Sustainability of common pool resources

Common-pool resources (CPRs) are goods that are freely accessible to all individuals of a community. Hence, thet are inherently vulnerable to overexploitation because individual use reduces collective availability, often leading to the so-called tragedy of the commons. Yet decades of empirical research have shown that communities can develop institutions and cooperative norms that sustain shared resources over the long term. Recent advances in eco-evolutionary game theory have further enriched this perspective by explicitly modelling the feedbacks between human strategic behavior and environmental dynamics. In this thesis, I adopt a theoretical, physics-inspired approach to study such socio-ecological feedbacks. I first analyze the model introduced by Tu et al. and explore its recent extensions. I then incorporate a richer ecological dynamics and investigate the role of global knowledge of the resource state (knowledge feedback). Next, I examine how knowledge feedback interacts with more complex social dynamics. I conclude with preliminary insights on how stochasticity may amplify socio-ecological oscillations.