Taking a common-pool resources approach to space sustainability: A framework and potential policies

Throughout the world, there is a growing interest in communities' self-governance of natural resources. However, many self-governance initiatives proceed with difficulty, particularly when these initiatives conflict with established rules and institutions. This paper addresses the question of the extent to which, and under what conditions, self-governance initiatives can become successful in heavily regulated policy fields. It, therefore, analyses a self-governance initiative by a Dutch farmers' association from two theoretical perspectives: Ostrom's institutional design principles and insights from the politics of self-governance. Whereas, Ostrom's principles focus on arranging interactions between the members of a self-governing community and their common resources, the focus of the politics literature is on the negotiations between the community and the governmental authorities to obtain room for self-governance. The paper reveals how the arrangements within the association influenced the negotiation between this community and the involved authorities, and vice versa. This mutual relationship can both positively and negatively influence the accomplishment of self-governance. Adequate self-governance arrangements can help to convince policy-makers to provide room in existing policies to accommodate self-governance. Conversely, policy-makers can help to set conditions for designing successful arrangements. Otherwise, both processes can negatively reinforce each other, and this can result in stalemates and blockades.

Common Property Resources (CPRs) have become a topic of scholarly research and attention, only after publication of an article entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons” by Garrett Hardin (1968). It is well established fact that CPRs and its allied products play vital role in promoting sustainable rural development and thus there is a need to understand the perception of local people in management of CPRs (Olo Mola, 1993). In this context, the Theory of Collective Action, also known as Theory of Public Goods, can provide the basis for understanding the conditions under which the users of CPRs will act and react on the utilization CPRs and the major problems confronted in using the CPRs. Traditional economic theories recognize and focus only two types of property viz public and individual. But there is third dimension of property as CPRs, which have been traditionally recognized by the rural society. They CPRs are playing a crucial role in people’s survival and particularly in community development of “Rural India” - real India according to our future of Nation Mahatma Gandhiji. In rural environment of India, both ecological and socio economic sustainability is largely determined by the status of CPRs and rights. In this context (Jodha 1995) and (Singh 1994) are rightly pointed out that CPRs are owned in common by identifiable group of people, regulated by social convention and legally enforceable rules. Further, CPRs are resources accessible to the whole community of a village to which no individual has exclusive property rights. In short CPRs is subject to individual use, but not to individual position. Cross root evidences show that CPRs have made significant contribution to rural mass and they are: providing physical products, generating income, promoting social culture gains, bringing environmental/ecological benefits. With this background, the researchers have made an attempt to study “People’s perception on CPRs management in Thamaraikulam Village of Dindigul District”, by carving out the following objectives such as (i) to study the socio economic conditions of the sample users of CPRs in the study area; (ii) to examine the extend in which the CPRs are used and managed by the sample households; (iii) to identify the major problems in using and many the CPRs; and (iv) to suggest ways and means for effective utilization of CPRs for betterment of village community. The researchable issues and questing raised are: What are the CPRs available to the village community? How these resources are being utilized and managed for the well being of the community as a whole and individual in particular? What are the constraints found by the community for sustainability of CPRs usage? This micro level research provides feasible, viable possible and sustainable solution to these issues and questions.

