Historical successes — candidate examples

Candidates only. Nothing here is written up for teaching yet, and several entries carry a live scholarly dispute that would need resolving before use.

Scope: pre-1990. Post-1990 AI, climate and internet governance cases are a separate list.

A note on skepticism, since it applies to a third of what follows. The long-enduring commons literature has an idealisation problem: cases get described by the rules on the books rather than by what people did, exclusion of outsiders gets quietly dropped from the account, and institutions that survived partly through coercion get remembered as consensual. Where an account is contested I say so in the entry rather than at the end.

Commons governed over long periods

Törbel, Valais, Switzerland

What happened: An alpine village in the Swiss Valais has held its summer grazing meadows, forests, waste land, irrigation channels and paths as communal property under written rules. A charter of 1224 is the earliest document of the rules; irrigation arrangements are documented from 1483. The binding rule on grazing is the wintering rule: no member may send more cows to the alp than he can feed through the winter on his own land.
Why it's a collective action case: Subtractable commons, with the appropriation limit set by a proxy that is cheap to verify. The mechanism is observability engineered into the rule itself. Counting how much grass a cow eats on a shared alp is impossible; counting a neighbour's hay barn in February is trivial, and everyone in a village of 600 does it as a side effect of living there. Reinforced by repetition (the same households, indefinitely), and by the fact that the commoners' association is a closed membership corporation — new residents don't automatically get grazing rights.
Could serve: Ostrom and the commons (S3); Introduction to collective action (S1), as an opening success paired with a failure.
Media: Netting's book carries photographs and the village record series. Swissinfo produced a short video piece on Törbel and Ostrom (2025). I haven't verified whether a full documentary exists.
Source: Robert McC. Netting, Balancing on an Alp: Ecological Change and Continuity in a Swiss Mountain Community (Cambridge UP, 1981), from fieldwork in 1970–71; Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990), ch. 3.

The huerta of Valencia and the Tribunal de las Aguas

What happened: The irrigated plain around Valencia is served by canals (acequias) whose users elect officials and whose disputes are heard by a court of eight elected farmers, sitting in the open air outside the cathedral on Thursdays at noon. Proceedings are oral, in Valencian, and decisions carry no appeal. The court still sits.
Why it's a collective action case: Subtractable commons with the classic upstream/downstream asymmetry. The mechanism is low-cost graduated sanctioning plus public shaming: the canal guards are paid by the irrigators themselves and have an interest in catching theft, penalties start small, and the hearing is held in a public square where the offender's neighbours watch. Ostrom's emphasis is that the dispute resolution is fast and cheap enough that people actually use it, which is what keeps the rules alive.
Contested: The popular claim that the tribunal is a thousand years old and runs continuously from al-Andalus is not documented. No text mentions the tribunal before the 18th century; the pre-modern continuity is inference, and the "oldest democratic institution in Europe" line is tourist-board framing. The irrigation communities themselves are much better evidenced than the court.
Could serve: Ostrom and the commons (S3); Polycentricity (S4), since each canal governs itself and the tribunal sits above them.
Media: The court sits in public and is filmed regularly; it was inscribed on UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2009, and that listing has associated video. Good photographic material.
Source: Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990), ch. 3; Thomas F. Glick, Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia (Harvard UP, 1970).

Iriai forest commons, Japan

What happened: Japanese villages held forest and grassland in common under iriai rights, with detailed rules on what could be taken, when, how, and in what quantity per household. Ostrom drew on the villages of Hirano, Nagaike and Yamanoka, documented by Margaret McKean. Opening days for a given product were announced and everyone harvested at once.
Why it's a collective action case: Subtractable commons. The mechanism is synchronised harvesting as a monitoring device. If everyone cuts thatch on the same declared day, everyone can see everyone else's pile, and stealth harvesting out of season is conspicuous by definition. Villages also paid detectives — two-person patrols, deliberately paired so neither could be bribed alone — and fines were graduated and recorded.
Contested: Iriai has declined sharply since the mid-20th century as fuel switched away from firewood and rural populations fell. Presenting it as continuous to the present would be wrong; the interesting claim is about the Tokugawa and Meiji period, not about now.
Could serve: Ostrom and the commons (S3); Repeated interaction and the folk theorem (S3).
Media: None known to me in film. Historical photographs of village forest work presumably exist but I haven't verified a collection.
Source: Margaret A. McKean, "Management of Traditional Common Lands (Iriaichi) in Japan", in Making the Commons Work (1992), and her earlier 1986 work; Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990), ch. 3.

Balinese subak and the water temples

What happened: Rice irrigation in Bali is organised by subak — farmer associations tied to water temples — which coordinate planting schedules across a whole watershed. Stephen Lansing and James Kremer built a simulation showing that the temple-coordinated schedules sit near optimal on a trade-off between water sharing and pest control. During the Green Revolution push of the 1970s, agricultural planners overrode the temple schedules; pests and water shortfalls followed, and the schedules were restored.
Why it's a collective action case: A coordination problem rather than a dilemma, which makes it unusually useful for the course. The mechanism is ritual as a synchronisation device with a real ecological function. Synchronised planting starves pests of a continuous host, but staggering is better for water supply; the temple calendar is the compromise, and it holds because the schedule arrives as religious obligation rather than as a negotiated agreement that anyone could reopen each season.
Contested: Stefan Helmreich (1999) criticised the simulation work as importing a functionalist and depoliticised picture of Balinese society; Lansing has replied. Others argue Lansing overstates the temples' exclusive role in irrigation management relative to other actors. Worth teaching with the dispute attached rather than as settled fact.
Could serve: Ostrom and the commons (S3); Ritual and the manufactured tribe (S5); Costly signals and Big Gods (S5).
Media: The Goddess and the Computer (1988), a documentary made with Lansing, directed by André Singer. Strong footage of the temples and terraces.
Source: J. Stephen Lansing, Priests and Programmers (Princeton UP, 1991); Lansing and Kremer, "Emergent Properties of Balinese Water Temple Networks", American Anthropologist 95 (1993); critique: Stefan Helmreich, "Digitizing 'Development'", Critique of Anthropology 19 (1999).

