This TED Talk features environmental policy expert Naoko Ishi,

recorded live at TED Global NYC 2017.

Good evening, everyone.

I am from Japan, so I'd like to start with a story about Japanese fishing villages.

In the first, every fisherman was tempted to catch as many fish as possible.

But if everybody did that, the fish, common shared resource in the community, would disappear.

The result would be hardship and poverty for everyone.

This happened in some cases, but it did not happen in other cases.

In these communities, the fishermen developed a kind of social contract

that told each one of them to hold back a bit to prevent overfishing.

The fishermen would keep an eye on each other. There would be penalty if you were caught cheating.

But once the benefit of social contract became clear to everyone,

the incentive to cheat dramatically dropped.

We find the same story around the world.

This is how villagers in medieval Europe managed pasture and forests.

This is how communities in Asia managed water, and this is how indigenous peoples in the Amazon managed wildlife.

These communities did realize they relied on a finite shared resource.

They developed rules and practice on how to manage those resources,

and they changed their behavior so that they could continue to rely on

those shared resources tomorrow by not overfishing, not by overgrazing, not by polluting or depleting water streams today.

This is a story of the commons and also how to avoid the so-called tragedy of the commons.

But this is also a story of an economy that was mainly local where everybody had a very strong sense of belonging.

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