This is a special post for quick takes by mako yass. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Wild Speculative Civics: What if we found ways of reliably detecting when tragedies of the commons have occurred, then artificially increased their costs (charging enormous fines) to anyone who might have participated in creating them, until it's not even individually rational to contribute to them any more?
I can imagine a few technical problems, like determining what level of usage is optimal (you don't want people to overfish the lake, but you don't know exactly how many fish are there), or the costs of policing. But it would be possible to propose a few dozen situations where this strategy could be used, and address these issues individually; and then perhaps only use the strategy in some of them. Or perhaps by examining individual specific cases, we would discover a common pattern why this doesn't work.
That sounds like punishing any usage of common resources which is likely undesireable.
Good policy to manage individual commons requires to think through how their usage is best managed. Elinor Ostrom did a lot of research into what works for setting up good systems.