The zanjeras of Ilocos Norte, Philippines

What happened: Farmer-built and farmer-run irrigation societies in northern Luzon, some dating to the Spanish colonial period. A member acquires land rights by contributing labour to building the system, and holds shares (atar) that entitle him to water and oblige him to maintenance days. Plots are laid out so that each member holds strips in the head, middle and tail sections of the system.
Why it's a collective action case: The mechanism is making the free rider problem structurally impossible by aligning holdings. The usual failure in gravity irrigation is that head-enders have no reason to maintain the tail of the canal. Give every member land at both ends and the incentive to maintain the whole system is individual, not collective. Labour obligations are recorded, absences fined, and repeated absence costs the share itself.
Could serve: Ostrom and the commons (S3); Changing the payoffs (S4) — it is a property-rights design, just not a private one.
Media: None known.
Source: Robert Y. Siy Jr., Community Resource Management: Lessons from the Zanjera (University of the Philippines Press, 1982); Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990), ch. 3.

The Alanya inshore fishery, Turkey

What happened: About 100 fishers work a small inshore fishery on the Turkish Mediterranean coast. Through the 1970s, competition over the best sites caused hostility and occasional violence. From the early 1980s the local cooperative operated a system in which named fishing sites are listed, fishers draw lots at the start of the season for an initial site, and then rotate one site east each day until the end of January, then back west, so that everyone passes through every site as the fish migrate.
Why it's a collective action case: Subtractable commons resolved by rotation, which converts a contest into a queue. Nobody has to be monitored by an authority: the fisher due at a site tomorrow has every reason to notice someone occupying it today, so monitoring is a by-product of the allocation rule. Note the rules were devised locally and are not enforced by the state, though the cooperative gave them a venue.
Could serve: Ostrom and the commons (S3); Did it ever work? (S4), next to a collapsed industrial fishery at several orders of magnitude larger.
Media: None known.
Source: Fikret Berkes, "Local-level management and the commons problem", Marine Policy 10 (1986); Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990), ch. 1.

Maine lobster gangs

What happened: Maine's lobster fishery is divided informally into harbour territories held by "gangs" of fishers. Entry requires sponsorship and years of tolerated presence; intrusion is answered first by warnings, then by half-hitching or cutting trap lines. Alongside this, Maine fishers pushed for and comply with conservation rules — minimum and maximum size, and notching the tails of egg-bearing females so they can never be landed.
Why it's a collective action case: The mechanism is graduated informal punishment that never has to reach the courts, layered under formal state rules the industry itself lobbied for. It also shows the cost: the same exclusion that sustains the stock is enforced by property destruction and occasionally violence, and access is effectively hereditary.
Contested: How much of Maine's stock performance is due to gang territoriality versus the size and v-notch rules, water temperature, and the collapse of cod as a lobster predator, is genuinely unsettled.
Could serve: Ostrom and the commons (S3); Did it ever work? (S4); the exclusion cost feeds The bill (S5).
Media: Heavily photographed and filmed. Discovery's Lobster Wars (2007) is about offshore Georges Bank rather than the harbour gangs, so check before using. Acheson's books carry field material.
Source: James M. Acheson, The Lobster Gangs of Maine (University Press of New England, 1988), and Capturing the Commons (2003).

Dutch water boards (waterschappen)

What happened: Regional bodies governing dikes, drainage and water levels in the Netherlands. The Hoogheemraadschap van Rijnland was established in 1255 by Count William II of Holland, formalising roughly two centuries of informal local arrangements. Boards levied their own taxes, maintained dikes, and assigned each landholder a specific stretch to keep up. There were around 2,600 boards by 1950; they have since been amalgamated, and they still exist with their own elections.
Why it's a collective action case: A public good where defection is fatal to everyone — one unmaintained dike section floods the whole polder. The mechanism is assignment plus inspection plus the power to tax: each stretch has a named person responsible, inspectors ride the dikes, and the board can raise money and coerce. This is the case where a commons institution visibly acquires state-like powers, which makes it the bridge between Session 3 and Coercion.
Could serve: Coercion (S4); Polycentricity (S4); Ostrom and the commons (S3).
Media: Extensive archival material; the boards' own archives are public. No specific documentary verified.
Source: William H. TeBrake, Medieval Frontier: Culture and Ecology in Rijnland (Texas A&M UP, 1985); Dutch Water Authorities, The Dutch Water Authority Model (2021) for the institutional description.

The English open-field system

What happened: Much of medieval and early modern England farmed in scattered strips across large open fields, with common grazing on the stubble after harvest, stinting rules on how many animals each household could turn out, and manorial courts that set and enforced the bylaws. The system operated for centuries before enclosure.
Why it's a collective action case: This is the case Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" is usually taken to be about, and the historical record says the commons were stinted, not open access. The mechanism is a court of the commoners themselves — the manorial court roll records presentments by neighbours and small fines, year after year.
Contested: Heavily. Whether open fields were efficient, how well stinting actually held, and whether enclosure raised productivity are all live disputes — Robert Allen, Deirdre McCloskey and others disagree substantially. Do not present this as a clean success; present it as the correction to Hardin's framing.
Could serve: The games (S2), against the tragedy of the commons as usually taught; Ostrom and the commons (S3).
Media: Ridge-and-furrow earthworks are visible and photographable across the Midlands; Laxton in Nottinghamshire still farms open fields and has a visitor centre.
Source: Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons", Science 162 (1968), for the framing; Robert C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford UP, 1992); Susan Jane Buck Cox, "No Tragedy on the Commons", Environmental Ethics 7 (1985).

