Governing thecommons: The evolution of institutions for collective action

简介：Congratulations to Elinor Ostrom,Co-Winner of The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory ofAlfred Nobel 2009! The governance of natural resources used by many individualsin common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts. Both statecontrol and privatization of resources have been advocated, but neither thestate nor the market have been uniformly successful in solving common poolresource problems. After critiquing the foundations of policy analysis asapplied to natural resources, Elinor Ostrom

here provides a unique body of empiricaldata to explore conditions under which common pool resource problems have beensatisfactorily or unsatisfactorily solved. Dr. Ostrom first describes threemodels most frequently used as the foundation for recommending state or marketsolutions. She then outlines theoretical and empirical alternatives to thesemodels in order to illustrate the diversity of possible solutions. In thefollowing chapters she uses institutional analysis to examine differentways--both successful and unsuccessful--of governing the commons. In contrastto the proposition of the tragedy of the commons argument, common pool problemssometimes are solved by voluntary organizations rather than by a coercivestate. Among the cases considered are communal tenure in meadows and forests,irrigation communities and other water rights, and fisheries.