Elinor Ostrom wins Nobel in Economic Science!

Elinor Ostrom, widely considered the lead scholar of common property management, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Science. This is a fantastic validation of research, policy, and practice around common property management in natural resources, the topic that Ostrom contributed to most. She has been key in updating our understanding of how individuals and groups can manage common property successfully, in contrast to the "Tragedy of the Commons" scenario popularized by Garrett Hardin. Hardin's work inspired policies wherein either governmental control or private ownership has been the central management tool of all natural resources across the world for the past several decades. However, Ostrom and many other scholars have shown that under the right institutional conditions,  natural resources can be managed commonly with desirable outcomes, as has been the case in many rural communities in developing nations. For example, forests in India - my own area of research -  are managed through common institutions by communities that depend on them (forests) for daily sustenance needs with aims in ecological conservation as well as human interests, and there are many cases of success on both fronts. It is exciting to anticipate the long-range effects of this accolade, and one hope is that the US, as well as nations all over the world, will begin to take community forestry more seriously as a strategy toward forest conservation.

The Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), the organization I've worked with in India for the last two years, has made remarkable progress in ecological conservation by building sustainable local governance institutions for natural resource management. A lot of their work has been guided by Ostrom's research, especially her seminal book Governing the Commons. I was inspired by both Ostrom and FES yesterday, as I observed the Madanapalle office giving a workshop to fieldworkers on institutions affecting natural resource management using Governing the Commons as its source. I then walked home only to learn that Ostrom had been awarded the Nobel.

I am lucky to work with such a fantastic organization that has been tapped-into innovative and effective strategies for natural resource governance over the past two decades. It doesn't take an event like this to realize how much I'm learning here, but it is a wonderful validation of the work I'm involved with, and the people who I get to work with everyday. Go Ostrom, and go FES!!!

Here are a few links that will shed more light on the topics discussed above:

News about Ostrom's Nobel:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/12/AR2009101201487.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVarWAboxFQ&feature=player_embedded
http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14632614


Foundation for Ecological Security:
http://fes.org.in/

Elaine Grimm's blog:
http://common-s-knowledge.blogspot.com/