Although competition for vital resources is indeed a part of every life-bearing environment, and the winnowing of competitors through natural selection is essential to the evolutionary process, cooperative symbiotic arrangements are not only essential, but appear to have been necessary for driving evolution at the pace it has unfolded on earth. The discovery that the energy-producing engines of plant and animal cells probably resulted from the union of formerly separate organisms places symbiosis at the center of life's origins, evolution, and continuation.

Nitrogen, for example, is a resource necessary for the growth of plant life, yet plants are not capable of producing it efficiently and independently, but plant life does not consist solely of those victorious competitors who manage to sequester sufficient supplies of this resource. The roots of many species of trees host fungi that in turn create hospitable environments for bacteria that are capable of fixing nitrogen in the soil in a form useful to the trees. The trees, fungi, and bacteria create environmental conditions, through their specialized capacities, that encourage one another's growth; instead of competing for a scarce resource, these different kinds of organisms work together to produce it in abundance. Similarly, every human carries twenty times as many living bacteria as human cells - 90% of the dry weight of human feces consists of the bodies of intestinal microbes. Humans and other animals are able to digest a wide variety of substances solely because we have evolved myriad symbiotic partnerships with a wide variety of microorganisms.

The capacity of different microorganisms to exchange and combine genetic material, from the useful emergence of mitochondria and chloroplast-bearing cells to the dangerous (to humans) endosymbiotic union of different animal forms of influenza strains, constitutes a vast and rapid engine for genetic change. Nobel winning evolutionary biologist Joshua Lederberg remarked in a 2002 lecture: "Together with its symbionts/parasites, we should think of each host as a superorganism with the respective genomes yoked into a chimera of sorts."
The way in which early life forms may have altered the chemical composition of the atmosphere, ocean, and earth's crust led James Lovelock to propose the Gaia Hypothesis - that life on earth is a vast and complex, self-regulating, superorganism, in which the separate parts cooperate in order to maintain an environment supportive of their existence and evolution.

Although Darwin's 19th century advocates stressed the role of competition in natural selection, Darwin established speculation about cultural evolution in regard to human cooperation: "It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over other men of the tribe, yet that an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and t his would be natural selection."

The authors note that human social complexity is far beyond that of other social animals, and that biological mechanisms of kin selection and reciprocity are not adequate to fully explain human social behavior. Culture, defined as "information stored in individual brains (or in books and analogous media) that was acquired by imitation of, or teaching by others," has the properties of transmission forward through time and selection of successful strategies in common with genetic evolution. As Homo sapiens evolved, the mental and social capacity for cooperative work was highly adaptive for groups of small, relatively weak creatures with neither fangs nor claws nor wings. "Social instincts" enabled humans to band together in groups larger than the 50 individuals that our brain size allows in other primates. But that made cultural transmission of learning possible, which over-rode genetic group selection.

Although the Pleistocene era, with its radical climate changes, could have exerted long-term pressure on genetic group selection, the rapid evolution of social complexity over the past 10,000 years has not been long enough for significant genetic selection. Culture is both enabled by genetically-shaped human sociality, and is a means of progressively ratcheting mutually beneficial social cooperation. Once sociality, learning, and symbolic media make it possible to externalize and transmit individual learning, cooperative invention changes the game. Individual innovators can gain advantage through prestige and reputation, but only by displaying what they know, while learning and innovation enable the entire tribe to benefit from their innovations.

Culture harnesses and channels social instincts, enabling the creation of institutions. Norms enable the diffusion of enforcement of altruistic punishment through the population, leveraging emotions such as anger and shame to guard against free-riding, defection, and exploitation.

Using “international [cooperation] regimes” as an example, Keohane examines how cooperation is possible in the absence of a “hegemon” to enforce compliance.

Keohane distinguishes cooperation from harmony and discord as follows:

• Harmony refers to a situation in which actors’ policies (pursued in their own self-interest without regard for others) automatically facilitate attainment of the other’s goals. An example is the classical economic market, in which Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” regulates supply and demand.
• Cooperation requires that the actions of separate individuals or organizations – which are not in pre-existent harmony – be brought into conformity with one another through mutual adjustment.
• Discord, the opposite of harmony, stimulates the need for cooperation

Cooperation takes places only in situations where actors perceive that their policies are actually or potentially in conflict, not where there is harmony. Without the specter of conflict, there is no need to cooperate.

