In December 1968, the ecologist and biologist Garrett Hardin had an essay published in the journalSciencecalled‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. His proposition was simple and unsparing: humans, when left to their own devices, compete with one another for resources until the resources run out. ‘...
Hardin applied the term “tragedy” to such scenarios because of their inevitability given a growing population of users. TOC has been debated since Hardin’s first paper, with both examples and counter-examples being drawn from the real world. Hardin advocated coercive or top-down management of...
Examples and evidence are provided from Cambodia, which has many features in common with other countries in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa in this respect. Keywords: tragedy of the anticommons; customary rights; property rights; land reform 1. Introduction During recent decades the efforts to ...