Tragedy of the Commons, Concepts
Standing
Concerns Description
Currently States The tragedy of the commons describes a situation in which individuals acting in their own rational self-interest deplete a shared resource, even though this outcome works against the long-term interest of the whole group. The term was popularized by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in a 1968 essay arguing that a shared pasture open to every herder would inevitably be overgrazed, because each herder captures the full benefit of adding one more animal while the cost of overgrazing is spread across everyone. Hardin's own prescriptive conclusion, that only privatizing the resource or imposing centralized government control could prevent this outcome, is contested. Elinor Ostrom's empirical research, recognized by the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, showed that communities frequently design and enforce their own durable rules for sustainable collective management, without either solution.
The underlying dynamic Hardin described, that an open access resource tends toward overuse absent some constraint, is widely accepted; what remains debated is his narrower prescriptive claim that only privatization or state control can supply that constraint, a claim Ostrom's fieldwork challenged directly.
Source The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics