Governing the Commons
What can we learn from communities around the world managing shared resources about human evolution, behavior, and sustainability?
Exploring diverse sustainability dilemmas in the world helps us to identify the conditions and behaviors that play a role in the sustainable development of communities.
The role of the Governing the Commons content anchor is to integrate perspectives from human behavioral ecology, evolutionary biology, political science, behavioral economics, geography, and sustainability science to explore how biological species and especially human groups around the world manage shared resources such as land, water, air, knowledge, and public goods. Within the OpenEvo framework, this content anchor contributes to the understanding that sustainability problems usually require collective action, beyond individual behavior change. By studying how norms and institutions as well as ecology interact with individual and collective resource use behaviors, learners gain insights into the factors that can have an influence on whether communities succeed or fail in sustaining shared resources, equipping them with conceptual tools to analyze and address novel sustainability problems.
Teaching Materials related to this Content Anchor
Below you find all our teaching materials that integrate or explore perspectives on the management of shared resources in order to understand challenges and solutions to problems of sustainable resource use.
A Teacher’s Guide to Evolution, Behavior, and Sustainability Science
Our interdisciplinary teacher’s guide outlines our educational design concept. It provides introductory readings around core concepts of human sciences and ideas for exploring them in the classroom.
Analyzing social-ecological systems
In this lesson, students analyze a select real-world social-ecological system by looking at factors of the resource(s) and ecosystem, resource user behaviors, and governance, to develop recommendations for improving the sustainable management of the resource.
Chimps or children – who is better at sharing resources?
A comparative behavioral research experiment exploring the abilities of chimpanzees and of children to cooperate around a shared resource.
Climate Change Game
A cooperation game that lets students experience some of the challenges of cooperation in addressing global climate change
Commons game
In a classroom simulation game with changing conditions students develop strategies for the use of a common resource so that the profit for the entire group is maximized.
Community Science Field Guide to School Culture
Schools are central social environments for young people to grow and develop themselves. How schools are governed, and which norms, values, and institutions get adopted, can all drive major life trajectories for how students think about their own learning and civic capacities and about the world they live in. This community science field guide provides supports for students around the world to investigate and strengthen the cooperation dynamics of their own school governance systems.
Evolution, Cooperation, and Sustainability
A lesson collection on evolution, cooperation, and sustainability
Evolutionary Anthropology in the Primary School
Evolutionary Anthropology in the Primary School – a pre-service primary teacher module
Exploring the Design Principles for Cooperation
Students explore the principles that allow groups to work together and achieve common goals, applying them to the groups that they are a part of or care about.
Human Behavior & Sustainable Development
A lesson collection for the Human Behavior & Sustainable Development module.
Human evolution – Life in groups
Teaching resources and information about origins of human adapatations to life in groups
Introduction to social dilemmas and the payoff matrix
Students reflect on the causes and consequences of human behaviors in situations of social interactions, and are introduced to the payoff matrix as a helpful tool to represent motivations and outcomes of behaviors.
NetLogo: Evolution and competition for forest resources
This NetLogo model builds on the model of Two Foresters. In this model, agents reproduce based on the amount of resources that they harvest.
NetLogo: Evolution of resource use and social behavior (monitoring and punishment)
This model lets us explore how the appearance of certain social behaviors can affect evolutionary population dynamics.
NetLogo: Evolution of resource use through behavior imitation
This model adds cultural evolutionary dynamics through behavior imitation to the evolution of resource use behavior.
NetLogo: Evolution of resource use with harvest efficiency
This model introduces the concept of resource use efficiency into the evolution of resource use behavior.
NetLogo: Population size and living costs
This model allows students to explore the relationships between population size, resource growth rates, cost of living, and resource use rates.
NetLogo: Two communities
This NetLogo computer model extends the model Two Foresters and introduces a bigger and more complex population structure
NetLogo: Two Foresters
An interactive introduction into concepts of ecology, behavioral ecology, and sustainability with a computer simulation of a simple social-ecological system.
Payoff matrices
Payoff matrices can help us analyze the behavioral strategies and possible outcomes in diverse situations across biology and society.
Perception of eyes and prosocial behavior
A behavioral experiment that tells us about the role of unconscious perception, particularly the perception of human eyes, on human social behavior.
Public Goods Game
With these teaching materials, students can be introduced to game theory in general, as well as a concrete method, the public goods game. The conditions and rules of the public goods game reflect the challenge of a group to maintain common resources.
Three Mexican fisheries
Students compare the stories of three Mexican fishing villages to understand the factors that enabled some villages to sustainably manage their fishing resources, while others failed.
What motivates people to save energy
A set of behavioral experiments to find out what motivates people to save electricity, exploring the roles of monetary incentives, social norms, appeals to the environment or to citizenship.