Common pool resources like fisheries, open pastures or, more globally, the capacity of our earth to absorb pollutants suffer from the threat of overuse.
Professor Ostrom, political scientist, one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of environmental economics, and laureate of the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2009, resents a priori conceptions like “private property and markets will internalize the relevant external effects of individual decision making and see to it that scarce environmental resources will be put to the most valuable uses” or, at the other extreme, “what concerns all must be managed by all through central state monopolies”.
Unwilling to act as a mere second hand dealer in preconceived ideas Professor Ostrom has left the traditional beaten paths of academic research; she interviewed fishermen in Turkey as well as mountain farmers in Japan and analysed water supply systems on the Philippines. And she found that humans can get out of collective action problems. Not all common pool resources are overexploited. Self-organized human co-operation is in fact possible.
We must make the best use of markets, government and intermediate governance structures if we intend to cope with the challenges presented by the scarcity of mankind’s common pool of resources, says Professor Ostrom. In suggesting sound policies we must respect the poly-centric and multi-layered nature of successful human organization.
To understand how, we need a truly interdisciplinary approach that pays attention to grown conventions as well as to organizational and human behavioural detail. Professor Ostrom’s public lecture will accordingly explore the interdisciplinary relationships between political science and economics along the dimensions of (1) the Public Choice Approach, (2) the Governance of the Commons debate, (3) New Institutional Economics, and (4) Behavioural Approaches to Explaining Human Actions.
This time will not be Professor Ostrom’s first visit to Bielefeld: after being a ZiF-Fellow already in 1981 she played an important role in the ZiF Research Group ‘Game Theory in the Behavioral Sciences’ convened by Reinhard Selten in the academic year 1987/1988. There she has been exploring, presenting and discussing many of the topics to be addressed in her seminal, 1990, book ‘Governing the Commons’.
Since ‘the ZiF means a great deal to’ her, as, Professor Ostrom said in retrospect, she is willing to stay on for another day after her public lecture to discuss her work with numerous renowned scholars of various disciplines during a ZiF Author’s Colloquium.
