Governing the Commons

In this pioneering book Elinor Ostrom tackles one of the most enduring and contentious questions of positive political economy, whether and how the exploration of common-pool resources can be organized in a way that avoids both excessive consumption and administrative cost

Notes

• "The prisoner's dilemma game fascinates scholars". What is paadoxical if the players are simply unethical, as opposed to "rational"? That society considers lack of Ethics as "rational" is the start of the problem. It is not rational. It is plain dumb. -op ed
• Olson - Logic of Collective Action -

Olson's argument rests largely on the premise that one who cannot be excluded from obtaining the benefits of a collective good once the good is produced has little incentive to contribute voluntarily to the provision of that good.

• Swiss Alpine villages - Combining work days or days of reckoning (where the summer's

cheese is distributed and assessments are made to cover the costs of the summer's work) with festiv:ties is another method for reducing some of Ehe . COSts associated with communal managemenr.

• Japan - In an important srudy of traditional

common lands in Japan, Margaret A. McKean (1 986) estimates that about 12 million hectares of forests and uncultivated mountain meadows were held and managed in comnon by thousands of rural villages during the Tokugawa period (1 600-1867) and that about 3 million hectares are 50 managed today. Although many villages have sold, leased, or divided th:ir common lands in recent times, McKean ( 1986, p. 534) indicates that she has "not yet turned up an c"ample of a commons that suffered ecological destruction while it was still a commons" (McKean 1 982).'