Elinor Ostrom's Rules for Radicals: Cooperative Alternatives Beyond Markets and States

by Derek Wall

Overview

Elinor Ostrom was both a groundbreaking thinker and one of the foremost economists of our age. The first and only woman to win the Nobel Prize for Economics, her revolutionary theorizing of the commons opened the way for non-capitalist economic alternatives on a massive scale. And yet, astonishingly, most modern radicals know little about her.
 
Elinor Ostrom's Rules for Radicals fixes that injustice, revealing the indispensability of her work on green politics, alternative economics, and radical democracy. Derek Wall’s analysis of her theses addresses some of the common misconceptions of her work and reveals her strong commitment to a radical ideological framework. This helpful guide will engage scholars and activists across a range of disciplines, including political economy, political science, and ecology, as well as those keen to implement her work in practice. As activists continue to reject traditional models of centralized power, Ostrom’s theories will become even more crucial in creating economies that exist beyond markets and states.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745399355
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	11/15/2017
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Derek Wall teaches political economy at Goldsmiths College, University of London and is the International Coordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales. He is the author of six books, including Economics After Capitalism, also published by Pluto Press.
 

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Elinor Ostrom's Radical Life

[A] core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans.

(Ostrom and Ostrom 2014: 197)

Elinor Ostrom (1933–2012) was the first and, as I write, so far the only woman to win a Nobel Prize for economics. Strictly speaking there isn't a Nobel Prize for economics, but the Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, which Ostrom shared with another institutional economist, Oliver Williamson. She won the award, according to the Nobel Committee 'for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons', and is best known for her book Governing the Commons (1990). So, what is meant by the commons and why are they a subject of interest?

Commons are collective forms of ownership. In Britain, commons often take the form of land which is open to members of a community to graze livestock, fly kites or walk upon. An example that I am familiar with and often have the pleasure of visiting, because it is relatively local to me, is Cricklade North Meadow. North Meadow, near Swindon in the English county of Wiltshire, is one of the UK's most important wildlife sites. It is famous for beautiful flowers including the rare snake's head fritillary. The meadow has been maintained as a commons since before the Norman conquest of 1066. As it is the commons I am most familiar with it will be discussed as an example at various points in this text. Fisheries and forests may be commons, and the concept as a legal form has been extended to free software and the World Wide Web. The biologist Garrett Hardin wrote 'The Tragedy of the Commons' in 1968, arguing that collective property was inevitably doomed to failure, because it would be abused by users (Hardin 1968). For example, too many cattle would be placed on the village green and it would be over grazed. The tragedy is that if no one individual privately owns a resource such as a field, people tend to exploit the good nature of others, fail to look after it and eventually it is wrecked. Or at least this is what Hardin argued. Yet increasingly, commons have been seen, on the left as a form of social collective ownership, perhaps even the basis for a communism (Hardt 2010).

Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel for 'demonstrating how local property can be successfully managed by local commons without any regulation by central authorities or privatization' (Nobel.org 2009). She argued that commons, including common land, forests or fisheries that were owned collectively, could be conserved. This was radical stuff; other economists argued, along with Garrett Hardin, that collective ownership would always fail because of the 'tragedy of the commons' which led to over use and disaster. However, she was not a leftist in a traditional sense and did not see commons as a straightforward alternative to private ownership in all circumstances.

According to Ostrom indigenous people and others have often maintained commons for hundreds or even thousands of years without destroying these environments. Ostrom argued that democratic control, rather than top-down management or simple privatisation, works to conserve nature. She can be seen as an ecological thinker, an advocate of cooperation and a subverter of economic notions of purely private ownership. This chapter provides a brief biography before discussing her potential contributions to radical political, economic and social transformation.

ELINOR OSTROM

Elinor was born in 1933 in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Adrian and Leah Awan. Leah was originally a musician from South Dakota. Adrian was a set designer who worked for the Hollywood Bowl and Civic Light Opera, among other projects. Her parents divorced when she was a child. Her early years, shaped by divorce, the depression and the Second World War, seem to have instilled a frugality in her that is perhaps unusual for economists and might have contributed to her later passion for ecological living. She helped in the garden and with canning fruit produced by her mother. She felt that part of the solution to environmental problems would come with us consuming less and downsizing.

She saw her first step on the road to the commons as occurring when she became at student at Beverly Hills High School. Beverly Hills High School is well known for its students who went on to become Hollywood film directors and actors. Elinor felt that it was an accident of geography that she attended the school. In turn, the school promoted academic achievement; without attending Beverly Hills it is unlikely that she would have gone to university,

'Technically, we lived in Los Angeles, but the high school was literally across the street,' she said. 'I'm very grateful for that opportunity, because 90 percent of the kids who went to Beverly Hills High School went on to college. I don't think I would have gone to college if not for being in that environment'. (Leonard 2009)

She suffered from a stutter and was encouraged to join first the poetry society and then the debating society, supposedly to help her with this problem. The debating society promoted both an interest in politics and mental flexibility derived from the fact that she would often have to debate one side of an argument before then arguing the case against. She completed high school in 1951 and went to study politics at University of California Los Angeles, where she graduated in 1954. She married a fellow UCLA student Charles Scott and moved with him to Boston. Charles studied law at Harvard and she worked in personnel departments to fund him. '"Basically I put my husband through law school and he entered a corporate law firm," she said. "I was thinking of doing a PhD, and he was not too enthusiastic"' (Leonard 2009). They divorced, but it seems to have been a relatively amicable break up. '"That's problem solving, too," she observed. "Sometimes, with couples, it's OK to say it's not working and it's not going to work and you move on"' (ibid.).

In deciding to pursue an academic career, she believed that economics was an obvious choice. Some of her work towards her politics degree was in the form of economics units, and she had enjoyed and excelled in them. Sadly, she was prevented from taking economics because it was claimed she had not studied enough mathematics at high school. In turn, at school when she had asked to study further mathematics this had been refused because she was a woman! Her school advisor, she claimed, had asked what use trigonometry would be when she was 'barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen' (Cronin 2012: 90).

Even carrying out her second choice of a politics PhD proved controversial:

Surprisingly, the Financial Aid Committee awarded four assistantships to women that year after 40 years without a woman on the faculty or as a PhD student. The four of us learned mid-semester that this decision had been strongly criticized at a faculty meeting. Some faculty members were concerned that allocating four out of 40 assistantships to women was a waste of departmental resources. They feared that none of us would obtain good academic positions, which would harm the department's reputation. Fortunately, fellow graduate students encouraged the four of us to ignore the concerns of the faculty who opposed our appointments. They also advised us whom to stay away from during our graduate program if we could. (Ostrom 2010b: 3)

Elinor found that much of the political theory she was taught, typically dealing with figures such as Hobbes, Machiavelli and Rousseau covered the biographies of such important thinkers but did not lead to a clear accumulation of knowledge. She was frustrated because she felt that political science did not attempt to build analysis in a step by step way, but focused on personalities and conflicting schools of thought. To her it was as if biology was continuing to debate Lamarck and Darwin, focusing on their lives, loves and disagreements, rather than gaining an understanding of the natural world from their work. She found more inspiration from Vincent Ostrom, whose seminars she attended. It seems to have been love at first sight and they married in 1965.

Vincent was born in Nooksack, Washington on 25 September 1919 (New 2012). His parents were recent immigrants from Jamatland in Sweden and the name Ostrom means 'island in the river'. The Ostroms farmed mink, and for Vincent conservation and farming were a lifelong fascination. He studied politics at UCLA, teaching in Ontario, California and gaining his PhD in 1950. His academic work linked local government, economics, ecology, game theory and much else, he was a multidimensional thinker. He was passionate about medieval city states, indigenous politics, the origins of the US constitution, the African revolutionary Amílcar Cabral and deep democracy based on self-government rather than state action. He was fascinated by how farmers managed their land and cooperated with each other to solve practical environmental problems. He was also intrigued by how language and culture shaped politics including our relationship with the environment. It would over simplify his work to say that he was an anarchist but he saw politics as something beyond formal governments and political parties.

