Reversing the ‘Tragedy’ of the Commons? Sustainable Management and the Commons Act 2006

Trade, Tragedy, and the Commons

Many of the world’s major renewable resource stocks are in a state of decline. This is true for capture fisheries, for forests in developing countries, and for many measures of the biosphere’s health. Other renewable resources, including many species of wildlife, marine mammals, and Coral reefs, are also under threat. While poverty and government corruption are surely responsible for some of th...

The Ultimate Tragedy of Commons

Demography and the tragedy of the commons.

Individual success in group-structured populations has two components. First, an individual gains by outcompeting its neighbours for local resources. Second, an individual's share of group success must be weighted by the total productivity of the group. The essence of sociality arises from the tension between selfish gains against neighbours and the associated loss that selfishness imposes by d...

Ecology and the Tragedy of the Commons

This paper develops mathematical models of the tragedy of the commons analogous to ecological models of resource consumption. Tragedies differ fundamentally from predator–prey relationships in nature because human consumers of a resource are rarely controlled solely by that resource. Tragedies do occur, however, at the level of the ecosystem, where multiple species interactions are involved. Hu...

On Averting the Tragedy of the Commons

STEPHEN KAPLAN Department of Psychology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science University of Michigan 3418 Mason Hall Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1027, USA ABSTRACT / One of the enduring facts of the human condition is that the earth's resources are finite and its environment fragile. It is also evident that human behavior is rarely based on an appreciation of these facts. While the outl...