Governing the Commons

Private property or the commons? Free enterprise or public ownership?

Arguably the most substantive contribution to such debates in the past 50 years has come from Elinor Ostrom for her decades of study of common-pool resource management.

From case studies around the world and from centuries past, she proves that collective ownership need not end in a “tragedy of the commons,” but can succeed.

In work that won her the Nobel Prize in Economics (she is a political scientist) studying community-managed fisheries, forests, grazing lands, and watersheds, Ostrom describes and evaluates successes and failures in great detail and with attention… show more.

Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel prize in economics for her pathbreaking work, presented in this book, about institutional solutions to the tragedy of the commons. 

Supported by extensive empirical work she demonstrates that we are not doomed to destroy our ecosystems and overuse our resources, and she develops institutional rules for the governance of common property resources at different geographic scales.

This book provides examples of collective action and collaboration in solving society's wicked problems, especially depletion of shared resources or commons (e.g., forests and fisheries). Ostrom talks about the local solutions, often through voluntary organizations, based on what matters to local people creating a sustainable system for protecting and transforming community goods or commons. While this book is mainly focused on natural resources, this idea of managing commons from voluntary and local actions helped me rethink how to manage intangible commons like arts and culture. In other words, rethinking how arts and cultural organizations are traditionally managed and funded (focused… show more.