Time and Tragedy

The resource management complications posed by “Temporal Commons”– the common pool of time shared by present and future generations when making resource management decisions – are understudied in the literature. This chapter attempts to briefly describe their nature, before detailing how the typical solutions to the tragedy of the commons – private property, government regulation, and Elinor Ostrom’s successful collective action model – fail to adequately account for temporal commons. Next, the chapter explores some factors that distinguish temporal commons from traditionally studied commons, making them subject to a potentially more inevitable form of tragedy. The chapter concludes with initial thoughts on avenues for better addressing the dilemmas created by temporal commons.