The work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom represents a distinctive contribution to the study of political economy, public policy and administration, collective action, and governance theory. Efforts to ...present a comprehensive overview of the Bloomington School that grew around the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis (now renamed the Ostrom Workshop), which they founded more than 40 years ago, received new impetus with the award of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science to Elinor Ostrom in 2009. Since then, renewed attempts have been made to map the Ostroms’ contributions to theories of polycentric governance and collective action, and to multi-methods and comparative institutional analysis of ways of managing social and ecological systems, common pool resources, public economies, and metropolitan reform. The open-ended and multiform nature of the Ostroms’ research program defies a single comprehensive overview; yet, it is a stimulus towards both creativity and disciplinary cross-fertilization in social science research. What sets this volume apart is that it brings together theory and practice, models and work on the ground, design and creativity, empirics and norms, to outline the significance of the Ostroms’ research program for the future. Each contribution to the volume takes the Ostromian perspective as the point of departure, amplifies it and explores the ground for future work by engaging with other approaches and areas of research with which the Bloomington School has some affinities. This way of testing and extending the ideas and methods of the Ostroms is particularly appropriate since their research program, initiated and nurtured through the Workshop, has always been in-between different fields and sub-fields in the social sciences (political science, economics, public administration, law, history, anthropology), cultivating a strong interdisciplinary way of doing research and exploiting the virtuous circle between theory, analysis, model building, and empirical research. Engaging in a creative dialogue with ideas and methods of other research programs is a way of sharpening one’s analytic tools, while renovating one’s own vision of social research. This volume is a way of thinking through and beyond the Bloomington School.
Abstract
Political economy is a term in wide use and has been for centuries. Yet standard economic theory reduces politics to ethics or economics. This reduction is enabled by the presumption of ...closed choice data or given utility and cost functions. In this conceptual framework, the political vanishes into an activity of preference satisfaction according to a welfare function (ethics) or into trade (economics). To bring the political back to life within a theory of political economy requires that closed schemes of thought be replaced by open schemes. The ways in which individuals react to the indeterminacy of their subjective choice data, in innocuous small-scale settings as well as in situations of dramatic exception to constitutional rules, separates them into leaders and followers. Followership creates an opportunity for political enterprise at the social level (enterprise in rules) and at the subjective level (enterprise in visions of options, and hence preferences). At both levels the political comes to the fore of political economy as an answer to the “challenge of exception.” Much of our inspiration for this argument traces to the work of Friedrich Wieser, Carl Schmitt, and Vincent Ostrom.
Abstract
This paper explores the interface between institutional theory and Austrian theory. We examine mainstream institutionalism as exemplified by D. C. North in his work with Wallis and Weingast ...on the elite compact theory of social order and of transitions to impersonal rights, and propose instead an Austrian process-oriented perspective. We argue that mainstream institutionalism does not fully account for the efficiency of impersonal rules. Their efficiency can be better explained by a market for rules, which in turn requires a stable plurality of governance providers. Since an equilibrium of plural providers requires stable power polycentricity, the implication goes against consolidating organized means for violence as a doorstep condition to successful transitions. The paper demonstrates how to employ Ostroms’ Bloomington School Institutionalism to shift, convert, and recalibrate mainstream institutionalism's themes into an Austrian process-oriented theory.
The fisheries problem Wellings, Richard; Booth, Philip; Aligica, Paul Dragos ...
Sea Change: How Markets and Property Rights Could Transform the Fishing Industry,
2017
Book Chapter
H. Sterling Burnett Wellings, Richard; Booth, Philip; Aligica, Paul Dragos ...
Sea Change: How Markets and Property Rights Could Transform the Fishing Industry,
2017
Book Chapter
Figure 1 Global fish catch, 1950–2013 (wild capture) Wellings, Richard; Booth, Philip; Aligica, Paul Dragos ...
Sea Change: How Markets and Property Rights Could Transform the Fishing Industry,
2017
Book Chapter
Introduction Wellings, Richard; Booth, Philip; Aligica, Paul Dragos ...
Sea Change: How Markets and Property Rights Could Transform the Fishing Industry,
2017
Book Chapter
ITQs in practice Wellings, Richard; Booth, Philip; Aligica, Paul Dragos ...
Sea Change: How Markets and Property Rights Could Transform the Fishing Industry,
2017
Book Chapter
