The first and introductory chapter explains the necessity of this book, in other words, why it should be read. Several questions arise to illustrate this: If climate emergency is the grand challenge, why is so difficult to address it? Is it technically feasible? Economically? Trying to address it, we frame the current climate emergency as an extreme case of the well-known phenomenon of ‘the tragedy of the commons’. As a potential solution, we introduce a new disruptive business model and environmental strategy called ‘regenerative’, characterised by two main elements: (1) cutting-edge climate science solutions (capturing and utilising atmospheric carbon dioxide capable of producing net zero and even net negative emissions or positive environmental externalities); and (2) firm purpose redefinition under a new ecological, ethical and moral paradigm. Finally, a brief description of the book’s contents is presented.

In Chapter 1, we discuss some of the standard introductory concepts in any economics course. After defining scarcity and discussing the importance of incentives, we focus on the presence/absence of property rights (in general and in the workplace) – and introduce the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” with applications to various “tragedies of the commons” and “tragedies of the anticommons” in firms and the economy.

This chapter explores the relationships between environmental stresses, natural resource shortages, and violent conflict. It describes ideas such as tragedy of the commons, carrying capacity, and common pool resources, as well as Malthusian theories. It also explains how environmental stresses can affect various kinds of conflict, through dynamics such as states sharing transboundary water resources clashing over maritime assets such as fishing and petrochemical reserves; resource shortages fueling conflicts over distribution among substate populations; and shortages causing internal migration, in turn fueling "sons of the soil" conflicts. It also describes how state capacity, rural economies, and groupness can affect the connection between environmental stresses and conflict. The chapter discusses how conflict can in turn exacerbate environmental stresses, and pays special attention to the consequences of climate change for conflict. The chapter applies many of these concepts to a quantitative study on the relationship between drought and conflict, and a case study on the role of drought in causing the Syrian Civil War.

Chapter 8 first provides an overview of the stipulations regarding how things held in tenancy in common (the most common co-ownership form of property around the world) should be administered and sold, as well as co-owner agreements not to partition. Then, Chapter 8 addresses whether the several types of rules lead to underuse or overuse — that is, whether tenancy in common may lead to tragedy of the commons or anticommons. The prevalent doctrine that provides one co-owner with a unilateral power to call for partition avoids a long-term tragedy but underinvestment and underuse of co-owned resources are still likely. This chapter ends with a proposed solution to ameliorate the underinvestment and underuse problems.

Late medieval Europeans extended exploitation of fish stocks to marine frontiers previously little affected by intense human predation. Driven by demand since the twelfth century and supported by waves of innovative capture and preservation methods, herring fisheries in the North Sea and Baltic fed millions of northern Europeans with the largest medieval catches known. Stockfish (naturally freeze-dried cod) from arctic Norway went from a regional subsistence product c.1100 to an export trade profiting fishers and merchants alike. Elsewhere entrepreneurs caught, preserved, and exported pike and other fish from the eastern Baltic, hake and conger from the Channel approaches and Bay of Biscay, and migratory bluefin tuna off Sicily and the Gulf of Cadiz, all for consumption a thousand and more kilometers away. Transforming local abundances for distant tables at unprecedented scale drove new capitalized forms of organization and market behaviour. Consumers, merchants, and fishers saw fish as economic objects disconnected from any familiar nature and free for competitive exploitation. Yet besides prospects of infinite abundance the new frontier fisheries posed risks, and not simply those of hazardous access or human conflict. Heavily fished local stocks of herring successively crashed to commercial insignificance when further stressed by environmental changes in the pulsating arrival of the Little Ice Age. But the almost accidental discovery of virgin cod stocks off Newfoundland in the 1490s confirmed the mythic belief that abundance always lay over the next horizon. Thoughts of limits vanished at the eve of modernity.

This chapter applies the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework conceived by Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom in 1990 to the institutional arrangements that structure and organize the operating environments for civil society organizations (CSOs). We begin by defining what is meant by “civil society” and “CSOs,” and highlighting their essential attributes, followed by a discussion of the importance of the legal and regulatory frameworks that underlie the existence and operations of CSOs. We then briefly review Garett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” thesis before discussing the role of CSOs in preventing such tragedies from emerging. After presenting the types of rules that inform every IAD action situation and applying them to the existing research on CSO laws, we conclude by reconceptualizing CSO regulatory regimes through the lens of Ostrom’s IAD framework and analysis.

If the logic of markets is that price equals value, sometimes there are forms of value that fall outside of what markets are able to recognize. We call this phenomenon market failure. It is not a personal or institutional failure or even a failure of economic theory, just a limitation of markets as a medium. Our core case study is of the opening of Tate Modern. The museum revitalized the Southwark area of London and increased property values sometimes 500%. The museum relied on philanthropy and government support and was not able to capture all of the value it created. We consider two very different methods economists use to evaluate these situations: contingent valuation method and economic development study. We compare and contrast the approaches taken by the Guggenheim and the Tate. We explore concepts of market failure including public goods, externalities, tragedy of the commons, free-rider problems, adverse selection, and moral hazard.

“Mutual Coercion, Mutually Agreed Upon” (the phrase comes from Garrett Hardin's classic essay "Tragedy of the Commons") sees the democratic reforms and social reorganization of Attica by the Athenian statesman Cleisthenes in 508 BCE as a case study in systems leveraging. Cleisthenes’s reforms are situated in a nexus of Presocratic (Pythagorean) thinking about limit (peras) and in the context of ideas that circulated at the time under the banners of isonomy (isonomia) and harmony (harmonia). The ancient Athenians, newly freed from political tyranny and the social upheaval of 508, recognized the intrinsic value of limits and restraint and built them into the structures of democratic life. Their example, I argue further, stands as a challenge to environmental and social problems faced by democratic regimes today.

Freshwater biodiversity is threatened by growing human consumption and contamination of fresh water - a globally scarce resource. As human populations increase, the quality and quantity available for freshwater biodiversity declines.The result is a tragedy of the freshwater commons with increasing competition among groups of humans – evident from the hydropolitics of transboundary rivers - and between humans and nature.Humans may even be approaching the planetary boundary for freshwater use.Pollution and contamination are widespread, with emerging threats from microplastics and pharmaceuticals.Dams, drainage-basin disturbance, climate change, alien species, and overexploitation of aquatic animals pose additional threats.Their synergistic effects are evident from a global analysis of rivers: both biodiversity and human water security are at risk in many parts of the world while, in others, investments in infrastructure have enhanced water security although biodiversity remains under threat. Everywhere on Earth where there are substantial human populations, freshwater biodiversity is threatened.In many of these places, human water security is at risk also.

This chapter opens with a brief typology of cyber conflict encapsulating cybercrime, espionage, war, and terrorism. The examination then moves on to investigate first how and why these categories are breaking down in the Information Age, and second what comparative approaches to regulating cyberspace and managing cyber conflict exist as juxtaposed against other global collective action problems. The tragedy of the unmanaged commons scenario, from which many collective action problems derive, predicts the overexploitation of common pool resources and has, traditionally, been moderated by three management solutions: privatization, nationalization, and common property legal regimes. Accordingly, this chapter introduces each of these concepts and reflects on the potential and limits of these approaches, including the CHM concept that was introduced to govern the deep seabed and the Moon as applied to cyberspace. The debate is then viewed through the lens of polycentric governance generally as well as through an introduction to a range of leading institutional design frameworks, including the Ostrom Design Principles, which are in turn applied to the case studies in Part II.