China has emerged as a global economic powerhouse after four decades of unprecedented growth. Such growth has generated many environmental challenges with enormous ecological, socioeconomic, and health consequences in China and beyond. Although the overall quality of air and water is starting to...

The shadow of “the tragedy of the commons” with its popularized assumption of selfish individual behavior concerns policy-makers, and consequently the cooperative capability of local communities in common resource management is usually underrated. Nevertheless, here we propose a hypothesis,...