Ecological Economics: Basic concepts

Lecture 06
Common Property Resources and
Commons Institutions
 Common Property Resources

❑ Available to everyone but one person’s uses diminishes other people

use (rival)

❑ Overuse is often a problem (e.g. overfishing, overgrazing).

❑ Garrett Hardin (1968) has called this problem “The Tragedy of

Commons”

❑ “Tragedy of commons” is essentially about open access resources to

which everyone has access without any limitation and regulation.

❑ Open access resources are usually confused with Common property

resources; but common property resources are not necessarily
open access.
How to manage common property resources?

Challenges involves in common property

resource management?
Governance of Common Property Resources
(CPR)- Prof. Elinor’s perspective

“The use of common property resources may be

regulated by customs, traditional rules, social
norms of communities (Prof. Elinor Ostrom,
Nobel Prize Winner 2009)”.
 Governance of Common Property Resources
(CPR)- Prof. Elinor’s perspective

❑ Given the right form of institutions, Ostrom suggests, the commons can be
managed from the “bottom-up” perspective for a shared prosperity.

❑ For ex. she demonstrated the importance of involving farmer-users in the

design and management of irrigation systems for successful local resource
management policies in Nepal.

❑ Work in Asia demonstrated that large, centralised and essentially top-down

government management systems tended to underperform, with lower rates of
return on investment than systems where incentives to engineers were aligned to
those of local farmer-users with their active participation.
‘Polycentric Systems of Governance can make CPR
sustainable if it consider “Bottom-up” approach’--
Prof. Elinor’s findings
Note: Vincent Ostrom, Charles Tiebout, and Robert Warren (1961) introduced the concept
of “Polycentricity.” Vincent Ostrom is the Husband of Prof. Elinor

Source: Morrision et al. 2019

Fig. Key concepts and dominant interpretations of power relevant to polycentric environmental governance.
Source: Morrision et al. 2019