The truth about the tragedy of the commons
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Peer2Politics
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on peer-to-peer dynamics in politics, the economy and organizations
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jean lievens
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David Bollier's overview of Elinor Ostrom, the Political Scientist Who Debunked Mainstream Economics 
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For at least a generation, the very idea of the commons has been marginalized and dismissed as a misguided way to manage resources: the so-called tragedy of the commons. In a short but influential essay published in Science in 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin gave the story a fresh formulation and a memorable tagline.
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Why so much sudden love for Ostrom? Did people really think before that the commons was impossible? Wasn’t the countryside full of communal lands and herds?
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The market fundamentalism of Hayek seems to dominate political discourse. Hayek, the liberal free market Austrian economists, argued that state planning would end in failure and only the market could promote economic efficiency. This agenda seems, since Thatcher and Reagan, to have swept the world but it is, of course false. Neo-liberals far from reducing state intervention use the state to support corporations. Privatization is about helping powerful firms and market competition is no longer an issue. A good example is the current transformation of the NHS into a cash cow for Virgin and US health corporations. Neo-liberals promote corporate welfare and monopoly. Elinor Ostrom is powerful ally for all those of us who want to challenge that neo-liberal dogma and create people centred cooperative economics.
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“The main objective of this paper is to explore what we call the “social theory” or the “social philosophy” that presumably shapes, inspires and defines the Ostroms’ research program. Our argument is that what we have called the “social theory” behind the Bloomington School’s research agenda has in fact two facets that may or may not be consistent with each other. Even more, they may or may not be necessarily and inseparably connected with the rest of the program. The first is built around the concept of “polycentricity” and a series of Public Choice insights, and is a challenge to two of the deepest assumptions of political and economic sciences in the 20th century: the monocentric vision of social order and the “market” versus “state” dichotomy. The second is built around a view of social order seen as a knowledge and learning process, along with a series of observations about the human condition, fallibility, coercion and error as well as about the factors engendering institutional order as a response to the challenges posed by them.”
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Ostrom’s main focus was examining how common pool resources could be managed. She explained that common pool resources included lakes and fisheries because they could not be easily divided into private property, meaning they had to be managed by some of form of collective agreement. Her work, and that of her husband Vincent Ostrom, started by looking at water tables around Los Angeles. Immortalised in the Roman Polanski film China Town, different users were in danger of taking too much water from the system. If too much water was taken, the water table would fall and salt water would be sucked in, destroying the system. The Ostroms found that water users formed associations and, despite difficult challenges, found ways of co-operating to preserve the system.
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With her research on the governance of the commons, that landed her the Nobel Price of Economy in 2009, Elinor Ostrom reversed Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the commons curse, which formed the basic argumentation for the privatization and monetization of public or public domain goods and services.
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Since the 1960s, the predominant policy prescription for ensuring the exploitation of land resources in Africa has been the individualisation of land held under custom.
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Why so much sudden love for Ostrom? Did people really think before that the commons was impossible? Wasn't the countryside full of communal lands and herds?
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J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is a meditation on the corrupting influence of power. I felt like Frodo making his way towards Mordor in my effort to understand economic theory, but the person who came closest to playing a Frodo-like role in the recent history of economic thinking is Elinor Ostrom.
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In a 2013 article, "Generalizing the core design principles for the efficacy of groups," David Wilson, Elinor Ostrom and Michael Cox recount Garrett Hardin's classic parable of the pasture overgrazed by farmers, each pursuing their own private interest by adding more cattle to their herd. Hardin's grim conclusion of a "tragedy of the commons" was shown to be avoidable by Ostrom's Nobel Prize winning research, in that, "when certain conditions are met groups of people are capable of sustainably managing their common resources [emphasis in original]."
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In the 1970s, Elinor "Lin" Ostrom and her graduate students, including Roger Parks began researching how urban governments supplied basic services such as police protection in large metropolitan areas like St. Louis. Many urban governments had turned to city-county consolidation plans but Ostrom's studies showed that smaller could be—and often was—better.
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The International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) is a multidisciplinary academic organization focused on building and mobilizing knowledge around many integrated social-economic and environmental issues with a particular focus on how to avoid the “tragedy of the commons”. The organization is over 20 years old and gained significant notoriety in 2009 when one of its founding members (Elinor Ostrom) won the Nobel Prize in Economics. A significant body of research and practice speaks to the importance of common pool resource management to local and global sustainability.
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"Ostrom's framework for distinguishing different types of goods and services classifies them as either highly subtractable – meaning that one person's use of a resource leaves less available for others – or have low subtractability and as either more or less excludable, depending on how difficult or costly it is to exclude people from access to the good. Taken together, those two pairs constitute a matrix that specifies four ideal types of goods. Private goods are subtractable and excludable (that is it is not difficult to exclude beneficiaries). Public goods are neither highly subtractable nor excludable. The remaining sectors are common pool resources, which are subtractable but difficult to exclude and toll goods, which have low subtractability but are not difficult to exclude people from.
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This paper examines the notion that the enclosure of the information commons through the privatization of information that used to be in the public domain is part of a broad pattern of legal and political changes that are transforming several of the fundamental elements of modernity: science, scholarship, and law.
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Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist at Indiana University, received the Nobel Prize in 2009 for her research proving the importance of the commons around the world.
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Elinor Ostrom overcame considerable barriers to become the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Economics.
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Quite recently I’ve had the chance to participate to Pisa’s Internet Festival, one of the biggest Italian event about the Internet (as per the name). I was the curator of an entire conference afternoon that was dedicated to the theme of the sharing economy (or the collaborative economy as I very much more like to call it lately).
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