Ecology, Economics and the Management of Global Environmental Commons

Approaching the complexities inherent in human behavior, and compounded by the increasingly multifaceted environment we live in, requires multiple angles of attack. Hence, combining theoretical investigations and applied techniques appears to be a promising approach to inform the scientific and policy debates about environmental management. Sustainably managing jointly determined ecological-economic systems requires not only an understanding of the environmental factors that affect them, but also knowledge of the interactions and feedback cycles that operate between resource dynamics and activities attributable to human intervention. The socio-economic dynamics, in turn, call for an investigation of the behavioral drivers behind human action. We argue that a multidisciplinary approach is needed in order to tackle the increasingly pressing and intertwined environmental challenges faced by modern societies. Specifically, fruitful new insights into the mechanisms that can promote cooperation among the end-users of the local and global commons can be achieved by establishing bridges between the economic, the ecological and the behavioral traditions.