The cultural evolution of collective property rights for sustainable resource governance

Abstract

With commons encompassing approximately 65% of Earth’s surface and vast tracts of the ocean, a critical challenge for sustainability involves establishing effective institutions for governing these common-pool resources (CPR). While examples of successful governance exist, the circumstances and mechanisms behind their development have often faded from historical records and memories. Drawing on ethnographic work, we introduce a generic evolutionary multigroup modelling framework that examines the emergence, stability and temporal dynamics of collective property rights. Our research reveals a fundamental insight: when intergroup conflicts over resources exist, establishing and enforcing ‘access rights’ becomes an essential prerequisite for evolving sustainable ‘use rights’. These access rights, in turn, enable cultural group selection and facilitate the evolution of sustainable use rights through the imitation of successful groups. Moreover, we identify four crucial aspects within these systems: (1) seizures in CPR systems create individual-level incentives to enforce use and access rights; (2) support for collective property rights is frequency dependent and prone to oscillations; (3) the maximum sustainable yield (MSY) is a tipping point that alters the interplay between individual and group-level selection pressures; (4) success-biased social learning (imitation) of out-group members plays a vital role in spreading sustainable institutions and preventing the tragedy of the commons.