The institutional and ecological structure of Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” appears deceptively simple: the open-access pasture eventually will be overexploited and degraded unless (i) it is privatized, (ii) the government regulates access and use, or (iii) the users themselves impose...

Elinor Ostrom's IAD and SES frameworks are both widely used among social scientists. Each framework suffers from significant problems not shared by the other. For instance, the IAD framework pays insufficient attention to important social and, especially, ecological variables that can affect or...