Los Angeles groundwater basins

What happened: From the 1940s, pumpers drawing on groundwater basins under the Los Angeles area faced falling water tables and saltwater intrusion from the sea. Over roughly two decades they negotiated basin-by-basin settlements limiting extraction, created water districts and replenishment districts, litigated where necessary, and hired a neutral watermaster to measure and report pumping.
Why it's a collective action case: This is Ostrom's own dissertation work and the empirical root of polycentricity. The mechanism is nesting: hundreds of independent pumpers were too many to bargain directly, so they built a stack of overlapping bodies — voluntary associations, special districts, courts, and a state agency — each handling a different part of the problem, with none of them in charge of the whole. Also a clean case of third-party measurement making agreement possible: nobody trusted anyone's self-reported pumping until an independent watermaster measured it.
Could serve: Polycentricity (S4) — this is the best-documented case for it; Did it ever work? (S4).
Media: None known in film. Court records and watermaster reports are the primary sources.
Source: Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990), ch. 4; her PhD thesis, Public Entrepreneurship: A Case Study in Ground Water Basin Management (UCLA, 1965); William Blomquist, Dividing the Waters (1992).

Acequias of northern New Mexico

What happened: Community irrigation ditches in the upper Rio Grande, brought from Spain via Mexico and operating from the 17th century. Each ditch is governed by a mayordomo and elected commissioners; water rights come with an obligation to turn out for the annual spring cleaning of the ditch. New Mexico law recognises acequias as political subdivisions of the state.
Why it's a collective action case: The mechanism is an annual obligatory work day that doubles as a membership test. Turning out for the limpia is the visible act that keeps a right alive; missing it without sending a substitute costs water. The legal recognition is also interesting — a customary commons that got itself written into state law rather than being displaced by it.
Could serve: Ostrom and the commons (S3); Polycentricity (S4).
Media: Documented photographically; New Mexico Acequia Association holds material. Specific films not verified.
Source: José A. Rivera, Acequia Culture: Water, Land and Community in the Southwest (University of New Mexico Press, 1998).

Trade, credit and mutual aid

The Maghribi traders' coalition

What happened: Jewish traders operating across the 11th-century Mediterranean, documented in the Cairo Geniza letters, used overseas agents to handle goods they could not accompany. Avner Greif argued they sustained honest agency through a coalition in which information about cheating circulated by letter and a cheat was refused employment by every member thereafter.
Why it's a collective action case: The mechanism on Greif's account is multilateral reputation — not "I will stop dealing with you", which is often too weak because the cheat can find another principal, but "everyone will stop dealing with you", which requires a communication network to carry the news. That is the cleanest historical illustration of why observability at a distance is the binding constraint on trade among strangers.
Contested: Sharply. Sheilagh Ogilvie and Jeremy Edwards (Economic History Review, 2012) argue no Geniza document actually evidences a coalition, and that the Maghribis used courts and bilateral reputation much as European traders did. Greif replied in the same issue. Teach the mechanism as a model and flag that its best-known historical instance is disputed.
Could serve: Repeated interaction and the folk theorem (S3); Henrich and the trust of strangers (S5).
Media: The Cairo Geniza documents are digitised and viewable (Princeton Geniza Project, Cambridge Digital Library) — usable as primary-source imagery.
Source: Avner Greif, "Contract Enforceability and Economic Institutions in Early Trade", AER 83 (1993); Edwards and Ogilvie, "Contract enforcement, institutions and social capital: the Maghribi traders reappraised", EcHR 65 (2012); Greif, "The Maghribi traders: a reappraisal?", same issue.

The Champagne fairs and the law merchant

What happened: Fairs in Champagne were a hub of long-distance European trade in the 12th and 13th centuries, with private judges hearing merchant disputes. Milgrom, North and Weingast modelled the private judge as a registry: it did not enforce judgments, it recorded who had defaulted, and merchants could query it cheaply before dealing.
Why it's a collective action case: The mechanism is a cheap information institution substituting for an enforcement institution. Reputation only punishes defection if news travels; the law merchant's contribution is that it made the news cheap to obtain, which is a different and much smaller job than policing.
Contested: Edwards and Ogilvie have argued the historical evidence for the private law merchant is thin and that the fairs relied on the Counts of Champagne's enforcement — the same dispute as the Maghribi case, same participants.
Could serve: Repeated interaction and the folk theorem (S3); Changing the payoffs (S4).
Media: None known.
Source: Paul Milgrom, Douglass North and Barry Weingast, "The Role of Institutions in the Revival of Trade", Economics and Politics 2 (1990); Sheilagh Ogilvie, Institutions and European Trade (Cambridge UP, 2011).

