welcome tutorial & Tragedy of the Commons

This week's tutorial will be 2 hours in length and will be split into 2 segments. The first, a welcome tutorial, will provide an overview to the course with general discussions on the National Museum, and Yolngu, exercises. The second hour will delve into the first substantive topic for the course, which is also the first collaborative tutorial that will be shared with students from the National University of Singapore.

The First Hour

Preparation Instructions

The first part of the tutorial will give students an opportunity to get to know each other. We will discuss our interests and passions we bring to this course, and tutors will explain how tutorials will be organised and what students will be expected to do each week. The ANU and National University of Singapore collaboration will then be introduced, and students will be placed into small groups who will make contact with students at the NUS to form a collaboration group for the remainder of the term. More information on this collaboration is available in the support section of this website. Following this, we will then discuss students responses to the National Museum attraction Old Land, New Land, and Cira, and the Yolngu metaphors for learning. Before proceeding to the second hour, tutors will then

Reading

• Yolngu metaphors for learning

questions for your one page

Based on your reading of the above articles, answer the following questions:

1. What do you want out of this course
2. What do you bring with you to this course
3. Your response to Yolngu metaphors for learning (download link under "resources") and how you might best achieve Galtha (ie in what circumstances do you learn best and how are you going to achieve this in this course)
4. What you think are the key factors for making a good discussion
5. Your response to the National Museum Exercise
6. Your thoughts on the proposed assessment
7. Your selected 'blue tutorial' (see below)

blue tutorials

In addition to responding to the questions for this week, you have also been asked to pick a blue tutorial that is of interest to you, and during next week's tutorial you will be asked to find relevant web sources on this tutorial as part of the webography exercise. The blue tutorials (which can be seen on the lectures & tutorials page) signify tutorials which explore substantive issues within the course.

The "blue" tutorials are:

• Campus Sustainability
• Population
• Globalisation and the Environment
• Community Participation in Natural Resource Management
• Makah Case Study of Environmental Conflict

The Second Hour

preparation instructions

This weeks substantive topic, the Tragedy of the Commons, will be the first collaboration topic between ANU and NUS. In preparation for this, we will discuss Garret Hardin's classic article The tragedy of the commons, which is perhaps the most influential paper ever written in the area of resource management. It has been applied to various common resources such as global fisheries to explain the common collapse of these resources. The aim of this tutorial is to thus flesh out the ideas of Hardin in the context of contemporary resource management issues, and think about the relevance of this concept to present environmental problems and solutions so prepare students for the first collaboration exercise.

reading

• Feeny, David. (1990) Tragedy of the commons: twenty-two years later, Plenum Press, New York.

questions For your one page

Due to the nature of this weeks tutorial, you shoul aim to nclude the questions below on your one page with the questions above, however you will be allowed to go over the one page limit slightly.

1. What is a commons?
2. What are some examples of a communal system that you have been part of? (List one that has worked and one that has not).
3. Name some key determinants (in your experience) of how such systems function or don’t function.
4. Briefly, think about why some communal systems of managing resources work and other don't. For example, why do some group houses "work" while other don't? Some office "tea-clubs" work but in others all the biscuits get pinched!