In a legal context, it is a type of property that is neither private nor public, but rather held jointly by the members of a community, who govern access and use through social structures, traditions, or formal rules. In a modern economic context, ' commons' is taken to mean any open-access and unregulated resource such as the atmosphere, oceans, rivers, ocean fish stocks, or even an office refrigerator. If it were, the destruction of nature would not have occurred.' Dieter Helm posits that the tragedy of the commons 'is not generally solved this way. These examples are context-specific however, and Oxford University Prof. Elinor Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Science for demonstrating this concept in her book Governing the Commons, which included examples of how local communities were able to do this without top-down regulations or privatization. ДЄlthough open-access resource systems may collapse due to overuse (such as in overfishing), many examples have existed and still do exist where members of a community with regulated access to a common resource co-operate to exploit those resources prudently without collapse, or even creating 'perfect order'. The concept became widely known as the 'tragedy of the commons' over a century later after an article written by Garrett Hardin in 1968. The concept originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land (also known as a 'common') in Great Britain and Ireland. In economic science, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action. Industrial pollution is one of the consequences of operators ignoring their effect on the shared environment

Collective action problem