Medieval and early modern craft guilds

What happened: Guilds regulated training, quality and entry in European crafts from roughly the 12th century into the 18th, supplying apprenticeship, quality standards, mutual insurance for members, and collective representation.
Why it's a collective action case: Worth including chiefly for the selective incentives point — Olson's argument in the flesh. A guild supplies a public good (training, standards) and finances it by bundling in private benefits only members get: the right to trade in town, sickness and burial funds, feast days. But the same structure is also the most-cited case for cartel behaviour.
Contested: Ogilvie's work argues the rent-seeking dominated the public goods, against an older literature treating guilds as efficient. If the course uses guilds as a success, that reading has to be defended, not assumed.
Could serve: Olson (S3) — selective incentives; The bill (S5), since guild goods were funded by excluding outsiders.
Media: Guild halls, ordinances and charters survive widely and are photographable.
Source: Sheilagh Ogilvie, The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis (Princeton UP, 2019); S. R. Epstein, "Craft Guilds, Apprenticeship, and Technological Change", Journal of Economic History 58 (1998), for the opposing view.

British friendly societies

What happened: Mutual insurance clubs providing sickness pay, burial money and sociability to working people, growing through the 19th century to roughly six million members by 1904 — on the order of half of all adult males. The large federated orders, the Oddfellows and Foresters, each exceeded half a million members by 1900. Registration under the Friendly Societies Act 1793 gave them legal standing.
Why it's a collective action case: The central problem is adverse selection and malingering — you cannot easily verify that a claimant is too ill to work. The mechanism is local lodges combined with ritual. Claims were assessed by men from the same street and trade who knew whether you were ill, and sick-visiting was an obligation. The initiation rituals and regalia, which look ornamental, functioned as a barrier and a bond: costly to go through, meaningless outside the lodge.
Could serve: Olson (S3); Costly signals and Big Gods (S5) — the ritual point transfers directly; What modernity already did (S6), as the pre-welfare-state layer the state later absorbed.
Media: Rich material culture — regalia, banners, lodge certificates — well represented in UK museum collections. Photographs plentiful.
Source: Simon Cordery, British Friendly Societies, 1750–1914 (Palgrave, 2003); P. H. J. H. Gosden, The Friendly Societies in England, 1815–1875 (Manchester UP, 1961).

Raiffeisen rural credit cooperatives

What happened: Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen, a mayor in the Westerwald, organised rural credit associations from the 1860s — the Heddesdorf society of 1864 is the usual marker — to lend to farmers no commercial bank would touch. Members were jointly and severally liable, without limit, for the society's debts. The model spread across Germany and then internationally; it is the ancestor of much of European cooperative banking.
Why it's a collective action case: A credit market failing for lack of information about who is a good risk. The mechanism is unlimited joint liability, which converts the lender's monitoring problem into the members' own problem. If your neighbour's default can take your farm, you have both the incentive and the local knowledge to screen him — and you had it all along; the liability rule is what makes you use it. Membership confined to one parish kept the knowledge real.
Could serve: Changing the payoffs (S4); Repeated interaction and the folk theorem (S3).
Media: Raiffeisen museum at Hamm (Sieg), Germany; primary writings available. No documentary verified.
Source: Timothy W. Guinnane, "Cooperatives as Information Machines: German Rural Credit Cooperatives, 1883–1914", Journal of Economic History 61 (2001).

The Rochdale Pioneers

What happened: Twenty-eight weavers and others opened a cooperative store on Toad Lane, Rochdale, in December 1844, on a set of written rules — open membership, one member one vote, limited return on capital, and the dividend on purchases. The rules were copied widely and became the basis of the international cooperative movement.
Why it's a collective action case: The mechanism is the dividend on purchases — a selective incentive that ties a member's private return to their own loyalty to the shop, which is exactly the margin on which a consumer cooperative dies. One member one vote independent of shareholding is the other half: it blocks the takeover that would otherwise convert the thing into an ordinary firm.
Could serve: Olson (S3); Changing the payoffs (S4).
Media: The Toad Lane store is a museum (Rochdale Pioneers Museum); the original rules survive.
Source: George Jacob Holyoake, Self-Help by the People: The History of the Rochdale Pioneers (1858) — contemporary but partisan; Johnston Birchall, The International Co-operative Movement (Manchester UP, 1997).

Rotating savings and credit associations

What happened: A group contributes a fixed sum at fixed intervals and the whole pot goes to one member each round, until everyone has taken a turn. Found independently across the world — tanda in Mexico, susu in West Africa and the Caribbean, hui in China, ko and mujin in Japan, chit funds in India. Shirley Ardener's 1964 comparative survey is the standard starting point.
Why it's a collective action case: The structural problem is that whoever receives the first pot has every reason to walk away. The mechanism is repetition plus social collateral plus ordering: the group is drawn from people who cannot leave each other's lives — kin, neighbours, colleagues — so defection costs the relationship, and in many versions the order of payout is itself used as a sanction, with the untrusted placed last.
Could serve: Introduction to collective action (S1) — small, vivid, immediately graspable; Repeated interaction and the folk theorem (S3).
Media: None known in film. Ethnographic photographs exist.
Source: Shirley Ardener, "The Comparative Study of Rotating Credit Associations", Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 94 (1964); Clifford Geertz, "The Rotating Credit Association: A 'Middle Rung' in Development", Economic Development and Cultural Change 10 (1962).

The Hanseatic League

What happened: A confederation of northern German and Baltic merchant towns, operating from roughly the 13th to the 17th century, with trading posts (Kontore) at Bruges, London, Bergen and Novgorod. It had no standing army, no permanent treasury and only an irregular assembly, the Hansetag, yet it set trading terms, and enforced them against territorial rulers by boycott — notably against Bruges and against Norway.
Why it's a collective action case: A cooperating body with almost none of the apparatus of a state. The mechanism is collective boycott, backed by expulsion: a town that broke ranks lost Hansa privileges, which was worse than whatever it gained. That is a two-level punishment structure — the League punishes outsiders, and punishes members who fail to punish.
Contested: The League's cohesion is easy to overstate; it was frequently divided, and membership was never crisply defined.
Could serve: Polycentricity (S4); Did it ever work? (S4).
Media: European Hansemuseum, Lübeck. Charters and Kontor records survive.
Source: Philippe Dollinger, The German Hansa (Macmillan, 1970).

