Common-Pool Resource

A common-pool resource is defined by two fundamental characteristics. On the one hand, one person's use of a unit of common-pool resource makes that same unit unavailable to anybody else. On the other, it is costly to exclude potential users of a common-pool resource. Some classic examples of common-pool resources include, but are not restricted to, fisheries, forests, underwater basins, and irrigation systems.

Common-pool resources pose important challenges to governance because they are susceptible to overuse. Thus, common-pool resources are prone to tragedies of the commons. A tragedy of the commons is present when individual and group interests are in conflict. In the case of fishing, fishermen face the temptation to harvest as many fish as possible because if they do not, someone else will. Collectively, this leads to tragedy, even though no one intended it and all realize that they would be better off if they avoided it.

However, the prediction that the tragedy of the commons model makes is that individuals' interests will always come ahead of those of the group, and because of that, they will not cooperate to devise solutions to the tragedies. In the 1980s, scholars challenged this assertion. As a result, a theory on common-pool resources emerged.

The first generation of research on common-pool resources centered its efforts on identifying resource systems where tragedies had been successfully avoided. They found a variety of institutional arrangements common to all successful cases and absent on those that failed. Cases varied across cultures and time, and the numbers of institutional arrangements found were many. Most of them, however, aimed at regulating individual action through rules that users agreed to abide by so that all users could take into account the social benefits and costs of using the common-pool resource. Although the specific rules adopted to govern a common-pool resource are extremely numerous, scholars have identified seven broad categories of rule types according to their function: boundary rules, authority rules, position rules, scope rules, aggregation rules, information rules, and payoff rules. The rule taxonomy has helped scholars to understand that rules have a configurational nature. While some rule configurations tend to result in tragedies, others can achieve different policy outcomes.

While the initial wave of research allowed identifying institutional arrangements that are related to the emergence and sustainability of collective action for the governance of common-pool resources, today scholars are focusing their research efforts in finding the causal relationships among those institutional arrangements previously identified.

Since the emergence of the common-pool resources project in the mid-1980s, the study of common-pool resources has become a field in itself. After fifteen years of research, some of the most substantive lessons include (a) the recognition that the model of the tragedy of the commons is limited; (b) that autonomy to design and change rules, the ability of resource users to engage in direct communication, and their salience over the resource are necessary but not sufficient conditions for the emergence of self-organized institutions; (c) one policy form cannot ensure successful governance of all common-pool resources; and (d) the meaning of success will vary and be related to the group's interests.

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