ABSTRACT
Garret Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” (1968) does not make the news too often, but when it does, it is quite regularly in the context of overfishing. Be it local fisheries off the coast of Savannah, Georgia (Goggins 2017), the impact of China’s growing prosperity on global fish stocks (Jacobs 2017), the possibility of a global framework to limit exploitation of the resource (Governing the Oceans 2014), or the failings of the European Union’s common fisheries policy (Worstall 2017), such reports use Hardin’s thought experiment as a point of reference in their arguments. That the political positions and intentions of these arguments diverge in substantial ways, and that they employ the “Tragedy of the Commons” to very different ends, must not surprise. The fact that Hardin’s argument is present in the news at all, however, is testament to both its value as an analytical tool with which to comprehend and explain real world problems, and the urgency of the problem of the current overexploitation of marine fish stocks.