This paper addresses a series of fundamental issues relating to the governance of common-pool resources at multiple scales. Perhaps the most important question is whether the tragedy of the commons, as first articulated in Hardin's 1968 Science article, is inevitable. For many policy analysts the answer to that question is usually no. Avoiding the tragedy, however, is contingent on their policy prescription being adopted. The range of preferred approaches includes government ownership or private property. Some scholars will recommend community property. In the main, simple solutions are posed for complex problems. best is proposed by many analysts to a wide variety of problems. Ecological diversity is something that many of us feel strongly should be protected. There is considerable interest in preserving biodiversity as one form of global commons. On the other hand, a frequent way of maintaining ecological diversity has been to reduce or eliminate institutional diversity at a variety of scales including indigenous local institutions as well as institutions at other scales. I would argue that we need as serious attention to the problem of understanding institutional diversity as we do understanding ecological diversity. We need to build on that understanding rather than presume that there is a single, best way. At the current time, a large gap exists between policy recommendations about the commons and findings from empirical research. Underlying contemporary policy recommendations are three basic assumptions. One of the basic assumptions has to do with individuals using resources, e.g., fishermen, grazers, irrigators, farmers, users of the radio spectrum, and those of us who send smoke into the air, etc. All of these users are appropriating from a resource. We will use the term appropriator as the general, technical term for users or harvesters. A common assumption is that appropriators are trapped in tragic overuse of most resources. Thus, whatever the solutions to overuse are, they must come from the outside. This perception is based on a series of assumptions. This first one emerges from training in economics--which offers a narrow model of the individual that is useful for many purposes. When it is applied as a general theory, however, it leads to a presumption that all appropriators are norm-free, short-term maximizers of selfish gains. In the same policy analyses, government officials are assumed to be people who maximize the public interest. Do public officials have different genes? How come individuals are narrow and selfish and government officials seek out the public interest? We need to reflect on how we arrived at these two disparate assumptions. Secondly, there is a shared belief that it is feasible to design optimal rules by modelling and analysis. Models are useful, but it is unlikely, if not impossible, that one can get to optimality for a complex system through modelling. The third assumption that is frequently made is that to be organized you have to have a central direction. Unless the policy analysis finds a single central authority, an assumption that organization is lacking is made. These three basic assumptions underlie a good deal of our current policy thinking. I will argue that all three are incorrect. All three are a poor foundation for public policy. The management and governance of the commons at multiple scales is a cogent example of how these assumptions are in error. What are Common-Pool Resources? Common-pool resources generate limited amounts of resource units that can be fish, mushrooms, timber, water. A variety of resources exist that have a finite stock at any particular time. One person's use subtracts from the corpus or stock. Thus subtractibility is a core concept in defining a common-pool resource. Secondly, it is difficult to exclude individuals who might benefit from using common-pool resources. …

Public employee pension management is the nexus of public and private financial management systems that are significant long-term components of public finance. The idea that these pension systems can look quite similar yet perform in quite different and conflicting ways is significant when designing policy; system design templates are not successful in complex systems. Even pension systems within the same city can have radically different states of actuarial health based upon small differences in the rules (or adherence to the rules) establishing them. To better understand such systems, viewing them from a common pool resource perspective is useful. Elinor Ostrom (1990) , in her seminal book Governing the Commons, provides eight principles that facilitate governing common pool resources. The general theme running through Ostrom's principles is the need to facilitate the building and channeling of social capital. By facilitating constructive collective choice, the goal of effective, sustainable collective action is achievable. In this study, we examine the political, cultural, and institutional structures that are in place in the pension systems of Dallas and Houston, Texas. We examine the pensions’ governance practices to determine which appear to violate Ostrom's ideal institutional arrangements and their impact on the pensions’ long-term sustainability. Pertinent survey information from pension beneficiaries conducted as part of this research are provided

The tragedy of the commons has been an influential metaphor in the environmental movement, not only referring to the misappropriation of common property resources by private producers, but also incorporating a variety of other issues into the metaphorical commons. Criticisms of the thesis have concentrated on the facts of how humans manage classical common property resources in the real world. Yet the most provocative aspects of the metaphor are associated with its more general usage for resources not usually thought of as manageable common property resources. A full analysis of the tragedy of the commons reveals important political insights into the environmental consequences of capitalism, especially the tendency for externalization of many production costs, suggesting that a more appropriate title for the thesis might be the tragedy of the privately owned sheep.

