Beyond Markets and States

Ostrom’s Nobel Prize lecture, delivered December 8, 2009 and published in the American Economic Review the following year. It compresses a career of fieldwork into one argument against a dichotomy: the textbook treatment of common-pool resources offers privatization or state control, and Ostrom documents long-lived self-governing commons that are neither — Spanish and Nepali irrigation systems, Swiss alpine pastures, Japanese forests, inshore fisheries — along with the design principles that separate the ones that endure from the ones that fail. The positive programme is polycentricity: overlapping authorities at several scales, rather than one centre, are what complex resource problems actually respond to.

Why it’s on the list: It opens the curriculum’s section on the evolution of institutions and public administration, where three Ostrom entries and a summary run together; this lecture is the section’s thesis in twenty pages.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on Evolution of Institutions and Public Administration. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Elinor Ostrom — the author.
• Commons — the class of resource she studied.
• Tragedy of the Commons — the prediction her fieldwork contradicted.
• Institutions — the self-governing arrangements she catalogued.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.