Mondragón

What happened: A federation of worker cooperatives in the Basque Country, begun by the priest José María Arizmendiarrieta, with the first cooperative (ULGOR) founded in 1956 and the cooperative bank, Caja Laboral, in 1959. It grew into one of the largest cooperative groups in the world, spanning industry, retail, finance and a university.
Why it's a collective action case: Worker cooperatives usually fail to scale because they cannot raise capital and cannot discipline shirking. The mechanism here is internal capital plus federation: the group's own bank recycles surpluses into new cooperatives, and inter-cooperative agreements pool risk, so a failing cooperative's members are relocated rather than fired. Arizmendiarrieta also built the technical school first and the firms second, which is a deliberate answer to the selection problem.
Contested: The 2013 collapse of Fagor Electrodomésticos, and the use of non-member employees in overseas subsidiaries, are standard criticisms and should be stated if the case is used.
Could serve: Polycentricity (S4); Changing the payoffs (S4).
Media: Several documentaries exist; I have not verified titles well enough to name one.
Source: William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte, Making Mondragón (ILR Press, 1988); Race Mathews, Jobs of Our Own (1999).

Treaties and agreements

The Montreal Protocol

What happened: Signed in 1987, in force 1989, phasing out CFCs and other ozone-depleting substances. Preceded by the Vienna Convention of 1985 and strengthened repeatedly afterwards. It is the standard counter-example to "big environmental treaties never work".
Why it's a collective action case: The mechanism worth teaching is not goodwill but a small number of producers, an available substitute, and trade restrictions against non-parties. CFC production was concentrated in a handful of firms in a handful of countries, which collapses the n in the diagnostic; substitutes existed, so the cost of compliance was bounded; and the treaty banned trade in controlled substances with non-parties, which makes staying outside worse than joining. There was also a fund to pay developing countries to comply, which is the selective incentive.
Could serve: Did it ever work? (S4) — this is the headline case, run against Kyoto; Introduction to collective action (S1).
Media: NASA's ozone hole visualisations are strong and public domain. Treaty text and negotiating history published by UNEP.
Source: Richard Elliot Benedick, Ozone Diplomacy (Harvard UP, 1991) — written by the lead US negotiator, so partisan but primary; Scott Barrett, Environment and Statecraft (Oxford UP, 2003) for the mechanism analysis.

The Antarctic Treaty

What happened: Signed in Washington in December 1959 by 12 states, including the US and USSR, in force 1961. It suspends territorial claims rather than resolving them, bans military activity and nuclear tests on the continent, provides for freedom of scientific research, and — unusually for its date — gives every party the right to inspect any other party's stations at any time, without notice.
Why it's a collective action case: The mechanism is unrestricted mutual inspection, agreed at the height of the Cold War, plus the decision to freeze rather than settle the underlying dispute. It is a working demonstration of Schelling's point that agreement between adversaries turns on verification, not trust, and of the idea that an unresolved conflict can be parked if the parking is mutual.
Could serve: Schelling (S4); Did it ever work? (S4); The first enlargement with no outside (S6), as a partial precedent for governing something nobody owns.
Media: Treaty text is short and readable — good primary source for a session. IGY-era photographs are plentiful.
Source: The Antarctic Treaty (1959), full text via the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat; Barrett, Environment and Statecraft (2003).

Smallpox eradication

What happened: Viktor Zhdanov, Soviet deputy health minister, proposed global eradication at the World Health Assembly in 1958, and a programme was adopted in 1959. It stalled, and was relaunched as the Intensified Smallpox Eradication Programme in 1967, with US funding and CDC staff alongside more than a billion doses of Soviet-supplied vaccine. The last naturally occurring case was in Somalia in 1977; eradication was certified in 1979 and declared by the World Health Assembly in 1980.
Why it's a collective action case: A global public good delivered while the two funders were pointing missiles at each other. Two mechanisms worth separating. First, the good is indivisible and final — eradication, once achieved, cannot be defected away from, so the payoff structure is a stag hunt rather than a dilemma. Second, the operational shift from mass vaccination to surveillance and ring containment — find a case, vaccinate everyone around it — which made the task affordable, and which is an observability fix, not a resource fix.
Could serve: Did it ever work? (S4); The games (S2) as a stag hunt; What modernity already did (S6).
Media: WHO holds extensive film and photography from the campaign. D. A. Henderson's and William Foege's memoirs are primary accounts.
Source: F. Fenner et al., Smallpox and Its Eradication (WHO, 1988) — the official history, freely available; William H. Foege, House on Fire (2011); Erez Manela, "A Pox on Your Narrative", Diplomatic History 34 (2010).

The Limited Test Ban Treaty

What happened: Signed in Moscow in August 1963 by the US, USSR and UK, banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in space and underwater, but not underground. Negotiated within a year of the Cuban missile crisis, after years of failed comprehensive test ban talks.
Why it's a collective action case: The instructive part is the failure that preceded it. A comprehensive ban was blocked on verification: underground tests could not then be distinguished from earthquakes without on-site inspection, and neither side would accept inspectors. The parties therefore agreed only over the range where cheating was detectable unilaterally — atmospheric tests show up as fallout, from your own territory, with no inspection required. The scope of the agreement was set by the monitoring technology, not by the level of trust.
Could serve: Schelling (S4) — arguably the single best illustration in the course of verification determining what can be agreed; Did it ever work? (S4).
Media: Extensive footage of atmospheric tests, and of the signing. Kennedy's July 1963 address on the treaty is on film.
Source: Glenn T. Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Test Ban (University of California Press, 1981); Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (1960) and Arms and Influence (1966) for the framework.

