La lucha por la sierra - Interjection

Elinor Ostrom Wins Nobel Prize in Economics  

El Rito, CO. Those of us who are concerned with the recovery and restoration of the "commons" as a matter of environmental justice were both surprised and delighted that our colleague, Professor Elinor Ostrom of the University of Indiana, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics yesterday. 

This is an historic occasion. The obvious fact most pundits are mentioning in their comments on this year's Prize is that Dr. Ostrom is the first woman in the history of the Nobel to win in the Economics category. Downplayed by mainstream media (MSM) reporting are details on why the Professor won the most coveted honor granted to economists, also formerly known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. 

I was thoroughly taken aback by the timing of this announcement since last week's blog on the "Tragedy of the Commons" was written without my having had any personal knowledge of the Nobel Prize deliberations. This was sheer serendipity and my blog was simply the result of how Ostrom's work figures prominently as an influence in my own work on "The Last Commons," La sierra de la Culebra.

I went directly to the source, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (a.k.a. Nobel Prize Committee), to see why they deemed Professor Ostrom an appropriate choice for this award. Here are several excerpts from their analysis of Ostrom that places her contributions in the larger context of a longstanding and quite controversial debate in academic, governmental, and corporate policy-making circles: "The tragedy of the commons." 

More than forty years ago, the biologist Garrett Hardin (1968) observed that the overexploitation of common pools was rapidly increasing worldwide and provided the problem with a catchy and relevant title: "The Tragedy of the Commons."

....In economics, two primary solutions to the common-pool problem have been suggested. The first is privatization...An alternative solution...is to let the central government own the resource and levy a tax extraction. This solution initially requires coercion, in the sense that original users are disenfranchised...

A third solution - previously discarded by most economists - is to retain the resource as a common property and let the users create their own system of governance. In her book Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990), Elinor Ostrom objects to the presumption that common property governance necessarily implies a "tragedy." After summarizing much of the available evidence on the management of common pools, she finds that users themselves envisage rules and enforcement mechanisms that enable them to sustain tolerable outcomes. By contrast, governmentally imposed restrictions are often counterproductive because central authorities lack knowledge about local conditions and have insufficient legitimacy. Indeed, Ostrom points out many cases in which central government intervention has created more chaos than order.

As I read this I was struck by the similarities this language and vantage point shares with the last two blog entries of my ongoing series on "La lucha por la sierra." The local community, as I noted last week, is concerned about being "disenfranchised" by the federalization of La sierra, particularly when and if conservatives retake the White House and Congress.

What is truly significant here is that it now becomes more difficult for opponents of Chicana/o and Native American livelihood rights to use the same old tired and washed-out ideological argument about the "Tragedy of the Commons."

In my next blog in this series, I will outline the norms, rules, and practices that have underpinned the historical practices of commons governance. These are based on a critical reading of Ostrom's magnum opus and my own three-decades of knowledge of Mexican land grant history, law, and ecology. I will also discuss how this applies directly to the case of La sierra commons in Colorado. In subsequent blogs, I will propose a variety of strategies and policies that would support justice, resilience, sustainability, and democracy. I hope to initiate a wider conversation for a radical re-thinking of the management of the "public domain" that examines the prospects for the recovery and restoration of the commons as a "new paradigm" for ecological democracy.

The democratic experiment - and that is all it can be - involves in my estimation not just the two or four year election cycle and our vote-casting among ever more homogeneous options. Instead, democracy involves sustained daily lived experience in the practice of local place-based self-governance. This is the underlying principle that informs Ostrom's work.

Like Elinor Ostrom, I am a passionate proponent of place-based participatory democracy. The embracing of the ideas (and economic theories) underlying the struggle for the recovery and restoration of the commons is perhaps the most profound democratic challenge of the 21st century. I will examine these theories, and the critics' rejoinders, in forthcoming blogs.

For further information on the Nobel Prize in Economics and Elinor Ostrom, please visit: The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences.