Construct · 1 fields · 3 citations

tragedy of the commons: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

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tragedy ofthe commons1 CONSTRUCTCommons dilemmaHARDIN · COMMONS

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Political science, ecology, and economics

A shared resource depleted by individually rational overuse

Garrett Hardin's 1968 essay in Science coined the phrase and framed the problem: in a pasture open to all, each herder collects the full gain from adding one more animal while the cost of overgrazing is spread across everyone, so each acts rationally by adding animals until the shared resource is ruined. The mechanism had an antecedent in William Forster Lloyd's 1833 Oxford lectures, which used the crowded common to argue that resources held in common are overused. Elinor Ostrom's 1990 book Governing the Commons is the authoritative refinement, documenting how many real communities escape this outcome through self-organised rules, monitoring, and graduated penalties rather than only through privatisation or government control. As a landmark, the construct names one specific structural conflict between individual incentive and collective outcome for a resource that is rivalrous, meaning one person's use leaves less for others, yet hard to exclude users from, such as a fishery, groundwater, or the atmosphere, and it is the reference case for the broader study of common-pool resources and collective-action problems.[1][2][3]

Unit
A structural social dilemma over a shared, depletable resource, described qualitatively or modelled game-theoretically
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Identified where a resource is rivalrous in use yet costly to exclude users from and appropriation outpaces the regeneration rate; studied through field cases, common-pool-resource experiments, and game-theoretic models

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Nearby constructs

resource4 fields · 6 citationsjingle · one word, four constructsexternality3 fields · 5 citationsjingle · one word, three constructscollective action4 names · 5 citationsjangle · the free-rider problem, four verdicts

References

  1. Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243–1248. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.162.3859.1243
  2. Lloyd, W. F. (1833). Two lectures on the checks to population. Oxford University.
  3. Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511807763

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