India, a country with 5 percent economic growth per year, and a democracy of a billion people, faces difficult choices in conservation policy. Even the 5 percent of land set aside as park and sanctuary is under pressure, both within and without. A sense of the history of the forces that have brought us to this pass is imperative to understand the way forward. Princely practice, colonial policy, customary use, and scientific prescription have shaped the landscape as we know it. This paper tries to evaluate the key trends in ideas and the major interests in nature conservation in India. It suggests creative compromises while pinpointing new foci of conflict.

A fundamental puzzle is the ability of humans to organize themselves in cooperative arrangements to govern the shared use of resources at multiple scales. The challenges of governing digital commons share some similarities with the challenges of governing natural commons. Preventing free-riding on the voluntary contributions of others and avoiding over-consumption of scarce shared resources are core problems for all commons. Many commons have been destroyed when governance arrangements do not help participants to cope with these problems. A key question in designing governance arrangements is why agents cooperate with strangers in one-shot social dilemma interactions. In systems like eBay, for example, significant transactions are made between strangers. Current academic research has focused on reputation systems as a source of cooperation, but reputation alone can not explain all empirical patterns. Agent-based computational models are used to investigate the conditions of cooperation between strangers. These agent-based models are tested on experimental data and show the importance of heterogeneity of preferences (selfish vs. altruistic). We investigate the role of reputation scores and other symbols to identify trustworthy others (degree of altruism). The understanding of the interplay of symbols and preferences of actors will produce new insights on the consequences of regulations to governing (digital) commons.