-born hair stylist who lives in Yonkers, described the visit as excruciating. "Although this genocide happened a hundred and something years ago, it feels at is if were yesterday," she said. "No matter how old a wound is, once you prop it open, it becomes just as painful." Museum staff members said they are open to handing over the Namibian remains. But first, descendants will have to decide what they want to happen to them.

When the American Museum of Natural History was founded, in 1869, anthropologists were circling the globe, buying bones from dealers, and digging up graves in the name of science. "For European colonial powers, it was a worldwide phenomenon," Holger Stoecker, a Berlin historian, told me. Competing museums exchanged bones in a "global network" of human remains, Stoecker's research has shown. Many anthropologists sought to differentiate races by physical characteristics, such as skull size. Some disputed the significance of race; Franz Boas, who is often called the father of modern anthropology, rejected the supposed hierarchy of races, arguing that human behavior varied independently of racial characteristics. Even so, during the decade that Boas worked as an A.M.N.H. curator and, ultimately, the head of the anthropology department, he asked an explorer to bring living Eskimos to New York for research, then had their bodies dissected and studied when they died of tuberculosis. Henry Fairfield Osborn was the museum's president from 1908 to 1935, and he advocated the study of "backward races." In 1923, Clark Wissler, who curated the A.M.N.H. anthropology collection under Osborn, wrote, "We are strong in anatomical collections from the American Indians, but are lamentably weak in such collections from other parts of the world, especially from the more primitive races."

Late that year, Felix von Luschan put his life's work, a collection of more than five thousand skulls, up for sale. In a letter written weeks before his death, he said that it contained "rarities" and "treasures," and set the price at forty thousand dollars-more than half a million in contemporary terms. Documents in the A.M.N.H. archive show that, after offering thirty thousand, Osborn agreed to the full amount. When Luschan died, in Berlin, in early 1924, his wife, Emma, received the funds. She shipped the skull collection to New York; she had her husband's remains buried in Austria, the country of his birth.

Despite his disgraceful collection practices, Luschan rejected theories that classified some human beings as inferior and remains in high regard among anthropologists. But his work was easily hijacked. The anthropologist Eugen Fischer, a professor of Josef Mengele and a prominent Nazi, also collected Herero skulls; his writings, which have recently resurfaced on white-supremacist Web sites, often cited Luschan. Some skulls that Luschan collected did not reach New York, and were instead absorbed into the Nazi-led Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. Many historians believe that when German colonists decimated the Herero and the Nama, they laid a foundation for the Holocaust.

To cover the costs of the Herero bones, Henry Osborn solicited a major donation to the A.M.N.H. from a German-American philanthropist of Jewish descent, Felix Warburg, whose Manhattan mansion now houses the Jewish Museum. Without knowing it, Warburg paid for remains that were taken from the victims of a genocide.

The visit by the Herero descendants was not the first time that the A.M.N.H. had been forced to reckon with the ugly history of its collections. In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, which required institutions to inventory and repatriate human remains. ( NAGPRA applies only to museums that receive federal funding, and does not cover human remains taken from outside the United States.) Researchers at many museums, including the A.M.N.H. and the Smithsonian Institution, opposed its passage. Suzan Harjo, a Cheyenne and Muscogee activist who co-wrote the law, remembers museums arguing that they owned human remains. "What we did was change the conversation from property rights to human rights," she told me. In the inventory work that followed, one of the names that surfaced was Felix von Luschan. On the island of Lanai, Luschan personally dug up more than eighty Native Hawaiian remains, some of which ended up in the A.M.N.H.

