The village communities in Northern Portugal have combined a system of private property and common property regimes during a long historic period. In the early years of the XIX century the question of the commons gains notoriety. The belief that these lands are non productive lands and the attractiveness of the physiocratics ideas justify this particular attention. This paper discusses the relationship state / commons and searches some explanations for the resilience of this property regime.

Last decades of the 20th century have shown many problems arisen from the emergence of commons mismanagement and under-defined property rights. In the 80s, Michelman introduced the problem of excessive fragmentation of property rights. A new concept, “anticommons”, was developed to put in evidence some problems seen as the mirror image of traditional “tragedy of the commons”. These problems include the under-use of resources and may come from several sources, including bureaucracy. Buchanan and Yoon stated that the anti-commons construction offers an analytical tool for isolating a central feature of “sometimes disparate institutional structures”. This means that the inefficiencies introduced by “overlapping and intrusive regulatory bureaucracies” may be studied with the help of this conceptualization. There are only few empirical studies on anticommons’ tragedies in the real world, most of them focusing on pharmaceutics industry. The main purpose of this paper is to use this conceptualization to study the design and execution of aquaculture policy in Portugal. The results are consistent with the suggestion of Buchanan and Yoon.

The operation and management of common property resources ("the commons") have been exhaustively examined in economics and political science, both in formal analysis and in practical applications. "Tragedy of the Commons" metaphor helps to explain why people overuse shared resources. On the other side, Anti-Commons Theory is a recent theory presented by scientists to explain several situations about new Property Rights concerns. An "anti-commons" problem arises when there are multiple rights to exclude. Little attention has been given to the setting where more than one person is assigned with exclusion rights, which may be exercised. We analyze the "anti-commons" problem in which resources are inefficiently under¬utilized rather than over-utilized as in the familiar commons setting. In fact, these two problems are symmetrical in several aspects.

The western hemisphere is richly endowed with a diversity of natural resource systems that are governed by complex local and national institutional arrangements that have not, until recently, been well understood. While many local communities that possess a high degree of autonomy to govern local resources have been highly successful over long periods of time, others fail to take action to prevent overuse and degradation of forests, inshore fisheries, and other natural resources. The conventional theory used to predict and explain how local users will relate to resources that they share makes a uniform prediction that users themselves will be unable to extricate themselves from the tragedy of the commons. Using this theoretical view of the world, there is no variance in the performance of self-organized groups. In theory, there are no self-organized groups. Empirical evidence tells us, however, that considerable variance in performance exists and many more local users self-organize and are more successful than it is consistent with the conventional theory . Parts of a new theory are presented here.

Individual success in group-structured populations has two components. First, an individual gains by outcompeting its neighbors for local resources. Second, an individual’s share of group success must be weighted by the total productivity of the group. The essence of sociality arises from the tension between selfish gains against neighbors and the associated loss that selfishness imposes by degrading the efficiency of the group. Without some force to modulate selfishness, the natural tendencies of self interest typically degrade group performance to the detriment of all. This is the tragedy of the commons. Kin selection provides the most widely discussed way in which the tragedy is overcome in biology. Kin selection arises from behavioral associations within groups caused either by genetical kinship or by other processes that correlate the behaviors of group members. Here, I emphasize demography as a second factor that may also modulate the tragedy of the commons and favor cooperative integration of groups. Each act of selfishness or cooperation in a group often influences group survival and fecundity over many subsequent generations. For example, a cooperative act early in the growth cycle of a colony may enhance the future size and survival of the colony. This time-dependent benefit can greatly increase the degree of cooperation favored by natural selection...

From group hunting to global warming, how to deal with collective action may be formulated in terms of a public goods game of cooperation. In most cases, contributions depend on the risk of future losses. Here, we introduce an evolutionary dynamics approach to a broad class of cooperation problems in which attempting to minimize future losses turns the risk of failure into a central issue in individual decisions. We find that decisions within small groups under high risk and stringent requirements to success significantly raise the chances of coordinating actions and escaping the tragedy of the commons. We also offer insights on the scale at which public goods problems of cooperation are best solved. Instead of large-scale endeavors involving most of the population, which as we argue, may be counterproductive to achieve cooperation, the joint combination of local agreements within groups that are small compared with the population at risk is prone to significantly raise the probability of success. In addition, our model predicts that, if one takes into consideration that groups of different sizes are interwoven in complex networks of contacts, the chances for global coordination in an overall cooperating state are further enhanced.

The fossil record presents palaeoecological patterns of rise and fall on multiple scales of time and biological organization. Here, we argue that the rise and fall of species can result from a tragedy of the commons, wherein the pursuit of self-interests by individual agents in a larger interactive system is detrimental to the overall performance or condition of the system. Species evolving within particular communities may conform to this situation, affecting the ecological robustness of their communities. Results from a trophic network model of Permian–Triassic terrestrial communities suggest that community performance on geological timescales may in turn constrain the evolutionary opportunities and histories of the species within them.

