What IS a Tragedy of the Commons?
Over the thirty-seven years since its publication, Garden Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” has clearly become one of the most influential writings of all time. The tragedy of the commons is one of those rare scholarly ideas that has had an enormous impact in academia and is also commonly used outside of academia. In legal scholarship, the tragedy of the commons has been used to characterize a wide variety of resource problems, including intellectual property rights, overcrowding of telecommunications spectra, air and water pollution, and of course, the classic environmental commons problem, overfishing. But I suggest this embarrassment of citation riches highlights the fact that although we invoke it often, we do not know exactly what constitutes a tragedy of the commons. In an ideological policy battle between interventionists and libertarians – those that argue for and against governmental intervention – a true tragedy of the commons situation presents a potentially decisive argumen
