Tackles one of the most enduring and contentious issues of positive political economy: common pool resource management.

The "commons" has come to mean many things to many people, and the term is often used inconsistently. The study of the commons has expanded dramatically since Garrett Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons (1968) popularized the dilemma faced by users of common pool resources. This comprehensive Handbook serves as a unique synthesis and resource for understanding how analytical frameworks developed within the literature assist in understanding the nature and management of commons resources. Such frameworks include those related to Institutional Analysis and Development, Social-Ecological Systems, and Polycentricity, among others. The book aggregates and analyses these frameworks to lay a foundation for exploring how they apply according to scholars across a wide range of disciplines. It includes an exploration of the unique problems arising in different disciplines of commons study, including natural resources (forests, oceans, water, energy, ecosystems, etc), economics, law, governance, the humanities, and intellectual property. It shows how the analytical frameworks discussed early in the book facilitate interdisciplinarity within commons scholarship. This interdisciplinary approach within the context of analytical frameworks helps facilitate a more complete understanding of the similarities and differences faced by commons resource users and managers, the usefulness of the commons lens as an analytical tool for studying resource management problems, and the best mechanisms by which to formulate policies aimed at addressing such problems.

The "tragedy of the commons" is a central concept in human ecology and the study of the environment. It has had tremendous value for stimulating research, but it only describes the reality of human-environment interactions in special situations. Research over the past thirty years has helped clarify how human motivations, rules governing access to resources, the structure of social organizations, and the resource systems themselves interact to determine whether or not the many dramas of the commons end happily. In this book, leaders in the field review the evidence from several disciplines and many lines of research and present a state-of-the-art assessment. They summarize lessons learned and identify the major challenges facing any system of governance for resource management. They also highlight the major challenges for the next decade: making knowledge development more systematic; understanding institutions dynamically; considering a broader range of resources (such as global and technological commons); and taking into account the effects of social and historical context. This book will be a valuable and accessible introduction to the field for students and a resource for advanced researchers.

ÔThere is no issue more fundamental to the growth of the open source society than a more mature and penetrating understanding of the nature of the nonprofit organization in a digital culture. Professor LeeÕs book is essential reading to this fundamental topic, beautifully written and brilliantly conceived.Õ Ð Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law School, US ÔJyh-An Lee provides the first comprehensive account of nonprofit organizations and their overlooked role in setting (and working around) intellectual property policy. The reader will find a wealth of information and a novel theory of NPOs as part of the IP ecosystem.Õ Ð Mark A. Lemley, Stanford Law School, US Over the past twenty years, a number of nonprofit organizations (NPOs), such as Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Free Software Foundation have laid essential building blocks for intellectual-commons as a social movement. Through a detailed description of these NPOs and a series of in-depth interviews with their officials, this book demonstrates that NPOs have provided the social structures that are necessary to support the production of intellectual commons. By illustrating NPOsÕ role in shaping the commons realm, this book provides a new lens through which to understand the intellectual-commons environment. Protecting intellectual commons has been one of the most important goals of recent innovation and information policies. This book focuses on the NPOs that occupy an increasingly critical and visible position in the intellectual-commons environment in recent years. This detailed study will appeal to academics in intellectual property and internet law, nonprofit organizations, academics and professionals, and those involved in the Free Culture and Open Source Software Movement.

This volume offers a synthesis of what is known about very large and very small common-pool resources. Individuals using commons at the global or local level may find themselves in a similar situation. At an international level, states cannot appeal to authoritative hierarchies to enforce agreements they make to cooperate with one another. In some small-scale settings, participants may be just as helpless in calling on distant public officials to monitor and enforce their agreements. Scholars have independently discovered self-organizing regimes which rely on implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules and procedures rather than the command and control of a central authority. The contributors discuss the possibilities and dangers of scaling up and scaling down. They explore the impact of the number of actors and the degree of heterogeneity among actors on the likelihood of cooperative behaviour.

Elinor (Lin) Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her pathbreaking research on "economic governance, especially the commons"; but she also made important contributions to several other fields of political economy and public policy. The range of topics she covered and the multiple methods she used might convey the mistaken impression that her body of work is disjointed and incoherent. This four-volume compendium of papers written by Lin, alone or with various coauthors (most notably including her husband and partner, Vincent), supplemented by others expanding on their work, brings together the common strands of research that serve to tie her impressive oeuvre together. That oeuvre, together with Vincent's own impressive body of work, has come to define a distinctive school of political-economic thought, the "Bloomington School." Each of the four volumes is organized around a central theme of Lin’s work. Volume 2 examines the most well-known part of Lin’s legacy: her empirical, analytical, and theoretical work demonstrating that, in many cases, local resource users can solve collective-action problems through common-property management regimes. The volume comprises various papers relating to and building on the findings of her masterpiece, Governing the Commons (1990), including some lesser-known papers. Part I focuses on the all-important distinction between biophysical resources and the humanly devised institutions designed to govern them. Part II moves to the policy level, addressing how various sets of humanly devised institutions work better or worse, in various social and ecological circumstances, for the long-run sustainability of biophysical resources. Part III takes us full circle back to Ostrom’s first work (as part of her PhD) on water resources in Southern California, which was a topic she returned to, along with her students, throughout her career (and totaling more than 50 years’ worth of studies), with the specific intention of gathering data for dynamic (or, at least, comparative static) longitudinal analyses of combined social (including institutional) and ecological change. In sum, this volume presents what is, at least at present, thought to be Lin’s greatest legacy to social science: how resources can be sustainably managed over very long periods of time by the collective action of ordinary people, in addition to or without markets and states.