Brushes with Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson jointly won the Nobel Prize for economics today for separate work on governance and institutions for resolving conflict especially (in Ostrom’s case) in common-property settings. I was first turned-on to her work by Rod Dobell (see, e.g., “Social Capital and Social Learning in a Full World“) and Darcy Mitchell (see, e.g., “When Communities Collide“) in the mid-90s. Ostrom’s work influenced some of my work around 2000, especially an article I wrote called “On the Saturday Morning Soccer Field: A Habermasian Perspective on the British Columbia Commission on Resources and Environment.”

Advertisement