Governing the Commons

Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, published in 1990 by Cambridge University Press, is Elinor Ostrom's founding text of the Bloomington School branch of New Institutional Economics. Drawing on decades of empirical fieldwork on real irrigation systems, fisheries, forests and grazing lands around the world, Ostrom showed that communities repeatedly design and enforce their own durable rules for managing shared common-pool resources sustainably, through monitoring, graduated sanctions and mutual enforcement, without requiring either privatization of the resource or top-down control by a central government, the two solutions Garrett Hardin's 1968 tragedy-of-the-commons thesis had treated as the only ways to prevent overuse.