Any act of cooperation or apparent cooperation needs to be interpreted within the context of related actions, and of prevailing expectations and shared beliefs, before its meaning can be properly understood.

Quoting John Ruggie, Keohane defines regimes as a “set of mutual expectations, rules and regulations, plans, organizational energies and financial commitments, which have been accepted by a group of states.” Both formal rules and informal norms (standards of behavior) are used to sustain international cooperation. A major function of regimes is to facilitate the making of specific cooperative agreements among states.

Because regimes set expectations and reinforce norms, they shape actors’ behavior in the long-term, and thus promote sustained cooperation.

Introduction

Studying long-standing institutions for governing common pool resources at various scales can provide important lessons for governing new kinds of shared resources. Privatization or government control are not the only choices. Existing regimes based on that dichotomy are being re-conceptualized. Creating an interdisciplinary common vocabulary should be a high priority.

We cannot simply transfer an institutional design that worked well for managing one type of common-pool resource in one region of the world to another type of resource in another region and expect to repeat the success.

Key characteristics for successful cooperation to manage commons:

• small size of the user pool
• stable and well-delineated resource boundaries
• relatively small negative externalities
• ability of resource users to monitor resource stocks and flows
• moderate level of resource use (the resource must be neither over-abundant nor beyond recovery)
• well-understood (by the users) dynamics of the resource

“Instantly renewable” resources are distinguished from resources that require recovery time. For instantly renewable resources (spectrum, airplane landing slots, internet) overuse has little or no impact once overuse stops. The problem is crowding rather than degrading the resource stock. The forgiving nature of instantly renewable resources yields greater willingness to experiment with new and innovative management. However, since the resource is resilient there is less incentive to take serious action.

Research has shown:

• Users who trust each other are more likely to cooperate to manage common resources.
• Users who are connected by multiple issues and over a longer period of time can use issue linkages and reciprocity to induce cooperation.

The external legal environment can deliberately or inadvertently promote or hinder cooperative self-management. Transferring responsibility to users close to the resource has been a successful strategy as long as the users still have access to funding and other tools.

Resource users will devise new institutions for managing that resource or change existing rules governing its use when the perceived benefits of the change in the rules exceed the costs associated with creating the rules and with the change of the resource use pattern. Social and financial capital do not necessarily lead to better resource management Technology enables users to monitor the resource and each other more effectively and at lower cost. Technology also allows the development of alternative resources that can affect resource use.

Eight principles for managing commons:

1. rules are devised and managed by resource users
2. compliance with rules is easy to monitor
3. rules are enforceable
4. sanctions are graduated
5. adjudication is available at low cost
6. monitors and other officials are accountable to users
7. institutions to regulate a given common-pool resource may need to be devised at multiple levels
8. procedures exist for revising rules

Conclusion

Central governance and privatization only lead to deterioration of shared resources and communities, as well as to the failure of governance at the coarser scale. This implies that the organization at the macro-level is the deciding factor. However, we have seen sustainable management of natural resources over years and centuries despite macro-level restructuring, therefore the initial implication does not tell the whole story.

The authors set out to answer:

1. What new developments challenge traditional common property institutions and how do they adapt?
2. How is the increasing scale of human action affecting governance of shared resources?
3. Can we make progress in institutional design?

Some lessons learned:

1. The increased interconnection of the biophysical across scales and institutions across levels requires adaptation to change at multiple levels.
2. The interests of resource users at multiple levels often conflict.
3. Allocation of resource rights is a political process.

Our terminology needs refinement. Words like “local”, “regional”, and “landscape” erroneously imply that these are nested entities. We still lack conceptual tools with which to integrate the biophysical and the sociopolitical across multiple scales. For example, mobile resources (like fish) require complex polycentric management. Too-decentralized governance can serve as an impediment to meeting needs of a broader society.

Perceptions of fairness reinforce a climate of trust. Success of any mechanism relies on trust to enable cooperation. When participants do not come face to face with the consequences of their actions they feel no responsibility for them. Different forms of capital (physical, economic, political, and social) are intrinsically linked and one form can be used to create others, but social capital can lead to collective action for or against the commons.

In the end, a dynamic view of property rights is likely to be more appropriate to ensure sustainable and fair use of the resource than one that is static. Creating forums for negotiation and reallocation of such rights may be more important than laying down rigid rules and resource allocations.