Reformulating the Commons Ostrom, Elinor
Swiss political science review,
03/2000, Letnik:
6, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The western hemisphere is richly endowed with a diversity of natural resource systems that are governed by complex local and national institutional arrangements that have not, until recently, been ...well understood. While many local communities that possess a high degree of autonomy to govern local resources have been highly successful over long periods of time, others fail to take action to prevent overuse and degradation of forests, inshore fisheries, and other natural resources. The conventional theory used to predict and explain how local users will relate to resources that they share makes a uniform prediction that users themselves will be unable to extricate themselves from the tragedy of the commons. Using this theoretical view of the world, there is no variance in the performance of self‐organized groups. In theory, there are no self‐organized groups. Empirical evidence tells us, however, that considerable variance in performance exists and many more local users self‐organize and are successful than is consistent with the conventional theory. Parts of a new theory are presented here.
Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges Ostrom, Elinor; Burger, Joanna; Field, Christopher B. ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
04/1999, Letnik:
284, Številka:
5412
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In a seminal paper, Garrett Hardin argued in 1968 that users of a commons are caught in an inevitable process that leads to the destruction of the resources on which they depend. This article ...discusses new insights about such problems and the conditions most likely to favor sustainable uses of common-pool resources. Some of the most difficult challenges concern the management of large-scale resources that depend on international cooperation, such as fresh water in international basins or large marine ecosystems. Institutional diversity may be as important as biological diversity for our long-term survival.
Issues related to the scale of ecological phenomena are of fundamental importance to their study. The causes and consequences of environmental change can, of course, be measured at different levels ...and along multiple scales. While the natural sciences have long understood the importance of scale, research regarding scale in the social sciences has been less explicit, less precise, and more variable. The growing need for interdisciplinary work across the natural/social science divide, however, demands that each achieve some common understandings about scaling issues. This survey seeks to facilitate the dialogue between natural and social scientists by reviewing some of the more important aspects of the concept of scale employed in the social sciences, especially as they relate to the human dimensions of global environmental change. The survey presents the fundamentals of scale, examines four general scaling issues typical of social science, and explores how different social science disciplines have used scale in their research.
We develop an analytic framework for the analysis of robustness in social-ecological systems (SESs) over time. We argue that social robustness is affected by the disturbances that communities face ...and the way they respond to them. Using Ostrom's ontological framework for SESs, we classify the major factors influencing the disturbances and responses faced by five Indiana intentional communities over a 15-year time frame. Our empirical results indicate that operational and collective-choice rules, leadership and entrepreneurship, monitoring and sanctioning, economic values, number of users, and norms/social capital are key variables that need to be at the core of future theoretical work on robustness of self-organized systems.
Ecologists and practitioners have conventionally used forest plots or transects for monitoring changes in attributes of forest condition over time. However, given the difficulty in collecting such ...data, conservation practitioners frequently rely on the judgment of foresters and forest users for evaluating changes. These methods are rarely compared. We use a dataset of 53 forests in five countries to compare assessments of forest change from forest plots, and forester and user evaluations of changes in forest density. We find that user assessments of changes in tree density are strongly and significantly related to assessments of change derived from statistical analyses of randomly distributed forest plots. User assessments of change in density at the shrub/sapling level also relate to assessments derived from statistical evaluations of vegetation plots, but this relationship is not as strong and only weakly significant. Evaluations of change by professional foresters are much more difficult to acquire, and less reliable, as foresters are often not familiar with changes in specific local areas. Forester evaluations can instead better provide valid single-time comparisons of a forest with other areas in a similar ecological zone. Thus, in forests where local forest users are present, their evaluations can be used to provide reliable assessments of changes in tree density in the areas they access. However, assessments of spatially heterogeneous patterns of human disturbance and regeneration at the shrub/sapling level are likely to require supplemental vegetation analysis.
Moral Markets Zak, Paul J; Jensen, Michael C
12/2010
eBook
Like nature itself, modern economic life is driven by relentless competition and unbridled selfishness. Or is it? Drawing on converging evidence from neuroscience, social science, biology, law, and ...philosophy,Moral Marketsmakes the case that modern market exchange works only because most people, most of the time, act virtuously. Competition and greed are certainly part of economics, butMoral Marketsshows how the rules of market exchange have evolved to promote moral behavior and how exchange itself may make us more virtuous. Examining the biological basis of economic morality, tracing the connections between morality and markets, and exploring the profound implications of both,Moral Marketsprovides a surprising and fundamentally new view of economics--one that also reconnects the field to Adam Smith's position that morality has a biological basis.Moral Markets, the result of an extensive collaboration between leading social and natural scientists, includes contributions by neuroeconomist Paul Zak; economists Robert H. Frank, Herbert Gintis, Vernon Smith (winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics), and Bart Wilson; law professors Oliver Goodenough, Erin O'Hara, and Lynn Stout; philosophers William Casebeer and Robert Solomon; primatologists Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal; biologists Carl Bergstrom, Ben Kerr, and Peter Richerson; anthropologists Robert Boyd and Michael Lachmann; political scientists Elinor Ostrom and David Schwab; management professor Rakesh Khurana; computational science and informatics doctoral candidate Erik Kimbrough; and business writer Charles Handy.
Knowledge in digital form offers unprecedented access to information through the Internet but at the same time is subject to ever-greater restrictions through intellectual property legislation, ...overpatenting, licensing, overpricing, and lack of preservation. Looking at knowledge as a commons--as a shared resource--allows us to understand both its limitless possibilities and what threatens it. In Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, experts from a range of disciplines discuss the knowledge commons in the digital era--how to conceptualize it, protect it, and build it.Contributors consider the concept of the commons historically and offer an analytical framework for understanding knowledge as a shared social-ecological system. They look at ways to guard against enclosure of the knowledge commons, considering, among other topics, the role of research libraries, the advantages of making scholarly material available outside the academy, and the problem of disappearing Web pages. They discuss the role of intellectual property in a new knowledge commons, the open access movement (including possible funding models for scholarly publications), the development of associational commons, the application of a free/open source framework to scientific knowledge, and the effect on scholarly communication of collaborative communities within academia, and offer a case study of EconPort, an open access, open source digital library for students and researchers in microeconomics. The essays clarify critical issues that arise within these new types of commons--and offer guideposts for future theory and practice.Contributors:David Bollier, James Boyle, James C. Cox, Shubha Ghosh, Charlotte Hess, Nancy Kranich, Peter Levine, Wendy Pradt Lougee, Elinor Ostrom, Charles Schweik, Peter Suber, J. Todd Swarthout, Donald Waters
The Challenge of Common-Pool Resources Ostrom, Elinor
Environment : science and policy for sustainable development,
07/2008, Letnik:
50, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) released its seminal report, Our Common Future, which created a serious discussion about how we should engage in sustainable ...development of the world's future, including how to address global resource systems, or commons. 4 William Clark of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government evaluated the impact of the Brundtland Commission's work for Environment a decade after its release.5 Clark reflected that many disappointments, resignations, and increased cynicism were expressed at the international meetings held to evaluate progress toward sustainable development.
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