The Tragedy of the Commons and Global Commons

In 1968 ecologist Garrett Hardin published The Tragedy of the Commons, arguing that when a resource is open to all, each person has an incentive to overuse it, leading to ruin. He used the example of herders on a shared pasture. The idea influenced thinking about global commons, resources that belong to no single country, such as the high seas, the atmosphere, Antarctica and outer space. Treaties tried to manage some of these, including the Antarctic Treaty (1959) and the Outer Space Treaty (1967).

Economist Elinor Ostrom challenged Hardin's pessimism, showing in Governing the Commons (1990) that many communities manage shared resources successfully through local rules; in 2009 she became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics. The debate asks whether shared resources need privatization, government control or cooperative rules. It provides a framework for understanding many global environmental problems.