{"id":1134,"date":"2009-10-15T14:25:07","date_gmt":"2009-10-15T19:25:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/10\/15\/ostroms-nobel-the-commons-blog-flow\/"},"modified":"2009-10-15T14:25:07","modified_gmt":"2009-10-15T19:25:07","slug":"ostroms-nobel-the-commons-blog-flow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/10\/15\/ostroms-nobel-the-commons-blog-flow\/","title":{"rendered":"Ostrom’s Nobel, the commons, & blog flow"},"content":{"rendered":"

Several days of silence calls for at least a whimper of sound here… I’ve been on the road (Washington, DC, Boston, and tomorrow Montreal) and writing for crisp deadlines in amidst the travel. And I’m still uncertain as to whether it’s better to post little snippets just to keep the flow coming to your blog readers, or if I should concentrate on lengthier, more considered posts when the opportunity for them arises. Either way, I have been adding to the Shadow Blog<\/a>, and there’s been plenty to add there, most of which I could have said something about here. (Unfortunately I can’t control the Shadow Blog’s appearance — that’s Google’s prerogative — so some entries come up only as linked titles, while others blare their full length at you.)<\/p>\n

But a few things worth mentioning both concern economics:<\/p>\n

First, the very pleasant surprise of Elinor Ostrom being awarded a Nobel Prize for it. (The other <\/em>surprise Nobel I’ll leave uncommented upon…) Ostrom is a political scientist whose work <\/a>on the commons<\/a> is central to reconceptualizing the human capacity to manage commonly held resources. Her work (along with that of many colleagues) has dealt the death blow to Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” scenario, with its ornery assumption that unless we privatize or bring in the heavy hand of government, humans will destroy their environment inevitably, incessantly, and repeatedly, out of some kind of death drive (or maybe birth drive, an inability to control our own reproduction). That’s a simplification, of course, intended provocatively, but it still gets a little maddening to see how captivated students get by the elegant simplicity of Hardin’s apocalyptic tale, while being much less interested in the messy complexities of real life as shown by painstaking fieldwork and careful analysis. Ostrom’s work shows that commons can be, and often have been, successfully managed — it just takes the right kind of collective institutions (appropriately scaled, manageable and participatory, with clearly understood responsibilities, etc.). Here’s the Nobel committee’s justification<\/a> for their decision, a recent article<\/a> of Ostrom’s from Science<\/a> for those with institutional subscriptions, and some blog discussions<\/a> on the topic.<\/p>\n

And second, the seismic shifts starting to take place in the field of economics, of which Ostrom’s Nobel is one indicator, Paul Krugman’s recent NY Times Magazine piece How Did Economists Get it So Wrong?<\/a> is another, and the growing prominence of behavioral economics is a third. The latter is being incorporated into policy making in the US, as I’ve written about before<\/a>, especially now that Cass Sunstein<\/a> has been confirmed as Obama’s regulatory “czar<\/a>” (he who has been under fire from Glenn Beck for, well, does it matter?). This piece<\/a> from Britain’s funky Prospect Magazine<\/a> provides more news about how it is also shaping public policy in the U.K.<\/p>\n

(Where, though, are our buddies the ecological economists? They need to be taking this opportunity to leap to the forefront of economic debate as well. (I ought to prod my colleagues up the street at the Gund Institute<\/a> eco-eco think-tank to see what they have to say…<\/em>)<\/p>\n

