Governing the commons
How real communities manage shared resources, and why the standard tragedy story is incomplete.
Governing the commons
The tragedy of the commons is a prediction that real communities frequently falsify. This is the empirical literature on when and how they manage it.
The problem
- Tragedy of the commons
- Garrett Hardin — including Mutual coercion, his own proposed answer
- Commons
Kinds of commons
Not one problem but two, with different failure modes and different fixes.
- Subtractable commons — overuse and depletion: grazing, fisheries, groundwater
- Information commons — Undersupply rather than overuse
What works
- Elinor Ostrom
- Ostrom design principles
- Polycentricity and Subsidiarity — the answer to scale
- Curtin et al on Zapotec cooperative institutions — a working village commons-type institution, dissected by mechanism
