Development studies have often evolved amidst a tension between the tendency to declare all forms of communal management archaic and in need of modernisation via privatisation and market integration, and the temptation to essentialise indigenous management with nostalgia while vilifying market impacts. Closer examination suggests that common property systems will not simply collapse under market pressure, or create defensive bulwarks to maintain market-free enclaves, but can strategically engage with market systems and global trade. This offers opportunity for the design of sustainable environmental policies. Ethnographic examples open discussion of an often dismissed possibility: sometimes the connection of small-scale societies to market systems has created a productive opportunity that has allowed these communities to survive. Peer reviewed