Tragedy of the Commons

A “tragedy of the commons” is a systems archetype that describes a scenario in which some number of parties all share a resource, where each is individually incentivized to consume as much of the resource as they can for their own benefit, but in doing so they diminish the benefits available to anyone, and ultimate can exhaust the resource entirely.

Example

This is the kind of systemic failure we’re seeing with climate change. Each country on Earth is incentivized (through economic competition with each other) to perform as much industrial activity as they can, regardless of carbon emissions. But in pursuing this short-term self-interest, their actions threaten the habitability and arability of the entire planet, which is of course not in anyone’s long-term self-interest.

Strategies

• Some authority at a higher level than the individual participants (such as a government or regulatory body responsible for the sustainability of the resource) must establish and enforce limits to resource extraction
• Find a way to make the long-term collective loss more real and immediate to the participants

Structure

Each actor sharing the common resource is in a reinforcing feedback loop with their own gains: the more they take, the better-equipped they are to take still more. But they’re in balancing feedback loops with respect to the remaining resources: the more they take, the less is left: