Elinor Ostrom's IAD and SES frameworks are both widely used among social scientists. Each framework suffers from significant problems not shared by the other. For instance, the IAD framework pays insufficient attention to important social and, especially, ecological variables that can affect or...

The institutional and ecological structure of Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” appears deceptively simple: the open-access pasture eventually will be overexploited and degraded unless (i) it is privatized, (ii) the government regulates access and use, or (iii) the users themselves impose...

Compliance is one of the central, but often overlooked challenges that actors face as they seek to devise and implement environmental policies. Therefore this paper draws upon multiple models of rule compliance to assess the factors influencing compliance in the high forest zone of Ghana....

Methodological challenges have confounded studies of the commons for much of its recent history. These problems range from a large number of potentially influential variables, difficulties in capturing and measuring these variables, and large sets of interacting and mediating factors. With...