Tragedy of the Commons

A group of Swedish and Malagasy researchers led by Thomas Elmqvist of Stockholm University decided to try to correlate changes in Madagascar’s forest cover with local population densities and customary laws.

The difference between two sparsely populated regions was that in the west, where forest cover has dwindled, neither formal nor customary tenure was enforced. In the north—only about 20km away—land rights were well defined and forest cover increased. As with ocean fisheries, so with tropical forests, everybody’s business is nobody’s business.

Read more here.