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There are few terms that are used in such an inflated manner as the word" sustainability". Politicians, businesspeople, scientists and all kinds of advertisers consider themselves, their proposals, their articles and their beliefs to be more sustainable than the ones of their competitors. Listening to them, one gets the impression that our world is the most sustainable one imaginable. Looking at reality, the exact opposite is true. Globalization accelerates all kinds of industrial, domestic and urban metabolisms and increasingly unbundled market mechanisms are becoming a serious threat for the survival of the reproductive capacities of our common natural resources. With the advancement of globalization and market liberalization, the need for solid institutional mechanisms capable of guaranteeing the survival of normally local and/or regional natural resources has tremendously increased in the last twenty years. Traditional environmental protection policies are incapable of doing this job. Like many other scholars and politicians, we believe that fundamental changes in the way we manage our common natural resources are inevitable if we claim to fight against the" plundering of our common wealth"[Bollier 2002].

This article is meant to be a modest contribution to the theoretical and empirical thoughts towards a solution of this vital problem of overexploitation of natural resources. It firstly explores the traditional response to this question which consists of a wide range of environmental policies, each of which has the objective of providing a solution to the collective problem of protecting the resource against pollution. Taking into account the current situation …