Cleaning up the Rhine

What happened: The Rhine ran through several countries with each dumping upstream of the next. The International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine was formed in 1950 with limited effect. On 1 November 1986 a fire at the Sandoz warehouse near Basel washed roughly 20 tonnes of agrochemicals into the river, killing fish along hundreds of kilometres. Within a year the states adopted the Rhine Action Programme (1987), with salmon returning to the river as its public target.
Why it's a collective action case: A textbook upstream–downstream externality where the upstream party has no incentive to act. The mechanism is a focal disaster plus a simple, publicly legible target. Nothing about the incentives changed in 1986; what changed was that a visible event made agreement politically possible and "bring the salmon back" gave a non-specialist public something to check progress against. Worth pairing with Schelling on focal points.
Could serve: Did it ever work? (S4); Schelling (S4).
Media: News footage of the Sandoz fire and the fish kill exists (November 1986). ICPR publishes monitoring data.
Source: Mark A. Cioc, The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815–2000 (University of Washington Press, 2002); ICPR programme documents.

Cooperative labour

Barn raising and the Amish frolic

What happened: In North American rural communities, particularly Amish and Mennonite ones, the frame of a barn is raised in a single day by scores of neighbours who arrive unpaid, with women provisioning and older men directing. The practice continues; it is regularly used after fires. It is one instance of a broader class of frolics — communal work days for threshing, quilting, butchering.
Why it's a collective action case: A lumpy task nobody can do alone and nobody can be paid to do, in a community that rejects insurance. The mechanism is a generalised obligation with no ledger: nobody records who owes whom, which works precisely because the group is closed, small, unlikely to move away, and religiously bound. It is an immediately legible demonstration of the diagnostic's questions 2 and 4 — everyone can see who turned up, and everyone will be there next time.
Could serve: Introduction to collective action (S1) — one of the best opening images available, and a success rather than a disaster; The cooperative ape (S3); Costly signals and Big Gods (S5).
Media: Photographed constantly; the barn raising sequence in Witness (Peter Weir, 1985) is the widely known film version, though it is a dramatised Hollywood depiction and should be labelled as such. Documentary footage also exists.
Source: Donald B. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture, rev. ed. (Johns Hopkins UP, 2001); John A. Hostetler, Amish Society, 4th ed. (1993).

Reciprocal labour institutions: ayni, minka, gotong royong, meitheal

What happened: Named institutions of reciprocal labour recur worldwide: ayni (balanced reciprocal labour between households) and minka/minga (community work for a shared good) in the Andes; gotong royong in Indonesia; meitheal in Ireland; tequio and faena in Mexico. Several are still functioning, and some are written into law — Mexican municipalities in Oaxaca govern partly through usos y costumbres including tequio obligations.
Why it's a collective action case: Useful for a specific analytical point: the difference between the balanced and the pooled forms. Ayni is a bilateral debt — you worked my field, I owe you a day — and is enforced by memory of an account between two households. Minka is a contribution to a shared good with no individual counterparty, and is enforced by the community as a whole with sanctions on non-attendance. That is the two-player case and the n-player case, named separately by the people who use them.
Contested: Terminology and practice vary considerably between regions and the literature does not use the words consistently; check any specific claim against a regional ethnography rather than a general source.
Could serve: The cooperative ape (S3); Olson (S3), on the difference size makes.
Media: Ethnographic photography exists. No specific film verified.
Source: For the Andes, Enrique Mayer, The Articulated Peasant (Westview, 2002), and Catherine J. Allen, The Hold Life Has (Smithsonian, 1988).

Cooperation under war

The live and let live system in the trenches

What happened: Along stretches of the Western Front between 1914 and 1918, opposing units arrived at tacit truces: shelling at predictable times and places, deliberate inaccuracy, ration parties left alone, no firing during bad weather. Tony Ashworth documented the practice from diaries, letters and veterans' testimony, and showed it was widespread rather than exceptional. High commands attacked it with raiding orders, which was how it was eventually broken.
Why it's a collective action case: The best available natural experiment on repeated play. The mechanism is an iterated prisoner's dilemma with reciprocity and a long shadow of the future — units facing each other for weeks, able to observe and retaliate immediately, with no communication required. What destroyed it is as instructive as what created it: the high command rotated units and ordered raids, which is a deliberate removal of repetition by a third party who wanted defection.
Could serve: Repeated interaction and the folk theorem (S3); The evolution of cooperation (S3); War (S1).
Media: Abundant WWI photography and film at the Imperial War Museum. Ashworth's source diaries are archival.
Source: Tony Ashworth, Trench Warfare 1914–1918: The Live and Let Live System (Macmillan, 1980); Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (1984), ch. 4, which reads Ashworth through tit-for-tat.

The Christmas truce, 1914

What happened: Over Christmas 1914, unofficial truces broke out at many points along the Western Front — soldiers met in no man's land, exchanged items, buried their dead, and in some places played football. It was widely reported in the press at the time and suppressed in subsequent years.
Why it's a collective action case: Worth teaching as a focal point rather than as a warm story. The problem for two hostile lines is that stepping out first is fatal unless you know the other side will hold fire, and there is no way to negotiate. A date both sides recognise as sacred solves the coordination problem without communication — it is common knowledge, and that is all that is required. The truce's fragility is also the point: it lasted precisely as long as the focal date did.
Contested: Romanticised heavily, including the football, whose extent is disputed by historians. Say so.
Media: Contemporary photographs exist. Joyeux Noël (Christian Carion, 2005) is the feature film; the Sainsbury's 2014 advertisement is a commercial dramatisation and best avoided. Letters home are the primary source and are published.
Source: Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton, Christmas Truce (Hodder, 1984); Stanley Weintraub, Silent Night (2001).

The Danish rescue, October 1943

What happened: When the German occupation ordered the deportation of Denmark's Jews in early October 1943, warning circulated in advance and roughly 7,200 Jews and some 700 non-Jewish relatives — around 95% of the community — were hidden and ferried across the Øresund to neutral Sweden by fishermen over about three weeks. 482 were caught and deported to Theresienstadt, where most survived, partly because Danish officials kept demanding access to them.
Why it's a collective action case: A very large number of strangers had to act, each at real risk, with no organisation, no leader and no time. The mechanism is worth being honest about rather than moralising: Denmark's occupation was unusually light and the Danish administration remained in place, which lowered the individual cost; the operation was partly paid for, with fishermen charging substantial fares; the sea crossing was short; and Sweden publicly announced it would accept the refugees, which supplied the destination and the common knowledge. Cooperation at that scale and speed needed the risk to be survivable and the destination to be certain.
Contested: The account is often told as spontaneous national virtue. The fares charged, the earlier Danish cooperation with the occupation, and Sweden's role complicate it. Bo Lidegaard's account addresses these.
Could serve: Introduction to collective action (S1); The cooperative ape (S3); War (S1).
Media: USHMM and Yad Vashem hold photographs and survivor testimony. The boats survive. Miracle at Midnight (1998) is a Disney TV dramatisation — check before using.
Source: Bo Lidegaard, Countrymen (Knopf, 2013); Leni Yahil, The Rescue of Danish Jewry (JPS, 1969); USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, "Rescue in Denmark".

Le Chambon-sur-Lignon

What happened: A Protestant village and the surrounding plateau in south-central France sheltered several thousand refugees, many of them Jewish children, between 1940 and 1944, organised in part around the pastor André Trocmé and the local Huguenot congregations. The figures usually given are in the range of 3,000–5,000 and are not precisely established.
Why it's a collective action case: The interesting question is why concealment held when one informer could have ended it. The mechanism appears to be a pre-existing minority identity with its own memory of persecution, and a network of congregations with a habit of collective action — the Huguenot history is doing work here that a generic appeal to conscience does not explain. Also an instance of deliberate non-observability: people were not told details they did not need, which limits what any single defection could destroy.
Contested: How centrally Trocmé organised things, versus a diffuse plateau effort, is disputed; Hallie's account is the heroic version and later historians have qualified it.
Could serve: The cooperative ape (S3); Costly signals and Big Gods (S5); Introduction to collective action (S1).
Media: Weapons of the Spirit (Pierre Sauvage, 1989) — documentary, made by someone born there while hidden. Strong primary material.
Source: Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (Harper & Row, 1979); Caroline Moorehead, Village of Secrets (2014), which challenges parts of it.

Standards and infrastructure

The Metre Convention

What happened: Signed in Paris on 20 May 1875 by 17 states, creating the International Bureau of Weights and Measures and a permanent structure for maintaining physical standards. Prototype metre and kilogram artefacts were manufactured and distributed to signatories in 1889. The structure it created still maintains the SI.
Why it's a collective action case: A pure coordination problem — the payoff comes from everyone using the same unit and nobody much cares which one, except that incumbents have sunk costs in their own. The mechanism is a permanent neutral body holding the physical artefact: rather than states agreeing on a definition and each interpreting it, one institution keeps the object and everyone else calibrates against it. The tell is that Britain and the US signed and still did not adopt metric domestically for a century, which shows how weak the mechanism is without a reason to actually switch.
Could serve: The games (S2), as a coordination problem distinct from a dilemma; What modernity already did (S6).
Media: The prototype artefacts are photographed and displayed; BIPM publishes historical material.
Source: The Metre Convention (1875), text via BIPM; Ken Alder, The Measure of All Things (Free Press, 2002), for the earlier French history.

Standard time and the prime meridian

What happened: North American railways adopted standardised time zones on 18 November 1883, replacing a patchwork of local solar times that made timetables and safe scheduling nearly impossible. The International Meridian Conference in Washington in October 1884 adopted Greenwich as the prime meridian, with France abstaining and continuing to use the Paris meridian for decades.
Why it's a collective action case: Coordination again, with a visible distributional fight over which convention, which is the part usually left out. The mechanism is a private actor large enough to move first: the railways imposed the zones on themselves before any government legislated, and everyone else followed because clocks that disagreed with the station clock were useless. That is Olson's privileged group — one player big enough to supply the good alone — and it is rare enough to be worth a case.
Could serve: Olson (S3) — the privileged group; The games (S2); Why this matters so much now (S1), on infrastructure preceding governance.
Media: The 1884 conference proceedings are published and readable. Photographs of railway time standardisation exist.
Source: Ian R. Bartky, Selling the True Time (Stanford UP, 2000); proceedings of the International Meridian Conference (1884).

The International Telegraph Union and the Universal Postal Union

What happened: The International Telegraph Union was founded in Paris in 1865 by 20 states to make telegrams cross borders without being re-transcribed at each frontier. The General Postal Union was founded at Bern in 1874 and renamed the Universal Postal Union in 1878, on the principle that each country keeps the postage it collects and delivers incoming foreign mail without further charge. Both still exist, now as UN agencies.
Why it's a collective action case: The UPU's mechanism is the elegant one. Settling accounts between every pair of countries for every letter is administratively impossible, so the UPU abolished the accounting instead of automating it — you keep what you collect, you deliver what arrives, and it roughly balances. An agreement that removes the need for monitoring is structurally stronger than one that monitors well, and that generalises.
Could serve: Changing the payoffs (S4); What modernity already did (S6); Polycentricity (S4).
Media: UPU monument in Bern; founding treaty texts published. No film verified.
Source: Treaty of Bern (1874), text via UPU; Craig N. Murphy, International Organization and Industrial Change (Polity, 1994).

Container shipping standards

What happened: Malcom McLean ran the first container voyage in 1956. Incompatible box sizes and corner fittings across carriers then threatened to make the technology useless, since a container that cannot be lifted by the next port's crane is just a badly shaped crate. Standard dimensions and corner castings were settled through US and ISO committee work in the early and mid-1960s, with ISO standards issued from 1968. Costs collapsed and world trade patterns changed.
Why it's a collective action case: A network good whose value to each adopter depends on how many others adopted, with incumbents holding incompatible proprietary designs. The mechanism is standardisation imposed partly by a large buyer — US military shipping requirements during Vietnam pushed the industry toward common dimensions faster than negotiation alone would have. Another privileged-group case, and a reminder that standards bodies often ratify what a big player has already forced.
Could serve: Olson (S3); Changing the payoffs (S4); Why this matters so much now (S1), on the speed of technology relative to governance.
Media: Extensive photography of early container operations. Levinson's book is the accessible account.
Source: Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton UP, 2006).

Knowledge commons before the internet

The Republic of Letters

What happened: From the 16th to the 18th century, European scholars maintained a correspondence network across religious and political lines, exchanging results, specimens, books and introductions. Some correspondents — Mersenne in Paris, Oldenburg in London, Peiresc in Provence — acted as hubs, relaying letters between people who had never met.
Why it's a collective action case: A positive commons where the failure mode is undersupply — the individual incentive is to keep a discovery private until you can profit from it, which is what the alchemical tradition did. The mechanism is credit: contribution converted into reputation, and reputation into position. Sharing became the way to be known, and being known was the way to get patronage, so disclosure and self-interest were aligned rather than opposed. The hubs matter too — a network with brokers reaches far more people per letter written.
Could serve: Ostrom and the commons (S3), under positive commons; Henrich and the trust of strangers (S5).
Media: The Stanford Mapping the Republic of Letters project has visualisations of the correspondence networks, and much of the correspondence is digitised and online (Early Modern Letters Online, Oxford).
Source: Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning (Yale UP, 1995); Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature (1994).

Philosophical Transactions and the invention of priority

What happened: The Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions, begun by Henry Oldenburg in 1665, published dated accounts of experimental findings and correspondence. Before it, discoveries were routinely concealed or published as anagrams to reserve a claim without revealing it. Dated publication gave a public record of who had found what, and when.
Why it's a collective action case: This is the mechanism entry for positive commons and it deserves to be taught separately from the Republic of Letters. Priority is a selective incentive built on top of a public good. Publishing gives the finding away, which is the contribution; the date stamp gives the author something nobody else can have, which is the payment. It converts a good that is undersupplied into one people compete to supply. Nearly everything about modern open knowledge is downstream of it.
Could serve: Olson (S3) — selective incentives, in a form the audience won't expect; Ostrom and the commons (S3), positive commons; The reframe (S2).
Media: The full run of Philosophical Transactions is digitised and openly accessible via the Royal Society. Early issues make good slide material.
Source: Robert K. Merton, "Priorities in Scientific Discovery", American Sociological Review 22 (1957); Mario Biagioli and Peter Galison (eds), Scientific Authorship (2003); Royal Society archives.

The International Geophysical Year, 1957–58

What happened: An 18-month coordinated global research programme running July 1957 to December 1958, involving around 67 countries including both the US and the USSR, covering the upper atmosphere, oceans, glaciology and Antarctica. Data were deposited in World Data Centres deliberately duplicated across political blocs so that no party could withhold them. Sputnik was launched as an IGY contribution. The Antarctic Treaty came directly out of it.
Why it's a collective action case: The mechanism is mirrored archives: rather than trusting the other side to share, each bloc held a full copy of the data, which removed the incentive to withhold by removing the advantage of withholding. That is a structural solution to an information commons problem during a period of maximum distrust, and it is a design move rather than a gesture of goodwill.
Could serve: Ostrom and the commons (S3), positive commons; Schelling (S4); Did it ever work? (S4).
Media: Substantial contemporary film and photography; NOAA and NAS hold IGY records and the World Data Centre system still exists in successor form.
Source: Fae L. Korsmo, "The Origins and Principles of the World Data Center System", Data Science Journal (2010); Walter Sullivan, Assault on the Unknown (McGraw-Hill, 1961) — contemporary journalism, so check specifics.

Gaps worth filling

Things this list does not yet cover, noted so the next pass doesn't have to rediscover them:

Islamic waqf endowments — a long-lived institution for funding public goods, running for centuries. Included here only as a pointer because I have not checked the literature.
Indigenous fire management regimes in Australia and North America, which are commons institutions of a kind the Ostrom literature largely misses.
The abolition of the Atlantic slave trade as a case of a state acting against its own short-run interest and then coercing others into the same position — a coercion case, and an ugly one, since enforcement was done by the Royal Navy.
Swiss Allmend beyond Törbel, and the Alpine commons of Austria and Italy, where the comparative record is better than the single-village accounts suggest.
The Grameen Bank group lending model (1976 onward), which is joint liability again and sits just inside the pre-1990 boundary.