Elinor Ostrom

Amazing how many economics citations a political scientist was able to run up, and then a Nobel Prize on top. "Small groups can produce local public goods" is a remarkably powerful insight.

Corresponding lesson: http://mruniversity.com/elinor-ostrom

0:00:01.729,0:00:06.069
elena rostrum was a political scientist
but she won the two thousand nine nobel

0:00:06.069,0:00:08.040
prize in economics

0:00:08.040,0:00:12.199
we were very sorry to hear for passing
in the summer of two thousand twelve

0:00:12.199,0:00:16.439
she had visited george mason university
numerous times and she was an extremely

0:00:16.439,0:00:18.090
gracious person

0:00:18.090,0:00:23.400
but if her career she spent that indiana
university

0:00:23.400,0:00:27.079
her work starts by addressing a
well-known economic problem called

0:00:27.079,0:00:28.910
tragedy of the commons

0:00:28.910,0:00:33.190
when a common pool resources generally
owned or available for use to an entire

0:00:33.190,0:00:34.310
community

0:00:34.310,0:00:37.870
it's a problem that individuals overuse
that resource

0:00:37.870,0:00:42.050
they may pull out too many fish from
lake they may come too many dear they

0:00:42.050,0:00:45.940
may pump to much wider head of the
ground and in all these cases there is a

0:00:45.940,0:00:48.820
potential institutional failure

0:00:48.820,0:00:51.650
the general problem is a lack of
property rights

0:00:51.650,0:00:55.270
so if there's some water under the
ground in the form of an ac refer and no

0:00:55.270,0:00:59.270
one knows that water you as a user know
that if you pull that water out of the

0:00:59.270,0:01:03.280
gramm dwell you're not taking it away
from your own property at all so you

0:01:03.280,0:01:08.560
might as well use as much as you can as
quickly as possible

0:01:08.560,0:01:12.640
on stansky insight as to point out that
very often these tragedy of the commons

0:01:12.640,0:01:14.580
problems can be solved

0:01:14.580,0:01:18.340
and especially they can be solved by
small groups and they can be solved by

0:01:18.340,0:01:22.510
informal norms even one formal property
rights are absent

0:01:22.510,0:01:25.960
hoster has laid out some of the
techniques used solve these common pool

0:01:25.960,0:01:30.050
problems and three of these are as
follows

0:01:30.050,0:01:34.690
small groups can use clearly defined
boundaries and exclude external parties

0:01:34.690,0:01:37.800
from drawing upon the resource

0:01:37.800,0:01:42.080
small groups can have rules regarding
how to appropriate the resource and how

0:01:42.080,0:01:45.500
to adopt that appropriation to local
conditions

0:01:45.500,0:01:49.630
third there can be within the small
groups collective choice arrangements

0:01:49.630,0:01:53.850
that allow most resource appropriators
to participate in the decision making

0:01:53.850,0:01:55.380
process

0:01:55.380,0:01:59.070
another words they're kind of informal
governance can arise and you can think

0:01:59.070,0:02:05.330
of austen's work as really being about
the power of the local

0:02:05.330,0:02:09.329
some further principles for governing
common pool resources are

0:02:09.329,0:02:12.769
effective monitoring by monitors who are
accountable to the resource

0:02:12.769,0:02:14.649
appropriators

0:02:14.649,0:02:18.889
the scale of graduated sanctions for
resource appropriators who violate

0:02:18.889,0:02:22.680
community rules and mechanisms of
conflict resolution

0:02:22.680,0:02:25.239
that are cheap and easy to access

0:02:25.239,0:02:30.319
all of these institutions can help
prevent overuse apartment for resource

0:02:30.319,0:02:32.820
an ostrich has shown this both
theoretically

0:02:32.820,0:02:37.290
and with a lot of empirical case studies

0:02:37.290,0:02:41.120
posthumous studied a great number of
common resource pool problems

0:02:41.120,0:02:44.870
but some of her most important work
often with carter and his comment made

0:02:44.870,0:02:45.759
by our

0:02:45.759,0:02:49.019
in particular there she studied former
your addition

0:02:49.019,0:02:53.260
hinder cooper's gather data on a large
number of local former irrigation

0:02:53.260,0:02:54.569
project

0:02:54.569,0:02:58.359
they found that overall the local
project for a better able to build

0:02:58.359,0:03:01.649
maintain and use the irrigation system

0:03:01.649,0:03:04.829
the times when a distant or large
bureaucracy would come in

0:03:04.829,0:03:09.299
and impose some kind of external rule on
the irrigation in those cases then the

0:03:09.299,0:03:14.309
local norms would weaken and generally
agricultural productivity would fall

0:03:14.309,0:03:18.299
after mentor co-workers showed that in
the cases where the former irrigation

0:03:18.299,0:03:19.389
systems

0:03:19.389,0:03:21.369
were successful at the local level

0:03:21.369,0:03:25.399
they were based on exactly the kinds of
informal norms which your theory had

0:03:25.399,0:03:28.939
helped us analyze

0:03:28.939,0:03:32.339
for people who work on local
environmental economics in particular

0:03:32.339,0:03:36.879
local public goods such a fisheries are
mountain commons are raising our water

0:03:36.879,0:03:38.109
aquifers

0:03:38.109,0:03:42.499
the work of illinois off term is a
fundamental starting point for analysis

0:03:42.499,0:03:46.559
if you'd like to follow up on our work
you can just google her name or enter

0:03:46.559,0:03:48.849
into scholar dot google dot com