The Cambridge series on the Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions is built around attempts to answer two central questions: How do institutions evolve in response to individual incentives, strategies, and choices, and how do institutions affect the performance of political and economic systems? The scope of the series is comparative and historical rather than international or specifically American, and the focus is positive rather than normative.

In this pioneering book Elinor Ostrom tackles one of the most enduring and contentious questions of positive political economy, whether and how the exploration of common-pool resources can be organized in a way that avoids both excessive consumption and administrative cost. These cases, where a resource is held in common by many individuals – that is, well-defined individual property rights over the resource are absent – are often held by economists to be exploitable only where the problem of over-consumption is solved by privatization or enforcement imposed by outside force. Ostrom, by contrast, argues forcefully that other solutions exist, and that stable institutions of self-government can be created if certain problems of supply, credibility, and monitoring are solved. She provides a close study of a uniquely broad range of cases, including high mountain meadows in Japan and Switzerland, water projects in the Philippines and California, and fisheries in Canada and Turkey. Some of these cases involve stable institutions; in other cases the institutions were fragile and failed.