"Ostrom illustrated what anthropologists and people in stateless societies have known for generations: people are perfectly capable of working out rules to sustainably manage shared resources. In her book, Ostrom detailed one common pasture in Switzerland that has been in continuous use since the 1500s. She also described shared fishing rights in Turkey, shared agricultural and forest land in Japan, and shared irrigation systems in Spain. There is no tragedy.
This is not to say that establishing and maintaining systems of shared property is trivially easy or inevitably successful. There will be times when these systems fail. There are probably some scales at which coordination becomes impossible, such as at the level of the atmosphere or the world's oceans at a global scale. Commons management takes constant work and is often very hard. But over-exploitation is not logically and inexorably inevitable. There is no tragedy."
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but which is actually what has caused the disastrous mess we're in now.