The Pasture Was Never Empty · Chapter Two

The Pasture Was Never Empty

Ammanuel Santa Anna · ORCID 0009-0008-3244-0306

Chapter Two of The Pasture Was Never Empty: Elinor Ostrom’s Eight Design Principles for Governing the Commons, at Work and at Home.

Abstract

In 1833 an Oxford professor of political economy named William Forster Lloyd published two lectures on population. In the middle of them he asked his listeners to picture a common pasture. Each herdsman who adds a cow, Lloyd said, takes the whole gain of that cow for himself and bears only a fraction of the damage it does to the grass, because the damage is shared among everyone who grazes there. So each one adds a cow, and then another, and the pasture is ruined by people who were each behaving sensibly. It is a good argument, and it was meant as one. Lloyd was not describing a field he had walked. He was building a model to make a point about population, and the pasture was the model's furniture.

Read the PDFRead the whole bookdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989525

Cite this chapter

Santa Anna, A. (2026). The Pasture Was Never Empty. In The Pasture Was Never Empty. Luminous Prosperity Inc. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23989525

@incollection{santaanna2026the2,
  author    = {Santa Anna, Ammanuel},
  title     = {The Pasture Was Never Empty},
  booktitle = {The Pasture Was Never Empty},
  chapter   = {2},
  publisher = {Luminous Prosperity Inc.},
  year      = {2026},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.23989525},
  url       = {https://business.hautelumiere.life/library/the-pasture-was-never-empty/02-the-pasture-was-never-empty/}
}

References

  1. Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243–1248. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.162.3859.1243
  2. Gordon, H. S. (1954). The economic theory of a common-property resource: The fishery. Journal of Political Economy, 62(2), 124–142. https://doi.org/10.1086/257497
  3. Hardin, G. (1998). Extensions of "The tragedy of the commons." Science, 280(5364), 682–683. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.280.5364.682
  4. Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511807763
  5. Ostrom, E., Walker, J., & Gardner, R. (1992). Covenants with and without a sword: Self-governance is possible. American Political Science Review, 86(2), 404–417. https://doi.org/10.2307/1964229
  6. Ostrom, E. (2007). A diagnostic approach for going beyond panaceas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(39), 15181–15187. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0702288104

Every chapter of The Pasture Was Never Empty

  1. Chapter OneThe Things Nobody Ownsdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989524
  2. Chapter TwoThe Pasture Was Never Emptydoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989525
  3. Chapter ThreeWhere the Eight Run Thindoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989528
  4. Chapter FourEight Loops, Not Eight Rulesdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989529
  5. Chapter FiveThursday at the Apostles' Doordoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989532
  6. Chapter SixA Commons on Mondaydoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989533
  7. Chapter SevenMeadows, Forests, Fishing Groundsdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989534
  8. Chapter EightThe Field Manualdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989535
  9. Chapter NineCounting What the Commons Holdsdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989537
  10. Chapter TenThe Hard Conversationsdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989538
  11. Chapter ElevenThe Household Commonsdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989539
  12. Chapter TwelveThe Gate in the Eveningdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989540
  13. Chapter ThirteenThe Workbookdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989541

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The licence

Free to read, share, quote, translate and teach, non-commercially, for ever, under the Luminous Library Licence 1.0. Every other right is the Author’s. Deposited on Zenodo in the Luminous Prosperity community.