The 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded on 12th October to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson for their research on economic governance. Ostrom’s award is particularly exciting, for it cites her study of the commons.Ostrom’s pioneering work mostly concerns the governance of common-pool resources — resources that are rivalrous (i.e., scarce, can be used up, unlike digital goods) yet need to be or should be governed as a commons — classically, things like water systems and the atmosphere. This work is cited by many scholars of non-rivalrous commons (e.g., knowledge commons) as laying the groundwork for their field.
Elinor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories. She observes that resource users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts of interest, and she characterizes the rules that promote successful outcomes.
Hereunder is a short presentation by Elinor Ostrom, joint winner of this year's Peace Prize for Economics. She talks about the crucial role of learning about and respecting how communities manage common resources in the battle against environmental degradation.
References
Press Release Noble Prize 12/10 Economic governance: the organization of cooperation
Community Content 19/10 The importance of Local Knowledge in managing complexity
