Free Essay On Collective Action And The Commons: What Have We Learned

The speaker of the lecture is Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist and the winner of the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences from the Indiana University. She was considered to be one of the leading scholars of common pool resources- oil fields, fisheries, forests, grazing lands and irrigation systems.
The current video lecture has been taken at Cornell University on the 17th of September in 2009 and Elinor Ostrom has presented some of the findings and research she has treated in her lifetime work. The speaker has started the lecture by first of all outlining the themes that are going to be discussed throughout the lecture. First on the line, she has told the audience about the coventional theory of social dilemmas and ways to improve the outcomes in conventional theories, as well as conventional solutions to social dilemmas.
Later on she approached the empirical research on collective action related to common-pool resources, where she stated that the number of factors that affect whether users of a common-pool resource will cooperate is interrelated and strictly binded by behavioral theory. Further, she explained cooperation and trust in order to relate the terms to micro-situational variables and broader context of social dilemmas that affect the matter. She claims that effective institutional designs enhance those micro-situational variables and enable participants to increase trust and reciprocity rather than developing rules that allocate the optimal level of net benefits.
Elinor Ostrom has also explained how a Diagnostic Framework may help understand a complex Social Economic System (SES), by identifying the variables that may affect interconnections and their outcomes. She claims that none of these variables is always positive or always negative. This depends on how the combinations affect the levels of trust in a variety of micro-situations in a broader context. She sais that scholars have not tried to look at both aspects of this context until recently.
In order to illustrate the use of framework, she has come with a case study, implying valuable molusk fishing in the Gulf of Mexico and applying all these variables discussed before, in practice on the case.
Last, but not least, to sum it up, Elinor Ostrom looks into a variety of research, answering to why some groups self-organize and others do not self-organize, and the relevance of the theory of collective action to governance and the natural resources management. Her work has emphasized on the human’s interaction with the ecosystems for the maintenance of a long-term sustainable resource yields.