The ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ describes a situation in a shared-resource system where individual players seek to maximise their self-interest and end up ruining the shared resource, be it land, water or the air we breathe.
Professor Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Economics for her work on tackling the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’, believed it could be prevented through coordination, cooperation, monitoring and sanctioning of multiple stakeholders, without the need for a centralised government.
But collective action is still a problem especially when it comes to governing global public goods. States are still trying to figure out how to work together to handle environmental issues such as climate change. A former student of Ostrom's - Associate Professor Eduardo Araral from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP) - shares some insights.
This podcast was developed as part of PP5908 Global Governance in a Changing World, a core course for the Master in International Affairs (MIA) programme at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.