The Biophysical Environment: What is the nature of the good?
Perhaps the most important issue in institutional analysis is to define the nature of the good that is involved in the action situation. At the most fundamental level, the general characteristics of the country’s forest resources frequently resemble a loosely regulated common-pool resource (CPR) and such a characterization helps to define the physical conditions of the action arena’s context.1 Prior theoretical knowledge of CPRs suggests that human institutions are needed to prevent a “tragedy of the commons outcome” in which individual forest users pursue their narrowly defined, short-term, self-interest, which ultimately destroys the resource. Collective-action institutions are needed to stymie this short-term self-interest. One of the central aims of forest-resource governance is, therefore, to provide the institutions needed to constrain the individual, short-term incentive to over-harvest. The traditional way of providing these institutions has been for the central government to i
