Elinor Ostrom or the Revolution of the Commons (2019) (original) (raw)
Related papers
On the Time of the Tragedy of the Commons and the Need of Solutions beyond the Economic Man
This is a revisit to Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons, which describes today's global overpopulation and overexploitation of resources. The aim of the paper is to acknowledge the futility of today's solutions debating between governmental regulation and the free markets (which are also Hardin's solutions) and demands the need to reevaluate the human nature beyond the notion of homo economicus.
Nature, economics, property and commons. Subversive notes inspired by Elinor Ostrom
E3S Web of Conferences, 2014
Nature-economy relations also are the result of economics' concepts, ideas and paradigms. Heterodox economic views and paradigms are urgently needed to foster shifts towards the planet's future sustainability paths. Elinor Ostrom, 2009 Nobel economics laureate, stands as one of the authors whose long neglected views are most inspiring in subverting mainstream paradigms on property regimes and natural resource management. Challenging the tragedy of the commons orthodoxy, she shows humans are able to escape the prisoner's dilemma, as well as the public vs private property, and state vs market modern dichotomy in natural resources' management models, by recognizing common property as a third option, and re-inventing the commons as indeed diverse and resilient institutions to foster more sustainable economy-nature relations. Brazil's indigenous territories are cited as a living example of commons' sustainability, although increasingly threatened by economic growth.
This essay identifies a contradiction between the flourishing interest in the environmental economics of the classical period and a lack of critical parsing of the works of its leading representatives. Its focus is the work of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. It offers a critical analysis of their contribution to environmental thought and surveys the work of their contemporary devotees. It scrutinizes Smith's contribution to what Karl Polanyi termed the "economistic fallacy," as well as his defences of class hierarchy, the "growth imperative" and consumerism. It subjects to critical appraisal Malthus's enthusiasm for private property and the market system, and his opposition to market regulation. While Malthus's principal attraction to ecological economists lies in his having allegedly broadened the scope of economics, and in his narrative of scarcity, this article shows that he, in fact, narrowed the scope of the discipline and conceptualized scarcity in a reified and pseudo-scientific way.
This article distinguishes between the precise legal and economic approach to the commons used by Hardin and many other modern commentators, and the broader post-Hardinian concept utilized in environmentally-oriented discussions and aiming to limit the use of the commons for the sake of preservation. Particularly in the latter case, it is claimed, any notion of the tragedy of the commons is distinctly a modern twentieth-century one, and was foreign to the early modern and even nineteenth-century outlooks. This was true of the early modern mercantilists, and also of classical political economists such as Adam Smith and even, surprisingly, Malthus, as well as of Jevons and his neoclassical discussion aimed at maximizing the long-term use of Britain's coal reserves. One intellectual who did recognize the problematic possibility of leaving some tracts of land in their pristine condition to answer humanity's need for a spiritual connection with nature was J. S. Mill, but even he regarded this as in essence almost a utopian ideal. The notion of the tragedy of the commons in its broader sense is therefore a distinctly modern one.
A Nobel for the Commons: A Tribute to Elinor Ostrom
Economic and political weekly
The Nobel Prize in Economics co-awarded to Elinor Ostrom marks a rare departure from the traditional approach of the selectors which hitherto has been characterised by adherence to sub-disciplines more explicitly recognised as falling within the discipline of economics, rather than those that govern an economic system from its exterior, created at the interface of political economy, economics and social anthropology. This essay is a tribute to her work taking into consideration the implications of her thought in the context of governance of commons in general, and in south Asia, in particular.