Complex Ecological-Economic Systems and Their Governance Issues

The late Elinor Ostrom was the person who most clearly saw through the supposed dilemma called the “tragedy of the commons” (Hardin 1968; Ostrom 1990). It was widely argued that managing common property resources was an impossible proposition, that either common property is privatized in some way or else there will be an inevitable tendency for the resource to be overharvested, possibly to complete destruction or exhaustion. Such outcomes were seen as inevitable outcomes of prisoner dilemma games where agents using common property resources will fail to cooperate üwith one another and instead seek to get as much of the resource for themselves as soon as possible. However, she understood from early in her work (Ostrom 1976) that people seek to work out arrangements for managing common property resources. As she studied this phenomenon over time she came to realize that different groups pursue different solutions. This led her to pose the concept of polycentricity and the importance of institutional diversity around the world, based on local circumstances and cultures (Ostrom 2005, 2012).