Not only the tragedy of the commons: misperceptions of feedback and policies for sustainable development

Abstract

The article summarizes key insights from four laboratory experiments to study renewable resource management. The commons problem, which is widely held to be the cause of mismanagement of common renewable resources, was ruled out by the design of the experiments. Still the participants overinvested and overutilized their resources. The explanation offered is systematic misperceptions of stocks and flows and of nonlinearities. The heuristics that people apply are intendedly rational for static, flow resources, but not for dynamic, stock resources. Simplifying and reframing the management problem, by focusing on net growth rates, is suggested as a means to foster the use of more appropriate heuristics. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Resilience and collapse of artisanal fisheries: a system dynamics analysis of a shellfish fishery in the Gulf of California, Mexico

“…In order to address this issue, researchers would need to be able to conceptualize and measure resilience as the distance of a particular social-ecological system from its tipping point, so that agents could be able to prevent the crisis before it happens. Identifying a priori the vulnerability of the system to an incremental effectsinduced crises is extremely difficult however (Moxnes 2000). Initially, the amount of CDH harvested increases in response to increasing the number of boats, which decrease the population of mature CDH.…”

“…More often than not, users of a common-pool resource system fail to recognize that their systems are falling into a collapse trajectory (Moxnes 2000). The experience that people have before crossing the tipping point is likely to misguide them when the crisis arrives.…”

Sequence and Timing of Three Community Interventions to Domestic Violence

“…Empirical research has shown that human beings have difficulty drawing valid inferences about the relationship between the underlying structure of a complex system and its behavior (e.g., Dörner 1997;Moxnes 2000;Sterman 1989Sterman , 2002. People tend to underestimate the effects of delays, ignore the role of feedback, and rely on linear associations when drawing inferences about the behavior of complex systems.…”

The sustainability of the commons: giving and receiving

“…The maximum accumulated appropriation that permits a community to reach round T , is T t=1 n i=1 x it = F 0 +T gne c+g points, 24 which corresponds with a maximum 23 Using a linear growth function for the resource stock implies that the Pareto efficient solution leads to defer consumption, however it had the advantage to ease the understanding of the consequences of agents actions on the evolution of the resource stock (Moxnes 2000(Moxnes , 2004. 24 We determine this maximum accumulated appropriation from (A.2) in the paper assuming that F T = 0.…”