When I met Elinor Ostrom in 2012, shortly before she died, she insisted that Vincent had been interested in commons long before meeting her. When he died just days after her, his inspiration for her work was noted:

In 1943, while earning his M.A., Vincent began teaching at Chaffey Union High School in Ontario, Calif. It was here that he made observations that not only created a foundation for his master's thesis, but also the work his wife would later dedicate her career to.

During the two years he taught in Ontario, Vincent noticed that citrus-growing smallholders created a system of land and water rights that provided what the farmers needed to sustain the farms' incomes. The community also created an endowment for the local high school and a planned college.

In short, he realized that a group of people with common interests and needs could create their own systems and institutions to achieve complex objectives – without any outside governance. (New 2012)

Whereas Garrett Hardin talked about the tragedy of the commons, Vincent had studied the management of common pool resources and collective environmental management with care. His interest in ground water basins dealt with a classic potential tragedy of the commons, and one of his early books was entitled simply Water and Politics (V. Ostrom 1953). His PhD examined the theme of 'Government and Water: A Study of the Influence of Water upon Governmental Institutions and Practices in the Development of Los Angeles'. He was very much a political ecologist from his early academic work in the 1940s, long before the term 'green politics' had been invented. In 1960 he was approached by both the Kennedy and Nixon presidential campaign teams to draft their environmental policy platform. He chose the Democrats simply because they asked him first (Walljasper 2014).

At his suggestion Elinor studied West Basin, a water source underlying Los Angeles.

My assignment was the West Basin, which underlay a portion of the city of Los Angeles and 11 other cities. During the first half of the twentieth century, water producers ignored the facts that the level of groundwater underlying Los Angeles was going down and seawater was intruding along the coast. Toward the end of World War II, several municipal water departments asked the U.S. Geological Survey to conduct a major study of the area and agreed to fund one third of the study. The report detailed a grim picture of substantial overdraft and threat of further saltwater intrusion that could eventually ruin the basin for human use. (Ostrom 2010b: 4–5)

If too many users took too much water out of West Basin, it would lower the water level and tend to suck in salt water from the Pacific. Salinization made the water unusable and threatened the whole Basin. Elinor discovered that despite huge difficulties the different users were able to cooperate, ration their extraction of water and maintain the system. They prevented a tragedy of the commons from occurring.

While her academic career eventually wound its way to her Nobel win it was a long and often difficult journey. Elinor completed her PhD and she and Vincent moved to the Bloomington campus of the University of Indiana in 1965. He was appointed as a lecturer and she eventually was given work in the politics department. Initially she had to teach US constitutional politics at 7.30 in the morning, but eventually was able to carry out research and develop her own teaching topics. She developed a research project into policing, arguing that input from local communities led to better policing. This political research was based on anthropology and specifically participant observation; she worked both with African-American citizens and rode in the back of police cars. She began to focus upon governance, local politics and environmental problems. Research visits to what was then West Germany saw her develop an interest in experimental economics and game theory. Her work increasingly focused on commons, and her best known book, Governing the Commons, was published in 1990.

ELINOR OSTROM'S RADICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

Elinor Ostrom may have won a Nobel, or at least shared a Swedish bank prize, for economics, but she was very clear that her discipline was political economy not economics. She saw economics as powerfully shaped by institutions, so in turn saw herself specifically as institutionalist. Institutions are sets of rules created by human beings; economists sometimes forget that economic activity does not just happen, but is shaped by political institutions too.

This emphasis on institutions provides a sophisticated way of viewing economic activity and it is useful for understanding political and social change. She felt that democratic control made for effective problem solving as well as being desirable in its own right, so political institutions needed participation rather than centralised top-down management.

