Mainstream economics has a tight grip on public discourse, yet it remains illequipped to comprehend the collaborative vision for managing environmental and resource commons, whereby stakeholders work cooperatively in implementing solutions, or to analyse the complex institutional choices arising from its pursuit. This ground-breaking book diagnoses the weaknesses of mainstream economics in analysing collaborative and other decentralized approaches to environmental management, and presents an alternative approach capable of identifying the conditions under which pursuit of the collaborative vision has a reasonable prospect of promoting voluntary cooperation in management of the commons. The result is a powerful and useful approach to economics for collaborative environmental management of the commons.