Former Members of Parliament from Canada's House of Commons discuss their political careers and Canadian politics in general is examined.

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

This collection of eighteen original essays evaluates the use and misuse of common-property resources, taking as its starting point ecologist Garret Hardin's assertion in "The Tragedy of the Commons" that common property is doomed to overexploitation in any society. This book represents the first cross-cultural test of Hardin's argument and argues that, while tragedies of the commons do occur under some circumstances, local institutions have proven resilient and responsive to the problems of communal resource use.

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.

Commons—lands, waters, and resources that are not legally owned and controlled by a single private entity, such as ocean and coastal areas, the atmosphere, public lands, freshwater aquifers, and migratory species—are an increasingly contentious issue in resource management and international affairs. Protecting the Commons provides an important analytical framework for understanding commons issues and for designing policies to deal with them. The product of a symposium convened by the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) to mark the 30th anniversary of Garrett Hardin's seminal essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” the book brings together leading scholars and researchers on commons issues to offer both conceptual background and analysis of the evolving scientific understanding on commons resources. The book: gives a concise update on commons use and scholarship offers eleven case studies of commons, examined through the lens provided by leading commons theorist Elinor Ostrom provides a review of tools such as Geographic Information Systems that are useful for decision-making examines environmental justice issues relevant to commons Contributors include Alpina Begossi, William Blomquist, Joanna Burger, Tim Clark, Clark Gibson, Michael Gelobter, Michael Gochfeld, Bonnie McCay, Pamela Matson, Richard Norgaard, Elinor Ostrom, David Policansky, Jeffrey Richey, Jose Sarukhan, and Edella Schlager. Protecting the Commons represents a landmark study of commons issues that offers analysis and background from economic, legal, social, political, geological, and biological perspectives. It will be essential reading for anyone concerned with commons and commons resources, including students and scholars of environmental policy and economics, public health, international affairs, and related fields.

Collective Behavior is the summary of the 2014 National Academies Keck Futures Initiative Conference on Collective Behavior. Participants were divided into fourteen interdisciplinary research teams. The teams spent nine hours over two days exploring diverse challenges at the interface of science, engineering, and medicine. The composition of the teams was intentionally diverse, to encourage the generation of new approaches by combining a range of different types of contributions. The teams included researchers from science, engineering, and medicine, as well as representatives from private and public funding agencies, universities, businesses, journals, and the science media. Researchers represented a wide range of experience - from postdoc to those well established in their careers - from a variety of disciplines that included science and engineering, medicine, physics, biology, economics, and behavioral science. The teams needed to address the challenge of communicating and working together from a diversity of expertise and perspectives as they attempted to solve a complicated, interdisciplinary problem in a relatively short time. This report highlights the presentations of the event and includes the team reports and pre-meeting materials.

An argument that the commons is neither tragedy nor paradise but can be a way to understand environmental sustainability. The history of the commons—jointly owned land or other resources such as fisheries or forests set aside for public use—provides a useful context for current debates over sustainability and how we can act as “good ancestors.” In this book, Derek Wall considers the commons from antiquity to the present day, as an idea, an ecological space, an economic abstraction, and a management practice. He argues that the commons should be viewed neither as a “tragedy” of mismanagement (as the biologist Garrett Hardin wrote in 1968) nor as a panacea for solving environmental problems. Instead, Walls sees the commons as a particular form of property ownership, arguing that property rights are essential to understanding sustainability. How we use the land and its resources offers insights into how we value the environment. After defining the commons and describing the arguments of Hardin's influential article and Elinor Ostrom's more recent work on the commons, Wall offers historical case studies from the United States, England, India, and Mongolia. He examines the power of cultural norms to maintain the commons; political conflicts over the commons; and how commons have protected, or failed to protect ecosystems. Combining intellectual and material histories with an eye on contemporary debates, Wall offers an applied history that will interest academics, activists, and policy makers.