comedy of the commons

is an alternative to the 'tragedy' model for environmentalism. Rather than to make assumptions about individual rationality and market failures and inexorable destinies as the tragedy model does, comedy is about social groups and surprising outcomes.

Comedy, as distinct from tragedy, is 'the drama of humans as social rather than private beings, a drama of social actions having a frankly corrective purpose,' and Smith offered this as an entree to her participation in what emerged, in the ´ mid-1980s, as an anthropology-led critique of the use of the 'tragedy of the commons' way of explaining why common property and open-access property arrangements seem to be connected with poverty and environmental deterioration (Smith 1984... see discussion in McCay and Acheson 1987). Smith's reading of comedy has allowed those of us involved in transdisciplinary scholarship on environmental matters to posit a competing explanatory trope: 'the comedy of the commons.' It draws attention to the essentially social and cultural nature of the commons and more broadly of environmental problems. It posits an alternative to the 'tragedy' model, which is based on assumptions about individual rationality and market failures. Tragedy is about individuals and inexorable destinies... comedy is about social groups and surprising outcomes. More to the point, the 'comedy of the commons' idea calls on us to examine how people do in fact interact for 'frankly corrective purposes,' whether or not the ending turns out to be happy for everyone. It has inspired some of us to rethink the question of community capacity for effective engagement in using and managing common-pool resources (Dietz et al. 2002... McCay and Jentoft 1998... Ostrom 1990), serving as an intellectual tool among others available to support efforts at participatory and communitybased governance of natural resources in worlds otherwise dominated by authoritarian or neoliberal sources of governance. It helps remind us of the need to recognize deeprooted connections between people and places, interwoven to form the socionatural units we call 'the commons' or, as is more fashionable these days, 'complex, adaptive coupled natural and human systems.' In systems terms, the trope of comedy can inform our search for sources of transition from 'positive feedback' to 'negative feedback' in the lives and scientific and management institutions that involve the people and places we study, confronted as they are by climate and other environmental changes (McCay et al. 2011). In that effort, we may be moving toward a new definition of happiness as resilience, a buzzword of today's transdisciplinary environmentalism (Davidson 2010... Davidson-Hunt and Berkes 2003) and a possible focus for another 'Vital Topics Forum.

comedy of the commons, n.Definitions

comedy of the commons