In both economic and ecological terms, the 'tragedy of the commons', represents the notion that if individuals have access to common resources, without a mechanism for restricting or monitoring this extraction, it will cause the depletion of that resource to collapse... Hard to argue the point if you look at our current global system. But is this just an externality of our capitalist economy or are there proven models to manage these precious systems? Elinor Ostrom was the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her "analysis of economic governance, especially the commons" "It was long unanimously held among economists that natural resources that were collectively used by their users would be over-exploited and destroyed in the long-term. Elinor Ostrom disproved this idea by conducting field studies on how people in small, local communities manage shared natural resources, such as pastures, fishing waters, and forests. She showed that when natural resources are jointly used by their users, in time, rules are established for how these are to be cared for and used in a way that is both economically and ecologically sustainable."- NobelPrize.org https://lnkd.in/gbyGu3zt From a human-centred perspective, this work is crucial for framing our global communities' understanding of the management system needed for global commons, the natural resource we share, and the life-sustaining resources that our global economic machine exploits to a now mass extinction level Her work points to the benefit and optimum management practices of polycentric systems and order through complexity, and how our modern government systems have worked in the opposite direction and then copy-pasted these simplified systems globally If we have had this pool of knowledge for 14 years why hasn't there been global coordination to implement the findings? because we have an economy that is geared toward individual nation GDP-focused growth that will collapse if we can't exploit the world for maximum yield So What next? What do we do? We focus our work on regeneratively developing our local communities towards greater socio-ecological wholeness that puts a bottom-up driver on reshaping the layers of nested systems they work in until we reshape our global management systems, and we do this local-focused work at a global scale Elinor Ostrum Presentation