Too good not to share! I read this on the blog of Bill Sherman – a previous contributor to this blog:
Today, Elinor Ostrom was named one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Dr. Ostrom has advanced our understanding of common-pool resources–such as fisheries, underground water reservoirs, and small-farm aqueducts. In her 1990 book, Governing the Commons, she distinguishes between the common pool resource (a fishery or a reservoir) and the common pool unit (individual fish or units of water).
Dr. Ostrom has traveled the world studying how people manage common-pool resources. She studied water-rights in Los Angeles and Nepal. She argued that many top-down systems to govern common resources fail–because outsiders neither understand nor can oversee the fair allocation of resources.
In her experience, she’s see individuals and communities establish their own rules for “what is fair” and then police the system. Over her career, she has identified patterns on why common-pool projects around scarce resources will succeed or fail. That’s powerful for fisheries and global warming, but it also presents interesting insights for social networks and social capital.
Social networks can be viewed as a common pool resource (like a fishery), and social capital can be viewed as a common pool resource unit (like a fish).
