Two Americans shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for 2009. Both of them are political scientists, rather than economists, one of whom was not only the first woman winner in the 41-year history of that Nobel Prize family “step-brother”, but also a student of fishing communities.
Professor Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University, who shared the prize with her Berkley colleague Oliver E. Williamson, has in her research found evidence that the so-called “Tragedy of the commons” can not always be applied – the theory that shared management responsibility rather results in no one taking long-term responsibility at all.
In the prize announcement, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that Professor Ostrom “has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories.”
It is informed that Professor Ostrom’s work also brings to mind two projects described lately on this website: The Koster Project on the Swedish Northwest coast, and a community fishermen’s trust on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, brought up as an US example of successful management at a recent EU regionalisation conference in Brussels.
