Tag Archives for Ostrom

RIP Elinor Ostrom, Economics Nobel 2009

IASC deeply regrets the passing of Elinor Ostrom | IASC-COMMONS bookmarked on diigo

Here, also a short post I wrote about her work after she received the Nobel in Economics: Local cooperation can overcome climate change , and a recent article on the importance of her work for the Rio+20 conference: Elinor Ostrom’s trailblazing commons research can inspire Rio+20

Local cooperation to overcome climate change

I want to use the occasion of Blog Action Day to reflect a bit on how Elinor Ostrom’s work (this year’s Nobel in Economic Sciences) may help us deal with climate change. In short, many solutions will emerge from collective action at the local level that solve problems according to the different local conditions. One challenge will be to ensure that these local experiments and solutions will learn from each other.

Here are a few points from Lin Ostrom’s work that I think are relevant for the climate change discussions:

  1. Her work clearly refutes the Tragedy of the Commons as a myth shows that shared resources can be managed collectively.
  2. State and private property are not the only models of ownership and management for resources; for centuries local communities and small groups of forest dweller, farmers and fishers have been managing resources collectively developing at times very sophisticated management systems.
  3. The state is not always the best actor to manage shared resources – it is often better to allow for local variations and give autonomy to local groups so these can identify the best solutions for the specific context.
  4. We have to work together across disciplines and topics to see the right patterns and make the right connections to identify solutions that work.

What does that mean for climate change?

  1. It is possible to manage our shared resources (the earth’s diverse ecosystems and the atmosphere) that are crucial for our climate system to function without state control or privatizing them.
  2. New forms of ownership that transcend the private and public realm and that put the responsibility in the hands of the users (all of us) can trigger local action.
  3. While a general climate treaty will help to galvanize action across the world, governments have to be bolder to allow and support local changes and give people the chance to experiment with different ways of dealing with the challenges posed by climate change.
  4. The climate change space is still far too fragmented to come up with solutions that will be effective and have the support of a majority of societal actors. Environmental conservation, rights of local people, or business opportunities that carbon trade schemes offer do not have to be competing with one another, but they are in many cases today.

For more on Lin Ostrom’s work go to IU’s Workshop on Political Theory that she founded and still directs and the website of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC), of which she was the founding president.