Choe, Hyun, and Sun-Jin Yun. “Revisiting the concept of common pool resources: Beyond Ostrom.” Development and Society 46, no. 1 (2017): 113-129.
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Since Garret Hardin argued the tragedy of the commons, privatization or state control has been proposed as a solution to cure it. However, Elinor Ostrom opposed such an idea and opened the possibility of sustainable management of common pool resources (CPRs) through local people’s autonomous institutions. This study sees that Ostrom’s alternative approach fails to explain changes to the degree of excludability and rivalry in different historical contexts by regarding these attributes as physical ones. This study tries to re-conceptualize CPRs by understanding excludability and rivalry as social attributes, rather than as physical attributes. We argue that not excludability itself but the legitimacy of excludability is critical. This study mobilizes sociological imagination to go beyond the current theory of CPRs by paying attention to the social attributes of CPRs.