![]() ![]() If all herders made this individually rational economic decision, the common could be depleted or even destroyed, to the detriment of all. For each additional animal, a herder could receive additional benefits, while the whole group shared the resulting damage to the commons. He postulated that if a herder put more than his allotted number of cattle on the common, overgrazing could result. This was the situation of cattle herders sharing a common parcel of land on which they were each entitled to let their cows graze, as was the custom in English villages. In 1833, the English economist William Forster Lloyd published a pamphlet which included a hypothetical example of over-use of a common resource. Lloyd used shared grazing of common land as an illustration of where abuse of rights could occur. It has also been used in analyzing behavior in the fields of economics, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, game theory, politics, taxation, and sociology. In environmental science, the "tragedy of the commons" is often cited in connection with sustainable development, meshing economic growth and environmental protection, as well as in the debate over global warming. ![]() In a legal context, it is a type of property that is neither private nor public, but rather held jointly by the members of a community, who govern access and use through social structures, traditions, or formal rules. In a modern economic context, " commons" is taken to mean any open-access and unregulated resource such as the atmosphere, oceans, rivers, ocean fish stocks, or even an office refrigerator. If it were, the destruction of nature would not have occurred." On the other hand, Dieter Helm argues that these examples are context-specific and the tragedy of the commons "is not generally solved this way. Elinor Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for demonstrating this concept in her book Governing the Commons, which included examples of how local communities were able to do this without top-down regulations or privatization. Īlthough open-access resource systems may collapse due to overuse (such as in overfishing), many examples have existed and still do exist where members of a community with regulated access to a common resource co-operate to exploit those resources prudently without collapse, or even creating "perfect order". Īlthough taken as a hypothetical example by Lloyd, the historical demise of the commons of Britain and Europe resulted not from misuse of long-held rights of usage by the commoners, but from the commons' owners enclosing and appropriating the land, abrogating the commoners' rights. Faced with evidence of historical and existing commons, Hardin later retracted his original thesis, stating that the title should have been "The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons". The concept became widely known as the "tragedy of the commons" over a century later after an article written by Garrett Hardin in 1968. ![]() The concept originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land (also known as a "common") in Great Britain and Ireland. In economics, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action. Industrial pollution is one of the consequences of operators ignoring their effect on the shared environment. ![]()
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