Seven months after the passage of NAGPRA, Edward Halealoha Ayau, an indigenous-rights advocate from Hawaii, visited Ian Tattersall, then the A.M.N.H.'s curator of anthropology, to ask that he comply with federal law and return the Native Hawaiian remains. Ayau says he was shocked to find that Tattersall had simply placed the remains on a tray and covered them with a sheet. "It was so egregious that we kicked him out of his own office, so that we could do our prayers and our ceremony, to apologize to our ancestors for this kind of treatment," Ayau said. He told me, and others I spoke with agreed, that the A.M.N.H. has since dramatically improved its repatriation practices. "It was very early days in the repatriation process, and frankly, we had not developed normal procedures for dealing with repatriation," Tattersall told me, adding that he didn't expect the visit to occur so soon. "In the last thirty years, we've learned a great deal, and we now have procedures in place which all parties seem to be pretty happy with." Still, the museum arguably missed an opportunity, in 1991, to investigate the sources of its von Luschan Collection. If it had done so, it would have discovered, among other grim details, the disturbing context in which its Namibian remains were collected.

Now the museum waits on formal requests from communities of descendants to determine the future of the Namibian remains. Of the Herero descendants I spoke with, all agreed on two things: that the remains of their ancestors must ultimately return to Namibia, and that the neglected history of the Herero and Nama genocide deserves immediate global attention. But the visitors disagreed on one crucial question: More than a century after grave atrocities, how should a community of the living commemorate its dead?

One month after Kavemuii Murangi visited the museum, a delegation of Namibian leaders, including Herero and Nama chiefs, arrived in New York with a different vision for the future of the remains. "Those bones can no longer speak for themselves," Vekuii Rukoro, a Herero chief, told me. "We need to speak for those bones, and bring out the criminality of what has happened to them." He wants the museum to put the bones on display, as part of an exhibition on the little-known genocide that decimated his people, helped lay the foundations of the Holocaust, and stocked the shelves of natural-history museums around the world. Namibia has tried a similar approach: in 2011, when Berlin's Charité hospital repatriated several Herero skulls, they were transported in a casket draped with the Namibian flag and later displayed in a glass case next to a national-liberation monument.

Barnabas Veraa Katuuo, a Namibian-American architect, supports this proposal, and believes that an A.M.N.H. exhibition could empower the Herero in the international fight for recognition. Katuuo is a plaintiff in the American federal lawsuit that aims to hold Germany legally and financially responsible for the genocide. (His attorney, Kenneth McCallion, previously represented Holocaust survivors in a lawsuit against French banks.) "We can't just bury these remains," Katuuo told me. "As much as we hate it, we have to do it." But others disagree just as strongly. "That's not morally or ethically right," Jephta Nguherimo, the great-grandson of a Herero genocide survivor, said. "You never see the bones of your loved ones once they're buried."

Suzan Harjo told me that museums have used similar disagreements as excuses to delay or prevent repatriation. "We used to get pitted against each other all the time," she said. Thomas, the A.M.N.H. curator, said that, in this case, the museum will try to identify descendants who have some kind of standing that allows them to represent the wider community. Either outcome-repatriation in the near future or an exhibition-could be possible, he added.

I asked Thomas whether the museum now prohibits research on human remains collected in a context of violence or genocide. "We don't look at it like that," he said. When possible, the museum asks descendants what they want, but many scientists didn't bother to record the specific groups from which they seized remains, so large portions of the collection are unaffiliated. "They are fair game for study," Thomas said. Murangi told me, "Instead of sitting on these remains until people discover them, they should inform affected communities about human remains in their possession." Thomas told me that the museum lacks the resources to research the provenance of its entire collection.

In practice, descendants often shoulder the costs, and the years of effort, of locating and repatriating their ancestors one by one. When I called Ayau, the Native Hawaiian advocate, he was in the Seattle airport, accompanying the remains of four individuals on their return journey from Dresden, Germany. Ayau, who is fifty-three, has worked on repatriation cases for more than half his life. He has participated in a hundred and eighteen successful repatriation cases, including fifteen from institutions abroad. In October, the Dresden State Art Collections apologized for collecting, and delaying the return of, Native Hawaiian human remains. "We were healed by it. They were healed by it," Ayau told me. During the trip, he learned about a separate collection of Native Hawaiian remains, in Berlin. "Here we go again," he said. "Such is the nature of this work."

