Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges

In a seminal paper, Garrett Hardin argued in 1968 that users of a commons are caught in an inevitable process that leads to the destruction of the resources on which they depend. This article discusses new insights about such problems and the conditions most likely to favor sustainable uses of common-pool resources. Some of the most difÞcult challenges concern the management of large-scale resources that depend on international cooperation, such as fresh water in international basins or large marine ecosystems. Institutional diversity may be as important as biological diversity for our long-term survival. T hirty years have passed since GarrettHardin’s influential article “The Trag-edy of the Commons ” (1). At first, many people agreed with Hardin’s metaphor that the users of a commons are caught in an inevitable process that leads to the destruc-tion of the very resource on which they de-pend. The “rational ” user of a commons, Hardin argued, makes demands on a resourc