Commons Sense

IU’s press release on Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Speech yesterday in Stockholm.  Some good ideas to think with here regarding commons, especially at a time when the privatization of crucial, life/death stuff is more than ever a pressing political concern:

When she began her research in the 1960s, Ostrom said, it was ‘a very simple world’ according to economic theory. There were two types of goods: public and private. And there were two systems for governing their use and exchange: markets and the state.

Over the years, she and her colleagues added common-pool resources and ‘toll’ goods to the types of goods that could be analyzed. They developed the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, allowing them to refine their ideas through field work, laboratory experiments using game theory, and meta-analyses of studies of resource management.

In the influential 1968 essay ‘The Tragedy of the Commons,’ Garrett Hardin famously argued that humans dependent on a common-pool resource were helplessly trapped, destined to overuse and destroy the resource that sustained them.

But Ostrom had seen the opposite in her graduate research, when she studied how Southern California residents used informal associations to solve problems related to groundwater use. Later, with IU colleagues and students, she studied large and small police departments. They found the best results came not from large size but from ‘polycentric’ systems: small departments for direct services, consolidated efforts for indirect services such as crime labs.”

A lot more where this comes from, too.  Free pdf!

Filed under: commons  Elinor Ostrom  IU