When I sat with Murangi in the park, after the visit to the A.M.N.H. in September, he told me about his great-grandmother, a survivor of the Herero genocide. She rarely spoke about it, he said, and, he thinks he understands why. "She was raped by a German," he said. When he looks in the mirror, he notices that his skin is lighter than that of many Namibians. "I don't obsess about my looks, it's not the struggle that I have. It's what happened to my people." After Murangi became a father, decades later, he caught himself avoiding the subject of genocide around his three daughters. "You think about shielding them, so that they do not have to carry the burden of genocide," he told me. "You just separate yourself from it completely, and put it in a locked box, and say, 'I don't want to go there again.' "

In October, his twelve-year-old daughter chose to write a middle-school research report about the links between the Holocaust and the Herero and Nama genocide. She insisted on finishing it, even after a photograph of a concentration camp made her cry. "It's a burden," Murangi told me. "A burden of memory." Recently, he decided to tell her about his visit to the American Museum of Natural History, and the boxes of Namibian remains stored on the fifth floor. Her response moved him almost to tears. "I'm very proud of what you're doing," she told him. "I think you're making a difference."

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The Troubling Origins of the Skeletons in a New York Museum

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On a warm morning last September, a dozen Herero men and women paid a visit to the American Museum of Natural History, in Manhattan. The men wore dark suits and ties, like guests at a funeral. The women wore colorful dresses and hats, following a tradition from Namibia, their home country, in southern Africa.

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Arnstein's Ladder of Citizen Participation

Sherry Arnstein, writing in 1969 about citizen involvement in planning processes in the United States, described a "ladder of citizen participation" that showed participation ranging from high to low. See Sherry R. Arnstein's "A Ladder of Citizen Participation," Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 35, No. 4, July 1969, pp. 216-224.

The ladder is a guide to seeing who has power when important decisions are being made. It has survived for so long because people continue to confront processes that refuse to consider anything beyond the bottom rungs.
Here is how David Wilcox describes the 8 rungs of the ladder at www.partnerships.org.uk/part/arn.htm:

1 Manipulation and 2 Therapy. Both are non participative. The aim is to cure or educate the participants. The proposed plan is best and the job of participation is to achieve public support through public relations.

3 Informing. A most important first step to legitimate participation. But too frequently the emphasis is on a one way flow of information. No channel for feedback.

4 Consultation. Again a legitimate step attitude surveys, neighbourhood meetings and public enquiries. But Arnstein still feels this is just a window dressing ritual.

5 Placation. For example, co-option of hand-picked 'worthies' onto committees. It allows citizens to advise or plan ad infinitum but retains for power holders the right to judge the legitimacy or feasibility of the advice.

6 Partnership. Power is in fact redistributed through negotiation between citizens and power holders. Planning and decision-making responsibilities are shared e.g. through joint committees.

7 Delegation. Citizens holding a clear majority of seats on committees with delegated powers to make decisions. Public now has the power to assure accountability of the programme to them.

8 Citizen Control. Have-nots handle the entire job of planning, policy making and managing a programme e.g. neighbourhood corporation with no intermediaries between it and the source of funds.

Here is a high res PDF of Arnstein's Ladder.

See also:
Power Broker Tactics,
Serving or Engaging Citizens,
Developing a Civic Culture,
Making Citizens Scarce

The Citizen's Handbook / Home / About / Table of Contents
The Citizen's Handbook / Charles Dobson / citizenshandbook.org

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Arnstein's Ladder of Citizen Participation

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Arnstein's Ladder of Citizen Participation Sherry Arnstein, writing in 1969 about citizen involvement in planning processes in the United States, described a "ladder of citizen participation" that showed participation ranging from high to low. See Sherry R. Arnstein's "A Ladder of Citizen Participation," Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol.