Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

Neither the state nor the market has been consistently successful in limiting the use of natural resources to ensure their long-term economic viability. However, some communities of individuals have relied on other institutions to do so with some success. Ostrom criticizes the foundations of policy analysis when applied to natural resource management. She wishes to present case studies of successful and unsuccessful efforts to govern these resources in order to attempt to develop better intellectual tools to understand the governance of natural resources.

Academics have often relied on three models to explain why individuals themselves cannot govern natural resources. The first is called the “tragedy of the commons.” When people rely on public land to graze their animals, they are incentivized to overgraze. Each individual wants to get as much food as possible before the resource runs out. Unfortunately, those individual incentives lead to the destruction of the resource. Associated with the phrase “everybody’s property is nobody’s property” (3), the tragedy of the commons applies to many of the world’s resources. 

The second model is “the prisoner’s dilemma.” If two people are arrested for a crime and separated, the best option for each would be to say nothing.