The Commons in a Glocal World

7For the common good

Regulating the Lake Constance fisheries from 1350 to 1800

Michael Zeheter

Introduction

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 ...