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Abstract:
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"Elinor Ostrom has devoted much of her career to understanding the
conditions under which people have incentives to conserve or over-exploit commonpool
resources (e.g. oceans, air, irrigation, unowned forests and grassland). While a
growing number of anthropologists have taken an interest in this critically important
topic, her work is not well known to many anthropologists. This paper describes three
different aspects of Ostroms work which should be of interest to anthropologists.
First is her analysis of collective action problems and the conditions under which
people in local communities have devised rules and institutions to solve those
dilemmas to conserve resources. Second is Ostroms discussion and classification
of the complex rules used to manage resources. Third is her analysis of four kinds of
goods (i.e. public goods, common-pool resources, toll goods and private goods) and
the property regimes that produce them in different combinations. Last, I outline
several directions in which her work seems to be going."
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