Garrett Hardin's seminal essay "The Tragedy of the Commons" appeared in 1968 and has been at the center of the debate on commonly owned ground or resources such as Western public grazing or the oceans. This is the second edition of a book exploring the issues raised in Hardin's essay. As scarce resources are increasingly strained. It is ever more crucial to identify those resources which are held in common and are therefore prone to "tragic" waste and abuses. The essay in this volume focus on alternate institutional approaches to managing these resources to prevent such tragedy.

Managing natural resources that are held in common is a great and grave challenge. It requires addressing the community of users, beneficiaries, and managers. It also requires consideration of how those communities interact with the commons itself. At stake is the prosperity, and even survival, of both the people and the environment. Understanding and improving how we relate to commons has been the focus of much scholarly and practical research in the last 30 years. A quick look at the various natural resource commons surrounding us indicates that this will no doubt continue. Pacific Northwest salmon fisheries represent a system of commons, both complex and illustrative. My past history as administrator of the US. Environmental Protection Agency and my fisherman’s interest in salmon has heightened my sensitivity to the plight of the salmon and the people whose lives they affect. Recently, my wife and I moved back to the Pacific North-west—something the salmon try to do every year as they live out their inspiring life cycles. Unlike us, the salmon do not always find a hospitable environment when they return. There are many reasons: Simply put, there are more people in the salmon’s way, and they struggle more with the problems that come with expanding human populations. A number of reports issued over the past few years have chronicled the broad declines and local extinction of many salmon, steelhead, and sea-run cutthroat stocks in the region. The people who fish for a living and the communities in which they live have been hit hard. Our resource agencies are in danger of being overwhelmed by the complexity and magnitude of the problem. Why are salmon faring so poorly? Who is responsible? What can be done to reverse the recent declines in salmon populations? When tragedy befalls a commons as it has the salmon, I come to no conclusion about who is at fault, and I don’t intend to. The one thing that I am certain of is that the only truly innocent parties in all of this are the salmon and the generations of people yet to come. It seems to me that the responsibility falls upon all of us—fishermen, resource managers, and concerned citizens alike—to take the steps necessary to ensure that salmon populations recover to the point that our children will be able to enjoy the quality of life we once took for granted. While many people focus on how to get the most from commons, groups like the Sustainable Fisheries Foundation emphasize providing and maintaining those natural resources. Their goal is deceptively simple: ”We are trying to put more salmon back in the rivers and lakes of the Pacific Northwest.” Determining exactly how to accomplish this goal has defied the efforts of a great many dedicated and talented people. Many papers and panel discussions, especially reports on the status and trend ofwild salmon populations in the North Pacific, make it clear that many salmon stocks in parts of the lower United States, southern British Columbia, and the west coast of Vancouver Island are not faring well. The decline in salmon numbers in these areas corresponds with a rapidly expanding human population, alterations in land and water use, increasing sediment and containment loads, and heavy fishing pressure by a combination of sport, commercial, and tribal groups.

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.

The central message of the book is that stakeholder participation in the governance of fisheries is beneficial, but confers responsibilities as well as rights: all stakeholders have a public duty to act as stewards of the marine environment. With chapters by leading scholars and participants in fisheries governance, this book recounts contemporary techniques of public participation, and develops a new concept of environmental stewardship as a form of fisheries governance.