This paper deals with two principal questions, drawingclosely on the experience of Ireland. First, it addresses adeficit in our knowledge of resource governance institutionsand land tenure systems as moderators of the impact offamine. We have known for some time of the extent ofcommon-pool resource systems in districts of 19th-centuryIreland and wider Europe, but their role in determininglevels of ecological risk exposure is less understood.Knowing that both food insecurity and common tenancywere higher in marginal Irish districts, this represents a gapin our understanding of the geographical impact of theGreat Irish Famine. Second, although current thinking oncommon-pool resource governance suggests that suchsystems were potentially robust to ecological stress, whydid this not translate into greater resilience in Ireland? Tomake sense of this contradiction, we must consider boththe local behaviour of ecological stressors and wider con-text of Irish colonialism. Using local clustering analysis andgeographically weighted regression, we see how the impactof key stressors varied geographically. These findingssuggest that analyses of the role of common-pool resourcegovernance in conferring ecological resilience must be tem-pered with a fuller appreciation of geopolitical context.