Sustainability 2012, 4(11), 3141-3150; doi:10.3390/su4113141
Article

The Tragedy of the “Tragedy of the Commons”: Why Coining Too Good a Phrase Can Be Dangerous

Robert Stephen Hawkshaw 1,* email, Sarah Hawkshaw 2 email and U. Rashid Sumaila 2 email
1 Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia, 1822 East Mall, Vancouver, V6T 1Z1, Canada 2 Fisheries Centre, 2202 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T, Canada
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Received: 28 August 2012; in revised form: 30 October 2012 / Accepted: 13 November 2012 / Published: 15 November 2012
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Tragedy or Transcendence: Reflections on 'The Tragedy of the Commons')
PDF Full-text Download PDF Full-Text [162 KB, uploaded 15 November 2012 14:01 CET]
Abstract: A deep reading of Hardin (1968) reveals that he had a lot more to say about the use and regulation of resources such as fisheries than he is given credit for in the literature. It appears that he is typically cited just so that authors can use the phrase “tragedy of the commons” to invoke the specter of looming catastrophe and then tie that to whatever solution they have proposed. We argue in this contribution that there is a lot more in Hardin’s essay that either contradicts or greatly complicates the arguments he is cited as an authority for.
Keywords: tragedy of the commons; fisheries economics; individual transferable quotas

Article Statistics

Click here to load and display the download statistics.

Cite This Article

MDPI and ACS Style

Hawkshaw, R.S.; Hawkshaw, S.; Sumaila, U.R. The Tragedy of the “Tragedy of the Commons”: Why Coining Too Good a Phrase Can Be Dangerous. Sustainability 2012, 4, 3141-3150.

AMA Style

Hawkshaw RS, Hawkshaw S, Sumaila UR. The Tragedy of the “Tragedy of the Commons”: Why Coining Too Good a Phrase Can Be Dangerous. Sustainability. 2012; 4(11):3141-3150.

Chicago/Turabian Style

Hawkshaw, Robert S.; Hawkshaw, Sarah; Sumaila, U. R. 2012. "The Tragedy of the “Tragedy of the Commons”: Why Coining Too Good a Phrase Can Be Dangerous." Sustainability 4, no. 11: 3141-3150.

Sustainability EISSN 2071-1050 Published by MDPI AG, Basel, Switzerland RSS E-Mail Table of Contents Alert