The central fault with Hardin’s conclusion is that it presents a disempowering, pessimistic vision of the human prospect. Users are pictured as trapped in a situation they cannot change, and thus it is argued that solutions must be imposed on users by external authorities. In fact, for thousands of years people have self-organized to manage common-pool resources, and users often do devise long-term, sustainable institutions for governing these resources.

For most of history, the use of CPRs has been at the local level. Irrigation, grazing land, etc. have been successfully managed as CPRs. However, as the pace of population growth continues and globalization increases there is a corresponding strain on resources beyond local areas. Ocean fisheries, groundwater basins and the atmosphere are some of the more obvious examples of resources that transcend local boundaries.

Designing an effective management system requires that each CPR be examined individually to determine such properties as the size and carrying capacity of the resource system, the measurability of the resource, the temporal and spatial availability of resource flows, the amount of storage in the system, whether resources move (like water, wildlife, and most fish) or are stationary (like trees and medicinal plants), how fast resources regenerate, and how various harvesting technologies affect patterns of regeneration.

Additionally, an effective management system must deal with the relationship between the resource and the users. It is critical that the system results in sufficient benefits to the users to justify the cost of maintaining the resource and monitoring its use to ensure compliance with accepted norms.

Traditional methods of CPR management combined with new insights resulting from research in social science and advances in technology will be key to designing management systems able to meet the challenge.

Research in social science offers new understanding in determining what social values need to be in place in order for diverse groups to reach agreement on how to profitably and safely use the resource. New technology offers better ways to measure the properties of a resource and enhanced ways to monitor the maintenance and use of the resource.

The rules and norms that make any CPR management system operate well are often not visible to external observers, so efforts by well-meaning outsiders (whether in the form of central government or private companies) often result in reduced rather than improved performance. Thus, it is most important that the actual users of the resource play a key role in developing the management system.