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Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons" is a classic piece of academic literature in geography and cognate fields. Applying theories of embodied cognition and performance pedagogies, this paper presents a classroom-based activity that can be used to teach the concepts of "The Tragedy of the Commons" in a way that will likely intersect with students' own lived experiences more meaningfully than Hardin's central example of a group of livestock owners making use of a shared field for grazing. The activity involves a dialogue among five student volunteer actors that iteratively portrays a group of friends trying to negotiate their own advantages alongside a sense of equity in the context of dividing the cost of a shared meal. During and after the performance, key opportunities are presented for the instructor to lead a discussion about Hardin's "tragedy" as well as the solutions he proposes by which it might be overcome. The model of scripted performance plus impromptu discussion used here can be applied to the teaching of other complex topics in the geography classroom.

This exposition introduces a groundbreaking model that elucidates the role of societal norms and the preconscious in shaping cooperative behaviour, particularly with an eye towards averting the tragedy of the commons as conceptualised by the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Moving beyond the confines of rational-choice paradigms, this study harmonises Weber’s sociological theories with Freudian psychological insights, unveiling the nuanced interplay between conscious decision-making and deeper, preconscious motivations towards cooperation. It argues that an intricate understanding of both societal norms and the preconscious is crucial for crafting effective strategies to tackle the challenges of collective resource management.

Flag of convenience (FOC) refers to the practice of registering ships in foreign countries to benefit from lax regulations. While FOC offers several short-term cost advantages to ship owners and FOC countries, it poses significant threats to critical international interests, including environmental protection and marine habitat preservation. Despite global outrage and concerns over FOC's environmental impact, the number of FOC ships have continued to rise. Using game theory, we illustrate how individual rationality - opting for FOC to maximize economic benefits - leads to adverse outcomes for the common good, resulting in increased marine pollution, that we refer to as the tragedy of the commons. Our findings have implications for understanding the strategic behaviour of key players in the maritime transportation, revealing the dark side of globalization and stressing the need for stronger international cooperation to shift these behaviours., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest We wish to confirm that there are no known conflicts of interest and there has been no financial support provided for this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

An image is what we have in our head and what we make up in an allegory, a name, a metaphor, a text, a map or in a drawing. None of these should be confused with the thing that is being imagined. They are not the real thing, just our imaginations of it. Still, we could not do without them, for instance when governing small-scale fisheries. They make us understand what we are up to and the track we are on. I argue, however, that we need a more playful attitude to them. We must avoid being locked in one image, like that of Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons. The image may lead us astray, ignoring the things that matter to the wellbeing of the millions of small-scale fisheries people around the world whose lives are dependent on a healthy resource base as well as functioning communities and a governance system that works for them. The paper draws heavily on philosophical thought from ancient to modern times as well as interactive governance research from 2000 onwards.

Fisheries management uses a variety of methods to assess stocks, assign quota or allocations, and calculate potential for sustainability. In the New Zealand abalone (pāua) fishery, neither the total stocks nor amount removed in any fishing year are well-known because a major portion is fished 'recreationally', for which there is no requirement for a licence or catch reporting. Actual harvests relative to allocations cannot be established until well after the fishing season, and require data not typically collected. This was demonstrated over a 3-month fishing season opened after a 5-year closure along the earthquake-affected northeastern coast of the South Island. Recreational fishers removed c.74% of nearshore biomass of Haliotis iris populations. This was, in effect, a Tragedy of the Commons, whereby a common resource is exploited by those who harvest first, with scant regard for what remains. The underlying weakness is in the recreational fishing management rules which, in this instance, provide stark lessons in why abalone populations have come under pressure worldwide. We discuss concepts, prior knowledge, inertia in management, and a potential way forward, with the aim of preventing serial depletion of pāua populations and fostering more effective management that ends the Tragedy of the Commons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooperation via shared public goods is ubiquitous in nature, however, noncontributing social cheaters can exploit the public goods provided by cooperating individuals to gain a fitness advantage. Theory predicts that this dynamic can cause a Tragedy of the Commons, and in particular, a 'Collapsing' Tragedy defined as the extinction of the entire population if the public good is essential. However, there is little empirical evidence of the Collapsing Tragedy in evolutionary biology. Here, we experimentally demonstrate this outcome in a microbial model system, the public good-producing bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa grown in a continuous-culture chemostat. In a growth medium that requires extracellular protein digestion, we find that P. aeruginosa populations maintain a high density when entirely composed of cooperating, protease-producing cells but completely collapse when non-producing cheater cells are introduced. We formulate a mechanistic mathematical model that recapitulates experimental observations and suggests key parameters, such as the dilution rate and the cost of public good production, that define the stability of cooperative behavior. We combine model prediction with experimental validation to explain striking differences in the long-term cheater trajectories of replicate cocultures through mutational events that increase cheater fitness. Taken together, our integrated empirical and theoretical approach validates and parametrizes the Collapsing Tragedy in a microbial population, and provides a quantitative, mechanistic framework for generating testable predictions of social behavior.

Rule enforcement is critical in democratic, self-governing societies. Many political disputes occur when citizens do not understand the fundamental rationales for enforcement (e.g., COVID-19 pandemic). We examined how naïve groups learn and develop wise enforcement systems. Based on theories from behavioral economics, political science, psychology, and education, we predicted that groups need to experience failure of an enforcement system, but be guided on restorative justice principles to collectively learn from this failure. Undergraduate students (N = 288) from a Midwestern U.S. metropolitan university self-governed a simulated common-pool resource with real financial payoffs. Groups began with one of three conditions designed to create different experiences with enforcement and regulatory failure: (a) no enforcement (no communication or peer sanctioning), (b) lax enforcement (communication with peer-sanctioning), or (c) regulatory abuse (peer sanctioning without communication). Half then received facilitated guidance on restorative justice principles (e.g., discuss whether/why to use sanctions). To examine cooperation, we measured how well participants maintained the resource. To examine group learning, we created a novel coding system, which tracked groups' constitutional decisions about conservation agreements and enforcement, conceptual understanding, and the enforcement systems they created. The no-enforcement and lax-enforcement conditions quickly yielded moderate cooperation via voluntary agreements. However, such agreements prevented groups from discovering how and why to use enforcement (peer sanctioning) to improve performance. Initial exposure to regulatory failure had different effects depending on facilitation. Unfacilitated groups fixated on initial misconceptions, causing them to abandon or create less sophisticated enforcement systems, hindering cooperation. Facilitated groups learned from prior failure-discovering principles of wise enforcement (e.g., collective efficiency, self-restraint)-and created more sophisticated enforcement systems (e.g., coordinated sanctions) that improved cooperation. Guidance on restorative justice principles and experience with regulatory abuse may be necessary preconditions for naïve individuals to understand and develop wiser collective enforcement systems., Competing Interests: I have read the journal’s policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following potential competing interest to disclose: This research project received funding support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant No. 1658608., (Copyright: © 2024 DeCaro et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)