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Neo-institutionalism at the forefront of the Nobel 2009 Prizes with Elinor Ostrom’s win

Dr. Elinor Ostrom is one of the most cited authors in the field of neo-institutionalism and considered one of the most prominent authors who have studied the governance of the commons (common pool resources, CPR). My research has been strongly influenced by Dr. Ostrom’s work. Using neo-institutional rational choice theory, Dr. Ostrom has demonstrated that self-organizing communities can, indeed, manage common pool resources in a sustainable fashion and does not necessarily need to be regulated via a central governing mechanism.

In winning the Nobel Prize 2009 in Economic Sciences, Dr. Ostrom’s research is finally recognized for the significant contribution it has made to our understanding of collective action, resource governance and human behavior in regards to the environment. While her work is strongly based on economics, it’s not only based in economic theory. Dr. Ostrom is an interdisciplinary scholar by nature, and her work spans political science, sociology, economics, and psychology.

Congratulations to Dr. Ostrom on her much-deserved Nobel Prize, as well as to Dr. Williamson, who shares the prize for his work in the boundaries of the firm and economics of transaction costs. Both scholars are foundational to the theory of governance.

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Posted in governance.


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  1. Monica P says

    well…as Elionor Ostrom, herself, admitted , her work is only the beginning of a research for a theory which may develop a solution for the problem of collective action (or the “tragedy of commons”). I believe she forgot about Olson theory about the privileged groups and the small intermediate groups because she still cannot explain why is cooperation possible only in some small communities and in others not. We must search in other place for explanations, as she said, this kind of details are important and we need to discover them. Maybe John Stuart Mill had an ideea with his psihologist approach of methodological individualism.



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