The Tragedy of the Commons and the International Governance of Common-Pool Resources
A Special Issue Proposal
Veronica Anghel (King’s College London/European University Institute) and Erik Jones (European University Institute)
In 1994, Robert O. Keohane and Elinor Ostrom published a special issue of the Journal of Theoretical Politics to apply Ostrom’s work on the management of common-pool resources at the local level to international organisations. Under the title, Local Commons and Global Interdependence, the contributors to that collection – including many of the top scholars studying international relations – explored how actors operating at different levels of aggregation face the same challenges in organising collective action to address major problems as do local actors: without hierarchical governance and relying primarily on self-enforcing agreements.
We believe it is time to update that application and so we are calling for contributions to a new collection. There are three compelling reasons for updating the original insights.
- First, the scope and scale of the problems that the international regimes explored in the first collection addressed have widened dramatically. The end of the Cold War and the evolution of the global economy have created many more and different powerful actors. Hence it is worth asking whether international regimes created as self-enforcing agreements during the Cold War are still effective, or whether the problems they were meant to resolve are left increasingly unaddressed. We think of this as the problem of ‘enlargement’.
- Second, the maintenance and updating of these international governance regimes has itself become a more dynamic collective action problem. We aim to explore what contributes to the successful evolution of these regimes, their replacement with new arrangements that strive for functional equivalence, and the consequences of failure in terms of either or both endeavours. We think of this as the problem of ‘institutional adaption’.
- Third, the integration of the global economy, politics and societies over the past three decades has altered the nature of the ‘goods’ international governance regimes are intended to provide and govern. Material resources – such as energy, water, or critical raw materials – and immaterial resources – such as democracy, security or freedom of movement – are increasingly more difficult to seal off from outsiders or make sustainable for insiders. This is the ‘tragedy of the commons.’
- Fourth, the connections between and variety of transnational actors has increased dramatically with changes in technology and with the deepening of interdependence. While individuals and firms play important roles in the domestic political economy arguments that emergence in the contributions to the first collection, the nature of transnational interdependence and the cross-border relationships this represents is orders of magnitude more complicated. As a result, maintaining those relationships and ensuring they are both sustainable and resilient represents another important challenge for collective action. We think of this as the ‘management of relational geopolitics’ and geoeconomics.
We have piloted work that shows what a new application of Ostrom’s analysis of the management of common-pool resources at the micro level might look like at a much greater level of aggregation. In doing so, we have paid particular attention to the challenges of ‘enlargement’ and ‘institutional adaption’ in the European Union, but with clear implications for international organisations more generally. Both the article and the short book we published are available ‘open access’. The book version of the argument was reviewed in Foreign Policy.
That pilot work provides a theoretical model – based on Ostrom’s original analysis. For an exploration of the connection to ‘relational geopolitics’, see this article by Veronica Anghel.
What we would like to receive in your proposal fits on one page:
- A suggested title.
- A brief (200 word) description of the problem you seek to address and the relevance of the common-pool resource framework. Topics can include, but are not limited to energy, space, critical raw materials, freedom of navigation, payments, defence, cybersecurity, democracy, human rights, clean air. We also welcome theoretical challenges to the framework!
- A brief (50-75 word) description of the data and methods you will use.
- A two-sentence identification of who you are together with a link to your institutional homepage or personal website.
We will organise a first workshop around 3,000-word memos in Florence, Italy, in April 2027 with full first drafts to be submitted by 1 September 2027. The precise guidelines for the drafts will be circulated once we have a commitment from a journal. A lot will depend upon the submissions we receive and the ambitions of the contributors we invite to participate in the project. If there is enough interest that can be sorted into different types of contributions, we might develop two separate collections.
Please send your proposals to: Veronica Anghel (veronica.anghel@eui.eu) and Erik Jones (erik.jones@eui.eu).
The deadline for submission is 20 October 2026.
References:
Anghel, Veronica (2025). ‘Why the EU Is a Geopolitical Power: Wartime Enlargement, Integration, and Reform.’ Journal of European Public Policy 32:12, pp. 2862-2885.
Anghel, Veronica, and Erik Jones (2025a). ‘The Enlargement of International Organizations.’ West European Politics 48:1, pp. 1-28.
Anghel, Veronica, and Erik Jones (2025b). From Club to Commons: Enlargement, Reform and Sustainability in European Integration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Caroline De Gruyter (2026). ‘Europe Will Never Stop Growing.’ Foreign Policy (25 February) https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/02/25/europe-eu-growth-book-review/.
Keohane, Robert O., and Elinor Ostrom, eds. (1995). Local Commons and Global Interdependence. London: Sage Publications.