It took a woman to show how sharing collectives survive
Iam working on a project that has got me thinking about the work of Elinor Ostrom, the first, and to date only, woman to have been awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. I can’t say that Ostrom’s significant contribution to economics featured much in my university studies in the subject, which I began two decades ago. Perhaps now, since she was awarded the Nobel in 2009, her work may have gained more prominence in curricula.
It is worth reflecting on the contribution Ostrom made to economics and political science. The short citation for the Nobel states that the award is bestowed on her “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons”. Her work challenged the “long, unanimously held” view that “natural resources that were collectively used by their users would be overexploited and destroyed in the long term”.
This is the famous “tragedy of the commons” principle. Ostrom applied a dizzying range of methodologies to understand how small communities manage shared natural resources such as pastures, fisheries and forests. She found that in certain conditions rules can emerge that allow communities to use the commons in an economically and ecologically sustainable way.
Ostrom also challenged the notion of the market and the state as the ideal institutions for organising private production and exchange on the one hand, and public goods on the other. She argued that this did not fully cover the diversity of institutional arrangements that people develop to govern, provide and manage public goods and common resources.
What emerges from her research is how sophisticated some “traditional” modes of organisation are. Recent economic thought has often portrayed communal multilayered institutions as backward or flawed. I am not immune to this. But to refuse to understand other organisational modes is intellectually limiting.
As Ostrom pointed out in her Nobel lecture: “We demonstrated that complexity is not the same as chaos in regard to metropolitan governance. That lesson has carried forth as we have undertaken further empirical studies of polycentric governance of resource and infrastructure systems across the world.”
The “tragedy of the commons” is not inevitable. It is a logical outcome of game theory models for certain limited settings where the participants do not have the shared history and/or communication mechanisms to develop agreements, norms and sanctions. But Ostrom found that there were surprisingly numerous instances where communities create effective governance.
New technologies require people to think, once again, about how to organise nonhierarchical, interconnected systems such as the internet, open source software, social networks or Wikipedia.
OSTROM FOUND THAT THERE WERE SURPRISINGLY NUMEROUS INSTANCES WHERE COMMUNITIES CREATE EFFECTIVE GOVERNANCE
Robin Chase, founder of car-sharing service Zipcar, quotes Ostrom extensively in her own writing about how to govern platforms for sharing assets, including how to build trust.
Like many other disciplines, economics has not always valued the intellectual labour of women. In her early career, Ostrom was blocked at every turn. She had to be multidisciplinary because, at first, economics programmes would not admit her. In choosing her niche, it is possible that she was driven to the most neglected reaches of the field, where she could work in peace. Ostrom went on to produce phenomenal research — a cautionary tale on what ideas sexism might have robbed the world of.