Musical Chairs as Commons: The Resource Challenge

The tragedy of the commons is often taken as common sense – the idea that shared resources eventually devolve into a frantic scramble for private gain, at the expense of the whole community. We learn this lesson as children, playing zero-sum games like musical chairs, where there’s never enough to go around, and someone is always left standing. In the face of climate crises and increasing water and energy insecurity, it’s easy to fall back into these habits of thought – but it doesn’t have to be that way. This hands-on workshop turns the familiar game into a live experiment in cooperative resource management. We’ll play twice – first the way you remember it, then with a few changes to the rules – and experience how a community-based framework allows players to manage a shrinking resource together. From there, we will explore different approaches to managing the commons, from Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning study of a Swiss alpine village where local cooperatives have successfully governed communal pastures and irrigation channels for more than 500 years, to contemporary examples of community-led water and energy management in Greece and Switzerland. These cases show that it’s not just a game – we already have the institutional models and legal frameworks to make sure no one’s left standing when the music stops. This event is part of Assembly, the main Swiss stage at Climate Week NYC 2026. As world leaders gather in Midtown Manhattan, Swissnex assembles Swiss and global voices – from private sector innovators and researchers to artists and policymakers – in the East Village for three days of communal climate thinking and action. Assembly speaks to deliberation and democracy – the idea that communities must collectively define their futures – as well as the ongoing, creative, improvisational process of constructing those futures from the pieces of our present. At Swissnex in Boston and New York, we connect Switzerland, North America, and the world in science, education, innovation, and the arts.