Common-Pool Resource Analysis

Common-pool resource (CPR) analysis is a framework for diagnosing why shared natural and man-made resources are prone to overuse and for identifying the institutional conditions under which user communities can govern them sustainably without privatization or top-down state control. A common-pool resource is rivalrous (one user's consumption subtracts from what is available to others) yet costly to exclude users from. Garrett Hardin's 1968 'tragedy of the commons' framed the pessimistic baseline in which rational appropriators collectively destroy the resource, while Elinor Ostrom's 1990 Governing the Commons established, through extensive empirical work, eight design principles that distinguish durable self-governing commons from those that collapse.