Fishing the commons in Trang.

We are pleased to see recognition for Elinor Ostrom’s lifetime of work on common property resource management in winning this year’s Nobel in Economics.

Her academic career addresses the myth of the inevitability of the tragedy of the commons.  The conventional (Garrett Hardin-esque) wisdom was that resources either had to be legislated by public government or privatized to protect resources from over-depletion.  Her focus is on the ways that resource user groups develop their own institutional mechanisms to govern multiple-user resources (commons) — that conventional wisdom failed to account for human innovation in the institutional realm, and that people are apparently not always as self-interested as some economic theory predicts.  This is important to ISDSI’s work, as commons (forests, fisheries, rivers) provide a large portion of the livelihood sources for many of the people our students are working with on the program.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2009/ecoadv09.pdf
describes this year’s prize.
For more on this subject, including a bibliography of over 57,000 articles about common property management, see:
http://www.iascp.org/resources.html