Here work shows of course that the simplistic Econ101 Trategy of the Commons is wrong. And that of course was known long before. Just as in any other field just reading 101 isn't sufficient. This is an old problem in economics and much has been written about.

What her work actually shows is that the determining factor isn't so much if something is private or government or something else but rather about various other factor, like communication, monitoring and enforcement.

> Problem is that privatisation (together with markets, cause the two always go hand in hand) introduces incentives to compete and to exploit

There are tons of resources under private management and private operates are very well capable of understanding that if they simply use up the resource they will hurt their future earnings potential.

In the old school case of common land being zoned off, those lands became private. Those private operators used that land far more efficiently and the result a massive increase in the British population. And guess what, 100s of years later and that land is very often still farmed to this day. They understand that the land has capacity that needs to be restored in various way.

Now one can make the argument if the privatization happened in a fair way. Meaning did all the people who had access to common land get an fair share. That however is a different question.

With farm land this works because based on Ostroms work its pretty easy to monitor, and enforce. Secretly going to another farmers land and planting or harvesting isn't all that viable. In case of fishery rights this get much more complex. Before the invention of barbed wire such simply mechanism didn't work for cattle for example and thus other mechanism were used. However once barbed wire was invented cattle farmers moved to full privatization. See 'The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier' if you are interest in various stories like that.

We can take various other examples. Common forest could suffer tragedy of the commons. But private logging operations have long understood that they need to split up land to have forest at different stages so that they can continually harvest wood for a long time.

Privatization (as in splitting up the resources into various parts) can align the intensives correctly, the damage the resource takes impact your own utility and thus aligns intensives correctly.

So it totally correct to say that splitting up a resource and managing it independent is a potential solution. But I think Ostrom work indicates that we need to look deeper and beyond a one size fits all solution to resource management.

> But private logging operations have long understood that they need to split up land to have forest at different stages so that they can continually harvest wood for a long time.

Private logging operations have started taking a more sustainable view only after a lot of pressure from conservationist groups. And even today, private logging operations are destroying incredibly important forests. Private logging is a good example of why privatisation is so extremely bad about the commons and the environment.

> communication, monitoring and enforcement. > Which is a roundabout way of saying government. Privatised, for profit ownership encourages unsustainable exploitation, without much regard for the longer term consequences. Again - forestry is a good example, and so are fisheries. Likewise:

> Privatization (as in splitting up the resources into various parts) can align the intensives correctly, the damage the resource takes impact your own utility and thus aligns intensives correctly.

Again is a roundabout way of saying government. And instead of adding for-profit middle-men here, we can just skip that part and just govern the resources. Then you don't need to deal with a fiddly system of incentives, that will most likely be made weaker by lobbyists representing private interests.

> Now one can make the argument if the privatization happened in a fair way. Meaning did all the people who had access to common land get a fair share. That however is a different question.

Intimately connected to the topic however, since historically, privatisation has always been used in order to enrich the already wealthy. So it is important, because this is the cause for privatisation, and therefore there will be a lot of propaganda and justification on why it needs to happen - which is what we see historically as well.