Much of it boils down to coordination problems, local optima, game-theoretic outcomes, and the like. Politics, in a broad sense.
These are not solveable through popular rhubrics such as "market mechanisms", as those markets are quite often what have produced the conflicts or underlying frictions in the first place.
The work of William Ophuls has largely been dedicated to describing these problems and attempting to find ways out (as well as pointing out approaches doomed to failure). See especially Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977, 1992) <https://www.worldcat.org/title/25026105> and Plato's Revenge (2011) <https://www.worldcat.org/title/753684198>.
