Two enduring lessons from Elinor Ostrom

Abstract

Abstract:This article is a tribute to Elinor Ostrom. It explores two enduring lessons she taught: a substantive lesson that involves embracing complexity and context, and a methodological lesson that involves embracing a framework-driven approach to systematic, evolutionary learning through various interdisciplinary methodologies, theories, and empirical approaches. First, I discuss Ostrom's work on environmental commons. I illustrate the two lessons through a discussion of the tragedy of the commons. Next, I explain how the two lessons play a significant role in recent efforts to extend Ostrom's work on environmental commons to knowledge/cultural commons. I draw a parallel between the tragedy of the commons allegory and the free-rider allegory, and show how many of the problems Ostrom explored in the environmental context are manifest in the cultural environmental context. I discuss an ongoing research project that follows the path that Ostrom blazed and systematically studies commons in the cultural environment.

Learning from Lin: Lessons and Cautions from the Natural Commons for the Knowledge Commons

“…Even then, normative implications will remain scarce (to nonexistent), and all predictions will be contingent and contestable. No panacean solutions to social dilemmas relating to information will be discovered (Frischmann 2013).…”

Epistemic Regards on Food as a Commons: Plurality of Schools, Genealogy of Meanings, Confusing Vocabularies

“…The former because it is hardly difficult to find concrete examples where the two defining features are fully operationalised and the latter because it is evident that reducing the historical, political and legal complexity of commons created by people to just two features inherent to the resources represents an impoverishment of a rather diverse place-based time-dependent human construction. The resources, governing institutions, cultural trajectories, dominant narratives and moral principles that sustain the commons are all complex and fluent, as Elinor Ostrom taught us, so that distorting reductionism and overstated simple models shall be avoided (Frischmann, 2013). And yet, the economic meaning of commons is still dominant, as it was reinforced by other normative constructs such as the tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968), absolute proprietary regimes, private property as natural law, individualism, social darwinism, competition over cooperation as main driving motivation, and theory of rational choice.…”

The Firm As a Common. The Case of the Accumulation and Use of Capital Resources in Co-operative Enterprises

“…Following the growing evidence on the necessity to accomplish environmentally sustainable economic development, the study of the governance and exploitation of natural resources gained prominent role in economics and the social sciences, ever since the seminal contribution by Elinor Ostrom in 1990 (Ostrom, 2007;Frischmann, 2013;Hodgson, 2013;Pennington, 2013;Cole, Epstein and Mcginnis, 2014). Common goods are subtractable, hence characterized by high degree of rivalry in consumption and/or utilization, but by a low degree of excludability for subjects entitled to the exploitation of the good.…”

“…This research stream came to concentrate on self-managed common property regimes, which cannot be simply equated either to public or to private ownership, but share some features of both, and have been highlighted as the most typical way in which natural resources are managed and exploited (Ostrom, 1990). More recent literature concentrated on forms of 3 communitarian ownership generating positive externalities as concern knowledge/cultural commons (Frischmann, 2013), and urban spaces (Sacchetti and Campbell, 2014;Sacconi and Ottone, 2015).…”