The aim of behavior analysis has always been to apply technologies rooted in basic behavioral principles to problems of societal importance (e.g., Skinner, 1948; 1953; 1987). One such problem is the Tragedy of the Commons - a phenomenon arising from systemic failures among a community, leading to the total collapse of a critical resource (Hardin, 1968). Elinor Ostrom's Eight Design Principles were developed to provide a framework for the self-management of common pool resources (CPRs; Ostrom, 1990/2015). When applied as an independently manipulated variable, Ostrom's design principles have shown strong effects in the management of CPRs within the context of a tabletop board game Catan® (Smith & Becker, 2023). This preparation included both rewards (i.e., positive reinforcement) and sanctions (i.e., positive punishment) as a feature of the independent variable. However, it has been well documented that punishing and coercive contingencies can lead to problematic outcomes for individuals and societies (e.g., Sidman, 2001; Skinner, 1976). This study evaluated the effects of utilizing only rewarding consequences in lieu of sanctions in an effort to produce the previously observed control over self-management of a CPR, utilizing the previously adapted rules of the Catan® board game.

Millions of people across rural India depend on and share the ‘common’ (community) natural resources like forest, wasteland, grazing land, water resources, etc., for their livelihoods, whereas developing such ‘common resources’ through collective action for the sustainable village development is a challenging task for the rural community. The study analyses the community participation of Hiware Bazar village of Maharashtra in governance and management of common property resources for sustainable village development. This study adopts both descriptive and analytical research methodologies to understand various developmental initiatives and its overall impact of the watershed-plus and other attenuating measures on the social and economic lives of the people in Hiware Bazar. The study uses both qualitative and quantitative data that are collected through primary and secondary sources. The study finds that community-driven common resources management had impacted on rural households through increased employment and income. The social and economic integration of the people in Hiware Bazar led to social, economic and environmental transformations for sustainable development of the village.

ABSTRACTNatural resource tenure and economic feasibility of resource‐based activities are two of the most important issues in the current debate around environmental degradation and rural poverty. While many analyses have blamed the ‘tragedy of the commons’ and government mismanagement for environmental destruction, this paper provides a case study of resin tapping in Honduras which formulates the hypotheses that common property regimes can be successful and that economic liberalization policies may be detrimental to community‐level resource schemes. Over half of the 6000 farmer‐resin tappers in Honduras are organized into forty‐six co‐operatives that market the tree sap, wood and other forest products. These activities combine the twin goals of community‐based forest preservation and income generation. Established legally in 1974, the tapping groups have expanded to include a variety of organizational and technical arrangements. The two co‐operatives of Villa Santa and San Juan de Ojojona demonstrate contrasting histories, ecological endowments and economic outcomes. Currently the Honduran resin tappers are facing problems over their access to forest resources, the fluctuating profitability of extractive activities and the stability of the co‐operative organization. These three issues are relevant to a variety of community‐based environmental activities, and the lessons of the Honduran experience can be applied to analyse the processes of environmental degradation and community response elsewhere in the Third World.

‘The tragedy of the commons’ arises when it is difficult and costly to exclude potential users from common-pool resources that yield finite flows of benefits, as a result of which those resources will be exhausted by rational, utility-maximizing individuals rather than conserved for the benefit of all. Pessimism about the possibility of users voluntarily cooperating to prevent overuse has led to widespread central control of common-pool resources. But such control has itself frequently resulted in resource overuse. In practice, especially where they can communicate, users often develop rules that limit resource use and conserve resources.

A field study on cooperativeness and impatience in the Tragedy of the Commons

First principles of thermodynamics imply that metabolic pathways are faced with a trade-off between the rate and yield of ATP production. Simple evolutionary models argue that this trade-off generates a fundamental social conflict in microbial populations: average fitness in a population is highest if all individuals exploit common resources efficiently, but individual reproductive rate is maximized by consuming common resources at the highest possible rate, a scenario known as the tragedy of the commons. In this paper, I review studies that have addressed two key questions: What is the evidence that the rate-yield trade-off is an evolutionary constraint on metabolic pathways? And, if so, what determines evolutionary outcome of the conflicts generated by this trade-off? Comparative studies and microbial experiments provide evidence that the rate-yield trade-off is an evolutionary constraint that is driven by thermodynamic constraints that are common to all metabolic pathways and pathway-specific constraints that reflect the evolutionary history of populations. Microbial selection experiments show that the evolutionary consequences of this trade-off depend on both kin selection and biochemical constraints. In well-mixed populations with low relatedness, genotypes with rapid and efficient metabolism can coexist as a result of negative frequency-dependent selection generated by density-dependent biochemical costs of rapid metabolism. Kin selection can promote the maintenance of efficient metabolism in structured populations with high relatedness by ensuring that genotypes with efficient metabolic pathways gain an indirect fitness benefit from their competitive restraint. I conclude by suggesting avenues for future research and by discussing the broader implications of this work for microbial social evolution.