The idea of the commons<\/a> is central to Ostrom’s work and, incidentally, is also at the heart of Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri’s third and final installment of their much loved \/ drooled over \/ berated (hopefully not in equal measure) Empire<\/a> trilogy. (Are they the George Lucas of sociopolitical theory, or the Darth Vader?) Following up on Multitude<\/a>, this one’s titled Commonwealth<\/a>. They are the inspirational writers of the Spinozan (post-Marxist) left, and I’m eager to see where they’ve taken things (despite the weaknesses of the previous volumes, as outlined, for instance, by some of the articles here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Re-Public<\/a> put out a very nice special issue on the commons<\/a> a while back, though it focuses more on the technological commons than the ecological ones, and the issues faced by the two are not always the same. I would also recommend Re-Public’s environmental justice <\/a>issue, and Steven Shaviro’s<\/a> (and others<\/a>‘) more recent analyses of the economic crisis. And see On the Commons<\/a> for more of this kind of thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Several days of silence calls for at least a whimper of sound here… I’ve been on the road (Washington, DC, Boston, and tomorrow Montreal) and writing for crisp deadlines in amidst the travel. And I’m still uncertain as to whether it’s better to post little snippets just to keep the flow coming to your blog […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[196,691215],"tags":[105,16149,16819,16820,16821],"class_list":["post-1134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecoculture","category-politics_postpolitics","tag-commons","tag-economics","tag-hardt-negri","tag-ostrom","tag-resource-management"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-ii","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7407,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/04\/13\/quaking-the-subject\/","url_meta":{"origin":1134,"position":0},"title":"Quaking the subject","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 13, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"This post continues my thinking on the topic of a process-relational \"bodymind practice\"\u00a0-- an existential art or \"technique of the self\" building on Buddhist meditation practice reinterpreted and augmented through process-relational philosophy. In this post, I incorporate insights obtained through the practice of Quaker silent worship. See the posts\u00a0\"\u00a0What a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Process-relational thought"","block_context":{"text":"Process-relational thought","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/process-relational-thought\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Dark_matter_asteroid","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2014\/04\/Dark_matter_asteroid-275x250.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4325,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/05\/30\/what-a-bodymind-can-do-part-3\/","url_meta":{"origin":1134,"position":1},"title":"What a bodymind can do – Part 3","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"May 30, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"This is the concluding part of a three-part article. Part 1 can be found here, Part 2 here. They should be read in the sequence in which they were published. \u00a0 The True, the Good, and the Beautiful All of this can be related to the triad of the True,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2011\/05\/trinity.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6560,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/03\/25\/what-a-bodymind-can-do-update\/","url_meta":{"origin":1134,"position":2},"title":"“What a bodymind can do” update","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 25, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The following provides an updated diagram and some further notes pertaining to my three-part article \"What A Bodymind Can Do.\" The earlier parts can be read here: part 1, part 2, part 3.\u00a0 (Please note that this version has corrected a minor error in the originally posted article, and added\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Spirit matter"","block_context":{"text":"Spirit matter","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/religion-spirituality\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Supermind & Son","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/images4.wikia.nocookie.net\/__cb20090120223243\/pdsh\/images\/thumb\/1\/16\/Supermind_%26_Son.jpg\/250px-Supermind_%26_Son.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4287,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/05\/30\/what-a-bodymind-can-do-part-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":1134,"position":3},"title":"What a bodymind can do – Part 2","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"May 30, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"This continues from the previous post, where Shinzen Young's model of core mindfulness practices was expanded into a system of classifying what a human bodymind can do. Here the model is deepened following the process-relational insights that are at the core of Shinzen's system as well as of other (especially\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2011\/05\/work.3741708.2.flat550x550075f.spiritual-art-chi-flow-mind-eye-heart-power-and-the-primitive-mirror-soulbeing-275x183.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5511,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/12\/15\/shadow-blog-in-the-shadows\/","url_meta":{"origin":1134,"position":4},"title":"Shadow Blog in the shadows…","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 15, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Readers may have noticed that in addition to a general hiatus on this blog, the Immanence Shadow Blog (scroll down on the right) also stopped updating several weeks ago. This is because Google Reader, in its recent redesign, eliminated its Shared Items feeds, which means that I can no longer\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blog stuff"","block_context":{"text":"Blog stuff","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/blog_stuff\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3531,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/04\/18\/reduced-flow\/","url_meta":{"origin":1134,"position":5},"title":"Reduced flow","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 18, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Substantive posts on this blog will be more sporadic for the coming little while, since I really need to focus on wrapping up my cinema book. But do let me know (by private email or public comment) if you've been finding the \"Ecology-Ontology-Politics\" series, or any of the other lengthier\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blog stuff"","block_context":{"text":"Blog stuff","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/blog_stuff\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2011\/04\/flow-275x194.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}