It is my sincere belief, having studied Elinor Ostrom's work with obsessive passion over a period of years and having had the pleasure of meeting her on two occasions, that if human beings are to create a future which is democratic, socially just, equal and, above all, ecologically sustainable, we would do well to examine her arguments with care.

In contrast, some on the left have bluntly argued that her ideas have nothing to offer those of us who seek social change. The Marxist economist Ben Fine suggests that she ignores issues of class struggle and power and, at worst, her work is a form of 'economic colonialism' (Fine 2010). Indeed, while she focused on micro issues, looking at the rules that might be put in place to help or hinder conservation by local communities, she rarely examined the macro issues of why common land might be enclosed and simply taken by more powerful actors including colonisers and corporations. Much of her work appears dry and technical, using the unfamiliar language of game theory, additional formal models and forays into mathematics. While some argue she subverts mainstream economics, Fine contends that she actually applies mainstream market-based economics to new areas, potentially taming the commons with her analysis. It is economic colonialism because it is part of a wider tendency to apply economic logic to non-market areas of human society, such as Becker's analysis of the family or James Buchanan's Public Choice Theory. While I feel that Ostrom would have rejected Becker's work, she drew upon Buchanan and was, at one point, President of the Public Choice Society, normally seen as a right-wing body. Like her good friend Amartya Sen, she seemed to have a paradoxical love–hate relationship with such conservative economists. While a defender of the commons and collective ownership, she was far from being a Marxist or far-left thinker in any conventional sense.

Indeed, Ostrom never claimed to be on the left of politics. She often cited thinkers seen as far from radical, including the conservative economists Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter and Frank Knight, and, of course, James Buchanan. She was not a woman who delivered passionate polemics, attended protest marches or involved herself with political parties or social movements. She proudly rejected the notions of utopias, policy manifestos or demands. For a variety of reasons, she seems an unlikely author of a set of rules for radicals.

Yet, despite some caution, I think we can view Ostrom's work as helpful to those on the left seeking positive social change. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that 'sociology is a combat sport, a means of self-defense. Basically, you use it to defend yourself, without having the right to use it for unfair attacks' (Bourdieu 2000: 3). While Ostrom was not a sociologist, in the broadest sense she was a social theorist, concerned not only with economics but politics, human psychology, linguistics and the wide culture that is shaped by, and in turn shapes, human behaviour. She developed a body of research that can be used to defend the commons and commoners. Theory, including Ostrom's, can have a material effect. For hundreds of years, perhaps for thousands, collectively-owned resources have been stolen from communities with the simple justification that the commons was inevitably 'tragic'. Left to collective ownership, it is often claimed, individuals would abuse the system and wreck the commons. Either privatisation or strong state control was needed to prevent catastrophe, both alternatives demanded the destruction of the commons and removal of the commoners. While Ostrom felt that there was a possibility that commons could be abused and that this point had to be taken seriously, she argued that this dilemma could be overcome. She found that commons could be made to work and were not automatically doomed because of an intrinsic flaw in human nature. Her careful research is a powerful weapon of self-defence for those who wish to protect a commons under threat.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Rules for Radicals
 
1 Elinor Ostrom’s Radical Life
2 The Commons: From Tragedy to Triumph
3 Climate Change, Ecology and Green Politics
4 Beyond Markets and States
5 Deep Democracy
6 Feminism and Intersectionality
7 Trust and Cooperation
8 Science for the People
9 Transforming Institutions
10 Conflict and Contestation
 
Bibliography
Resources for Change
Index
 

Editorial Reviews

"Elinor Ostrom pioneered the radical proposition that human cooperation, self-governance, and sharing are economically and ecologically significant. Thanks to Derek Wall, we now have an astute interpretive overview of Ostrom's far-ranging scholarship on the commons: inspiration and guidance for a new generation of commons thinkers and activists."
 

David Bollier

Derek Wall’s latest book is a fascinating insight into the only woman to win the Nobel Prize for economics. I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone interested in alternatives to the neoliberal consensus, and for those who believe that democracy is more than just voting for a Government every few years.”

Caroline Lucas