Surprising Commons

The author begins this article on "surprising commons" with a few words about another article that she wrote some years ago, in the mid-1980s. It was called The Comedy of the Commons, and in it, she tried to figure out a peculiar and very long-standing legal pattern in which some kinds of terrain systematically resist privatization and instead remain in a state of more or less open access. And so, what happened to The Comedy of the Commons was definitely a pleasant surprise. What she wants to talk about is the more general phenomenon of surprises in real resources that are called "commons" or "commonses." Commons issues can be analyzed as collective action problems, which themselves are multi-person versions of the "prisoners' dilemma" -- a scenario in which the best collective payoff occurs if the actors cooperate, but in which the actors' individual motivations drive against cooperation. With that, she wants to turn to the reasons why commons problems surprise people.