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The Commons
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The commons refers to a resource, such as a fishery, forest, grazing land or irrigation system, that a defined community shares and from which excluding any user is difficult or costly, distinct from a purely open-access resource with no community and no rules at all. Garrett Hardin's 1968 tragedy-of-the-commons thesis argued such shared resources are inevitably overused unless they are either privatized or placed under centralized government control. Elinor Ostrom's 1990 book Governing the Commons showed empirically, from decades of fieldwork on real irrigation systems, fisheries, forests and grazing lands around the world, that communities repeatedly design and enforce their own durable rules, clearly defined boundaries, monitoring, graduated sanctions and low-cost conflict resolution, for governing shared resources sustainably without either of Hardin's two prescribed solutions, work that founded the commons-governance branch of New Institutional Economics generally called the Bloomington School.
Facts
FieldResource Economics, New Institutional Economics 1 Proposed ByReal-world commons institutions are ancient; Ostrom's 1990 Governing the Commons is what formalized commons governance as its own analytic category, distinct from open-access resources on one side and from Garrett Hardin's 1968 privatize-or-nationalize prescription on the other. SignificanceOstrom's empirical refutation of Hardin's inevitability thesis, built from decades of fieldwork on real irrigation systems, fisheries and forests, won her the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, the first ever awarded to a woman. 2 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Same subject, shared resources without individual ownership, addressed by two different bodies of work: Hardin's 1968 thesis predicts their inevitable overuse absent privatization or state control; Ostrom's empirical research (Governing the Commons, 1990) documents communities that avoid it through self-designed, durable governance institutions.
Associated With School
Attributed To
Ostrom's 1990 Governing the Commons founded the empirical commons-governance branch of New Institutional Economics this concept entry describes.
Sources
1. Governing the Commons
Elinor Ostrom, Cambridge University Press, 1990
1. Governing the Commons
Elinor Ostrom, Cambridge University Press, 1990Introduction
1. Governing the Commons
Elinor Ostrom, Cambridge University Press, 1990Publication date
2. Wikipedia
Wikimedia FoundationAwards sectionQuote, Awards section
In 2009, she was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her 'analysis of economic governance, especially the commons'.
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