Garrett Hardin's idea of the "tragedy of the commons" is widely invoked in the discussions of conservation and natural resource management. Many teachers of environmental studies use classroom simulations to introduce students to the "tragedy of the commons" and its implications. This chapter describes an activity in which students are asked to take the role of herders who are all given the same initial amount of cattle and cash. Each year they have an opportunity to buy cows and receive income from the sale of milk and excess calves. Everyone's purchases are summed up and a formula is used in the chapter to calculate a figure for the income per cow during the year from milk and calves. In this formula, the income declines once the combined herd on the common pasture exceeds some threshold, and the pasture becomes overgrazed.

In the conditions of permanent crisis of the economic system of Ukraine it is very important to organize an integral market economy. Entrepreneurship is an important element of the market economy and entrepreneurship in public sphere is an element of civil participation in governing of economy in formed liberal democracy. Accordingly, the purpose of the article is to form the theory of economic self-organization of groups of different sizes, on the basis of joint ownership and settlement of subjective, differently directed interests in conditions of limited resources, information and institutional imperfection of the government structure. The main methods used are institutional analysis and economic hermeneutic. In general, we used structural and logical analysis, inductive generalization. While general Ukraine scientific thought is torn between a competitive market and planned industrialization, with explicit Marx sentiments, the authors propose as one way to solve the problem the concept of public entrepreneurship. This theory arose as a response to the "tragedy of commons" class of problems, where neither state regulation nor private property give a satisfactory results. These problems concerned mainly natural renewable resources or common pool resources and, potentially, the problem of sustained economy in general. However, the authors, in the article, suggest that along with solving the problems of self-restorative resources, the concept of public entrepreneurship can be perceived more widely in situations where neither the market nor the government don’t work satisfactory, regardless of the nature of the reasons themselves. That is, if the theory of public entrepreneurship was formed to a specific level of problems, as an alternative to the market and government regulation, in addition to its basic field, where it was presumed the satisfactory efficiency level of the state bureaucracy and the formed market, the theory can be expanded to the situation of non-operation of the state apparatus due to corruption and the lack of a competitive market due to the weakness of the rule of law. Researching of mechanisms for entrepreneurship development in the public sphere, in the interests of society, with purpose to create public value, will allow to formulate conceptual prerequisites for mobilizing the entrepreneurial and organizational potential of Ukrainian society.

Simple movement rules result in ideal free distribution of mobile pastoralists

The theory of the anticommons opens up a new approach for legal research into Public International Law. This article demonstrates that anticommons structures can be readily located in the legal rules and legal institutions of public international law and its many affiliated substantive areas of law, such as in International Environmental Law. It provides an introduction and survey of the existing research into anticommons and sets out a list of the known potential solutions to anticommons structures. As such, it is demonstrated that legal researchers would benefit from a greater familiarity with current research in the field of anticommons theory. This article provides legal researchers with the frameworks necessary to begin research on anticommons in Public International Law.The model knowns as the ‘Tragedy of the Anticommons’ is a symmetrical reflection to the ‘Tragedy of the Commons,’ in that both models work on the extremes of having or not having exclusionary rights over a common resource or completion of a joint endeavor. Both models result in reduced benefits, or welfare, from the underlying resource albeit on different mechanisms.When this common resource or joint endeavor is a legal service, legal right, or legal procedure, one can have a legal anticommons; when the issue is based in complementary or competitive regulatory processes, one can obtain a regulatory anticommons. Evidence is presented that both legal and regulatory anticommons can be found in Public International Law.Given that there are anticommons in the rule sets and legal institutions of Public International Law, policy makers should be able to locate and characterize those anticommons to better identify which problems are thus created and which frustrations in public international law can be avoided or ameliorated.