Chapter 2: The Commons: From Tragedy to Triumph The chapter starts by outlining Garret Hardin’s tragedy of the commons argument. In short, my understanding of the argument is that due to the inherent selfishness of individuals the commons are doomed to overuse — unless they are turned into private property, or turned over to the…
This chapter starts out with a brief biography of Ostrom and her work, providing some context. I think it’s the right amount – the ideas are more important, but it is interesting to get some biographical context. The patriarchal system she faced early on is pretty galling – difficulties in getting where she got to,…
Over at social.coop, we’ve recently started a reading group, and the first book we’ll be reading is “Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals: Cooperative Alternatives beyond Markets and States” by Derek Wall. These are my initial thoughts on my expectations of the book. I’m keen to learn about Ostrom’s work on the commons and its governance,…
Read: Governing the Information Commons. Nice article about building governance layers into platforms. Following Elinor Ostrom’s 8 principles for managing a commons. The part that resonated most for me on first reading is the need to understand the many patterns of governance that exist. From there we can move from the simple defaulting to private…
At first blush there feels like some overlap between the Viable System Model and Elinor Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development framework. In that they both approach structures from a multi-level conceptual map, with units acting autonomously at each level but communicating between them. The polycentrism thing. Would be interesting to compare and contrast them.
Really interesting, I had not heard of the theory of collective action, another debunkable so-called ‘tragedy’ of the commons. “Ostrom noted that Olson’s model of collective action[…] is another model which predicts that the commons will be ruined. Olson (1965) examined political and social movements and was critical of the idea that support for a…
“Often it is asserted that human nature shows we are intrinsically competitive by those on the right, or intrinsically cooperative by those on the left. Ostrom’s approach was to reject such broad generalisations and her anti-essentialism made her suspicious of unchanging foundations of human behaviour.” — Derek Wall, #Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals Important point. To…
without close attention to how to construct new structures, aspiration is unlikely to be translated into effective workable systems. I do like how Ostrom’s views could be used as a different tack to organising in socialism. Locally focused but also recognises need for institutional superstructures. However, these made through rules and constitutions of diverse groups,…
In politics we pick a side; in contrast, for Ostrom the main emphasis was to participate in creating rules and, in effect, constitutions. — Derek Wall If I’m understanding Ostrom’s views so far, I’d say the emphasis there is on ‘participate in’, such that rule making is at a local level. Rules and constitutions will…
Interesting to see the links (perhaps only nominal…) between #Ostrom’s social-ecological systems and #Bookchin’s social ecology. Bookchin says that environmental degradation is rooted firmly in patterns of society such as hierarchy and domination. Ostrom with SES says that in making environmental policy, we can only do so by taking into account how it will affect…