This report is a companion report of the Country Financial Accountability Assessment. It presents an institutional analysis of the budget process, which is the process by which the government allocates funds to spending agencies. It analyzes the participants in the decision-making process related to spending and the institutions involved in the budgetary and financial management of government operations, as well as the modalities of preparation and execution of the budget. The report also updates the findings of the 1997 Public Expenditure Review concerning fiscal sustainability and the size and composition of public expenditure, which is discussed in an international context. Finally, the report provides recomendations on how to improve the management of public resources.

Historically, all capture fisheries have proven hard to manage; internationally shared stocks face an additional impediment to effective management. Previous fisheries studies estimate gains from cooperation for particular species or locations, but evidence is lacking on the wider effect that international sharing has in relation to other variables that affect stock status. This paper is an attempt to shed a broader light on the effect of sharing by identifying whether shared fish stocks are systematically more exploited. I compile exploitation status, biological and economic data into a unique two-period panel of more than two-hundred fish stocks from around the globe with which I test the theoretical implications of sharing. The empirical results from ordered category estimation suggest that shared stocks are indeed more prone to overexploitation.; Stephanie F. McWhinnie; Copyright © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Background: A tragedy of the commons arises if individuals cannot protect their future use of a depletable resource, and individual fitness increases if individuals exploit the resource at rates beyond sustainability. Natural selection then forces the individuals to diminish, perhaps even to destroy, their resource. One way to protect future use is privatization - that is, locally excluding rivals from the resource. Another is to reduce rivalry among individuals by restricting exploitation rates.

Problem: In the study of conflicts, both economists and evolutionary biologists use the concepts ‘tragedy of the commons’ and ‘public goods dilemma’. What is the relationship between the economist and evolutionist views of these concepts? Model features: The economics literature defines the tragedy of the commons and the public goods dilemma in terms of rivalry and excludability of the good. In contrast, evolutionists define these conflicts based on fitness functions with two components: individual and group components of fitness. Mathematical method: Evolutionary game theory and the calculation of evolutionarily stable strategy trait values by standard optimization techniques and by replacing slopes of group phenotype on individual genotype by coefficients of relatedness. Conclusion: There is a direct relationship between rivalry and the individual component of fitness and between excludability and the group component of fitness. Moreover, although the prisoner’s dilemma constitutes a suitable metaphor to analyse both the public goods dilemma and the tragedy of the commons, it gives the false idea that the two conflicts are symmetric since they refer to situations in which individuals consume a common resource – tragedy of the commons – or contribute to a collective action or common good – public goods dilemma. However...

The benefits of the institutional competition are reached under certain norms that prevent the violation of rights and the depredation of the resources. The horizontal competition can take the form of violent aggression between jurisdictions (war) or that of cooperation and commerce. Its impact can be “a negative“ if substrae governments resources benevolentes compromised with the general well-being of the community, but “positives“ if they are considered to be another way of controlling the Leviathan. The vertical competition shows the same potential "positive" control panel and the same need for certain rules to fulfill this role. They are similar to the strict definition of the right of property that solves the “tragedy of the common property”. Of another form it can create a situation where the taxpayers are smart for different levels of fiscal authority as it shows the Argentine case; Los beneficios de la competencia institucional se alcanzan bajo ciertas normas que impiden la violación de derechos y la depredación de los recursos. La competencia horizontal puede tomar la forma de agresión violenta entre jurisdicciones (guerra) o la de cooperación y comercio. Su impacto puede ser “negativo” si substrae recursos de gobiernos benevolentes comprometidos con el bienestar general de la comunidad...

Public goods are the key features of all human societies and are also important in many animal societies. Collaborative hunting and collective defence are but two examples of public goods that have played a crucial role in the development of human societies and still play an important role in many animal societies. Public goods allow societies composed largely of cooperators to outperform societies composed mainly of non-cooperators. However, public goods also provide an incentive for individuals to be selfish by benefiting from the public good without contributing to it. This is the essential paradox of cooperation—known variously as the Tragedy of the Commons, Multi-person Prisoner's Dilemma or Social Dilemma. Here, we show that a new model for evolution in group-structured populations provides a simple and effective mechanism for the emergence and maintenance of cooperation in such a social dilemma. This model does not depend on kin selection, direct or indirect reciprocity, punishment, optional participation or trait-group selection. Since this mechanism depends only on population dynamics and requires no cognitive abilities on the part of the agents concerned, it potentially applies to organisms at all levels of complexity.

Avoiding the tragedy of the commons requires that one or more individuals in a group or partnership “volunteer”, benefiting the group at a cost to themselves. Recognition and negotiation with social partners can maintain cooperation, but are often not possible. If recognition and negotiation are not always the mechanism by which cooperative partnerships avoid collective tragedies, what might explain the diverse social cooperation observed in nature? Assuming that individuals interact asymmetrically and that both “weak” and “strong” players employ a super-rational strategy, we find that tragedy of the commons can be avoided without requiring either recognition or negotiation. Whereas in the volunteer's dilemma game a rational “strong” player is less likely to volunteer to provide a common good in larger groups, we show that under a wide range of conditions a super-rational “strong” player is more likely to provide a common good. These results imply that the integration of super-rationality and asymmetric interaction might have the potential to resolve the tragedy of the commons. By illuminating the conditions under which players are likely to volunteer, we shed light on the patterns of volunteerism observed in variety of well-studied cooperative social systems...

Background. Many believe antibiotic use results in a tragedy of the commons, since overuse may lead to antibiotic resistance and limiting use would benefit society. In contrast, mass antibiotic treatment programs are thought to result in community-wide benefits. A survey was conducted to learn the views of infectious disease experts on the individual- and societal-level consequences of antibiotic use. Methods. The survey instrument was designed to elicit opinions on antibiotic use and resistance. It was sent via SurveyMonkey to infectious disease professionals identified through literature searches. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data. Results. A total of 1,530 responses were received for a response rate of 9.9%. Nearly all participants believed antibiotic use could result in a tragedy of the commons, at least in certain circumstances (96.0%). Most participants did not believe mass antibiotic treatment programs could produce societal benefits in an antibiotic-free society (91.4%) or in the United States (94.2%), though more believed such programs would benefit antibiotic-free societies compared to the United States (P < 0.001). Conclusions. The experts surveyed believe that antibiotic use can result in a tragedy of the commons and do not believe that mass treatment programs benefit individuals or society.

The conditions that can lead to the exploitative depletion of a shared resource, i.e, the tragedy of the commons, can be reformulated as a game of prisoner's dilemma: while preserving the common resource is in the best interest of the group, over-consumption is in the interest of each particular individual at any given point in time. One way to try and prevent the tragedy of the commons is through infliction of punishment for over-consumption and/or encouraging under-consumption, thus selecting against over-consumers. Here, the effectiveness of various punishment functions in an evolving consumer-resource system is evaluated within a framework of a parametrically heterogeneous system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Conditions leading to the possibility of sustainable coexistence with the common resource for a subset of cases are identified analytically using adaptive dynamics; the effects of punishment on heterogeneous populations with different initial composition are evaluated using the Reduction theorem for replicator equations. Obtained results suggest that one cannot prevent the tragedy of the commons through rewarding of under-consumers alone - there must also be an implementation of some degree of punishment that increases in a non-linear fashion with respect to over-consumption and which may vary depending on the initial distribution of clones in the population.

Individual success in group-structured populations has two components. First, an individual gains by outcompeting its neighbors for local resources. Second, an individual's share of group success must be weighted by the total productivity of the group. The essence of sociality arises from the tension between selfish gains against neighbors and the associated loss that selfishness imposes by degrading the efficiency of the group. Without some force to modulate selfishness, the natural tendencies of self interest typically degrade group performance to the detriment of all. This is the tragedy of the commons. Kin selection provides the most widely discussed way in which the tragedy is overcome in biology. Kin selection arises from behavioral associations within groups caused either by genetical kinship or by other processes that correlate the behaviors of group members. Here, I emphasize demography as a second factor that may also modulate the tragedy of the commons and favor cooperative integration of groups. Each act of selfishness or cooperation in a group often influences group survival and fecundity over many subsequent generations. For example, a cooperative act early in the growth cycle of a colony may enhance the future size and survival of the colony. This time-dependent benefit can greatly increase the degree of cooperation favored by natural selection...

To move beyond Hardin’s tragedy of the commons, it is fundamental to avoid falling into either of two analytical and policy traps: (1) deriving and recommending “panaceas” or (2) asserting “my case is unique.” We can move beyond both traps by self-consciously building diagnostic theory to help unpack and understand the complex interrelationship between social and biophysical factors at different levels of analysis. We need to look for commonalities and differences across studies. This understanding will be augmented if the rich detail produced from case studies is used together with theory to find patterned structures among cases. In this paper, we briefly illustrate important steps of how we can go about diagnosing the emergence and sustainability of self-organization in the fishing context of the Gulf of California, Mexico. By doing so, we are able to move away from the universality proposed by Hardin and understand how two out of three fisheries were able to successfully self-organize, and why one of them continues to be robust over time.

The primary objective of this research is to investigate why two state parks which are relatively similar (PETAR and PEI) have such different degrees of conservation. The central hypothesis is that differences can be explained on the basis of differences on managements. PEI is the best preserved than PETAR because their management is conducted by the Forest Foundation with the participation of the local community through a cooperative. Data analysis and results of field research leads us to conclude that PETAR is undergoing a process of deterioration of their caves open to visitors and its surroundings result of chaotic tourism, thus creating the effect of the tragedy of the commons. In the case of PEI was found a more controlled and limited visitation, and therefore a degree of preservation of the park much higher. We conclude that the management model in which the PEI is bound to Forest Foundation helps to explain the best grade of conservation of the park over the PETAR managed by the Forestry Institute.; El objetivo principal de este estudio es investigar por qué dos parques estaduales que son relativamente similares (PETAR y PEI) disponen de diferentes grados de conservación. La hipótesis central es que las diferencias se pueden explicar sobre la base de diferentes manejos...