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NOBEL PRIZE AWARDED FOR WORK ON THE COMMONS

This year's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Indiana University Professor Elinor Ostrom for her work on understanding how people can collectively manage common-pool resources, such as fisheries, forests, and water. Ostrom's work has profound conservation implications for a range of ecosystems. In particular, she challenged the pervasive "Tragedy of the Commons" paradigm, in which users of common property resources are assumed to be trapped by a system that creates incentives for unsustainable exploitation. In announcing the prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said, "Elinor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized."

Ostrom's theoretical, modeling, and empirical work has been instrumental in identifying both the types of institutions that promote sustainable use of common-pool resources and the conditions under which these institutions can be successful. She suggested that unsustainable exploitation tends to occur only under a very limited set of conditions: when resource users are anonymous and cannot communicate, have no foundation for trust or reciprocity, and lack established rules. Ostrom has shown that there are numerous examples in which these conditions are not present and resource users organize themselves to manage common-pool resources.

Noted the Academy, "Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories. She observes that resource users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts of interest, and she characterizes the rules that promote successful outcomes." Her work also emphasized that there is no panacea for resource management and that understanding and incorporating the social, economic, and political contexts is critical in sustainably managing many common-pool resources.

Ostrom is the first woman to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. She shared the prize with Oliver E. Williamson of the University of California, Berkeley for their independent work in the field of economic governance.

Joshua E. Cinner
James Cook University, Australia

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