We mourn the passing away of Nobel Laureate Dr. Elinor Ostrom on June 12th 2012. She will be missed by all those who hold deep concerns for the commons and grassroots action.
Elinor Ostrom, can definitely be called the grand philosopher, the champion of the people at the grassroots. She passed away on the 12th of June, 2012. The world needs to be thankful to her for the huge legacy she has left behind.
Some of us at Bhoomi were fortunate to meet her at the Kaikondrahalli Lake in Bangalore, where she had been supportive of our friends who had worked, hard to rejuvenate it rather than ‘develop’ it. Priya Ramasubban, who heads the Trust for Mahadevapura Parisara Samrakshane Mattu Abhivridhi Samithi, says that it was incredible that a person of her stature took interest in this small grassroots effort and so graciously supported them. Harini Nagendra of ATREE, Bangalore, who worked closely with her for 12 years says that she had a deep emotional connect with South Asia and was involved in research programmes on forestry in India and Asia.
Dr. Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2009. She was a brilliant, creative polymath, a researcher of great intellectual power and an energetic collaborator and networker. Ostrom posed a formidable intellectual challenge to the idea of the “tragedy of the commons” – an idea supported by advocates of the free market, privatization and central control by governments that in the absence of government intervention, people will overuse and destroy shared resources.
Ostrom’s work on the commons shows that human activity is far richer and more diverse than the market theorists would allow, and is above all democratic – it’s a basis for how equal human beings can resolve key issues about the management of resources without the coercion of ownership, or, crucially, the appropriation of resources.
Corporate interests and the capitalist system encourage the exploitation of land belonging to indigenous people (or colonialism, as we used to call it) and the turning of subsistence economies into cash-based suppliers for the wealthier parts of the world; it also includes commercialization of natural resources like air and water or even life itself (example: sale of GM seeds): exchanges that have traditionally been free acquire a cash value that can be factored into GDP numbers that feed capital’s voracious need for compound growth. In the process, real needs and aspirations of the vast majority of people are trampled upon.
Ostrom’s theory of the commons can be seen as providing a powerful alternative to the conceits and fallacies at the heart of the world’s current economic and ecological crises. It challenges the belief that the only measure of wealth is the generation of asset numbers on paper; it reminds us that real wealth often has little or nothing to do with economic activity, and it places democratic decision-making at the heart of the generation of real value. In other words, we need to decide democratically what has value, rather than leaving that decision to politicians, the owners of capital and their tame accountants; it means that those who do not share the prevailing ideology in a representative democracy have a voice too.
It emphatically does not offer easy solutions – in that sense it is much more honest than the neoliberal view that suggests we just have to make markets work more efficiently to ensure prosperity for all. It recognises the messiness of life, the fact that the world is full of conflicting interests that have to be resolved, far more effectively than a system based on the single imperative of maximising paper asset value in the long-term. In summary: the commons, and Ostrom’s work, offer a starting-point for an economic andpolitical discourse that is more humane, nuanced, grounded and sustainable than the dominant neoliberal ideology.
Ostrom’s work on understanding knowledge as commons helped an increasing number of scholars to conceptualize new dilemmas they were observing with the rise of distributed, digital information. Her legacy to the fields of education, economics, natural resource management, law and social sciences may well be that the walled gardens of commercial publishers will be torn down and replaced with open access, digital libraries.
Ostrom took a lively interest in applying her theories to the international debates over the environment, sustainable development, and climate change. Ostrom advocated a multi-layered, evolutionary approach to policy-making and maintained that “setting goals can overcome inertia, but everyone must have a stake in establishing them: countries, states, cities, organizations, companies, and people everywhere. The advantage of a polycentric approach is that it encourages experimental efforts at multiple levels”.
In response to those not convinced by such an approach, given the technical complexity, political fissures, and global nature of the topic, on the 12 June 2012, Elinor Ostrom wrote a final op-ed on the Rio+20 Summit entitled, “Green from the Grassroots”. Ostrom recognised that “inaction in Rio would be disastrous, but a single international agreement would be a grave mistake… we cannot rely on singular global policies to solve the problem of managing our common resources: the oceans, atmosphere, forests, waterways, and rich diversity of life that combine to create the right conditions for life, including seven billion humans, to thrive.”
Ostrom argued: ‘What we need are universal sustainable development goals on issues such as energy, food security, sanitation, urban planning, and poverty eradication, while reducing inequality within the planet’s limits.’ She warns: ‘Without action, we risk catastrophic and perhaps irreversible changes to our life-support system.’ Ostrom’s last words in her op-ed are: ‘Our primary goal must be to take planetary responsibility for this risk, rather than placing in jeopardy the welfare of future generations.’
Sources: wikipedia & www.theconversation.edu.au
Tribute by a friend and co-worker
I had the privilege of knowing and closely working with Prof. Elinor Ostrom for 12 years. Lin – as she was known by all – had a deep emotional connection to South Asia, having worked on forestry and irrigation commons in Nepal for many years. She loved the country, and deeply appreciated its diversity, culture and spirit of conservation. She had also visited India a few times, and we started to develop a larger program of research on forests in Nepal and India together since the year 2000. Over the past decade, we have studied how collective action impacts conservation in community and government protected areas in India and Nepal, and recently started some work examining the role of collective action in the restoration of urban lakes of Bangalore.
Lin was as wonderful a human being as she was an inspiring scientist – warm, incredibly affectionate, a great mentor, and extremely generous with her time and intellectual inputs. Although 78 when she passed away, her intellectual drive and energy could put people much younger and fitter to shame – for instance, even the day she went into hospital (3 weeks ago) we still had our scheduled Tuesday morning conversation. Even from the hospital, she continued to send emails to colleagues from her hospital bed, reading papers and abstracts, writing letters of recommendation, and discussing intellectual ideas.
One of my favorite memories of her is when she visited us in Bangalore towards the end of January/early February, giving a couple of lectures in Bangalore. She stayed with me for 4 days – and was keen to visit the Kaikondanahalli lake nearby, where we have a very active group of local residents protecting the lake, which is also one of our research sites. Despite being very tired, after a long day’s travel, she went around the lake, thoroughly enjoyed her visit, and planted a jackfruit tree at the lakeside. She insisted on shovelling in several spadefuls of mud herself, and told me she was especially pleased that it was a jackfruit tree because she used to have one in her childhood home in California. I am very happy the tree is growing well, and she has left a flourishing patch of green in her memory in Bangalore.
– by Harini Nagendra
Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE)
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