Nobel Prize is a Milestone for the Commons Movement

Elinor Ostrom’s Award Disarms Those Who Say a Commons-based Society is Impossible.

By Jay Walljasper

The biggest roadblock standing in the way of many people’s recognition
of the importance of the commons came tumbling down when
Indiana University professor Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for
economics. She accepts the award in Stockholm with a lecture on December 8.

Over many decades Ostrom has documented how various communities manage
common resources grazing lands, forests, irrigation waters,
fisheries equitably and sustainably over the long term. The Nobel
Committee’s recognition of her work effectively debunks popular
theories about the Tragedy of the Commons, which hold that private
property is the only effective method to prevent finite resources from
being ruined or depleted.

Awarding the world’s most prestigious economics prize to a scholar who
champions cooperative behavior greatly boosts the legitimacy of the
commons as a framework for solving our social and environmental
problems. Ostrom’s work also challenges the current economic
orthodoxy that there are few, if any, alternatives to privatization
and markets in generating wealth and human well being.

The Tragedy of the Commons refers to a scenario in which commonly held
land is inevitably degraded because everyone in a community is allowed
to graze livestock there. This parable was popularized by wildlife
biologist Garrett Hardin in the late 1960s, and was embraced as a
principle by the emerging environmental movement. But Ostrom’s
research refutes this abstract concept once-and-for-all with the real
life experience from places like Nepal, Kenya and Guatemala.

“When local users of a forest have a long-term perspective, they are
more likely to monitor each other’s use of the land, developing rules
for behavior,” she cites as an example. “It is an area that standard
market theory does not touch.”

(Garrett Hardin himself later revised his own view, noting that what
he described was actually the Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons.)

Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz, also winner of a Nobel
prize, comments, “Conservatives used the Tragedy of the Commons to
argue for property rights, and efficiency was achieved as people were
thrown off the commons….What Ostrom has demonstrated is the existence
of social control mechanisms that regulate the use of the commons
without having to resort to property rights.”

The Nobel Committee’s choice of Ostrom is significant considering that
many winners of the prize since it was initiated in 1968 have been
zealous advocates of unrestricted markets, such as Milton Friedman,
whose selection helped fuel the rise of market theory as the be-all
end-all of economics since the 1980s. Policies based upon this narrow
worldview sparked the rise of corporate power and the diminishment of
government’s role in protecting the commons.

While right-wing thinkers scoffed at the possibility of resources
being shared in a way that maintains the common good, arguing that
private property is the only practical strategy to prevent this
tragedy, Ostrom’s scholarship shows otherwise.

“What we have ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of
real involvement of the people involved,” she explains.

A classic example of this are the acequias, a centuries-old tradition
of cooperative irrigation systems in New Mexico and Colorado where the
small flow of water available for agriculture is allocated by the
community as a whole through a democratic process.

Ostrom is the first woman to be awarded the Economics prize, which
some observers say helps explain her emphasis on the role of people’s
relationships in our economic arrangements rather than the focus on
individualized market choices expounded by many male winners of the
 Nobel.

Equally noteworthy is the fact that Ostrom was not trained as an
economist, but as a political scientist may be a factor that may be even more
useful in explaining her outside-the-box approach to economics.

Yale economist Robert Schiller, quoted in the New York Times, welcomed
the merging of the two fields. “Economics has become too isolated and
stuck on the view that markets are efficient and self-regulating. It
has derailed our thinking.”

Elinor Ostrom has always been explicit in recognizing the importance
of the commons she helped found the International Association for the
Study of the Commons, also based at Indiana University and her
selection as a Nobel Laureate marks an early milestone in the
emergence of a commons-based society. Her works shows that our
social, environmental and personal advancement depends on the
vitality of the commons as well as the market in our lives.

Posted December 9, 2009