Revisiting the commons: local lessons, global challenges.

In a seminal paper, Garrett Hardin argued in 1968 that users of a commons are caught in an inevitable process that leads to the destruction of the resources on which they depend. This article discusses new insights about such problems and the conditions most likely to favor sustainable uses of common-pool resources. Some of the most difficult challenges concern the management of large-scale resources that depend on international cooperation, such as fresh water in international basins or large marine ecosystems. Institutional diversity may be as important as biological diversity for our long-term survival.

Environmental science as a social process.

The felt need for better environmental information for planners and voters is based on maladaptive beliefs about the nature of knowledge and social order. Because there is not a meta-model which links the individual environmental sciences into a coherent whole, understanding complex environmental problems is necessarily a process of discourse between scientists from separate sciences-a process of gaining trust, building new patterns of thinking, and reaching toward new consensuses. By acknowledging the nature of the process, we can improve upon it and relieve the felt need for better environmental information.