The contributors in this volume revisit "tragedy of the commons" (also referred to as "drama" or "comedy" of the commons) and examine new data and theories to mitigate pressures and devise models for sustainable communal welfare and development. They present twelve archaeological, historic, and ethnographic cases of user-managed resources to demonstrate that very basic community-level participatory governance can be a successful strategy to manage short-term risk and benefits. The book connects past-present-future by presenting geographically and chronologically spaced out examples of communal-level governance strategies, and overviews of the current cutting-edge research. The lesson we learn from studying past responses to various ecological stresses is that we must not wait for a disaster to happen to react, but must react to mitigate conditions for emerging disasters.

Foreword.- Introduction.- The Tragedy of the Commons: A Theoretical Update.- Who is in the Commons? Defining Community and Management Practices in Long Term Natural Resource Management.- Managing risk through cooperation: Need-based transfers and risk pooling among the societies of the Human Generosity Project.- Trolls, Water, Time, and Community: Resource Management in the Mývatn District of Northeast Iceland.- Organization of high-altitude summer pastures: the dialectics of conflict and cooperation.- Large-Scale Land Acquisition as Commons Grabbing: A comparative analysis of six African case studies.- Open Access, Open Systems: Pastoral Resource Management in the Chad Basin.- Mollusk Harvesting in the Pre-European Contact Pacific Islands: investigating Resilience and Sustainability.- Environment and Landscapes of Latin America's Past.- Collaborative and Competitive Strategies in the Variability and Resiliency of Early Complex Societies in Mesoamerica.- The Native California Commons: Ethnographic and Archaeological Perspectives on Land Control, Resource Use, and Management.- Identifying Common Pool Resources in the Archaeological Record: A Case Study of Water Commons from the North American Southwest.