Nobel and the Tragedy of the Commons
admin October 20th, 2009
River basin management is one of the most important and difficult environmental issues that we face as a planet. Rivers are no respecters of borders and so management issues of rivers tend to ‘overflow’ county, regional and international borders.
Studying and understanding the ways that we manage common assets – rivers, the sea, the air around us – has been a large part of the life work of Elinor Ostrom who has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics.
There are also a wide range of demands that are put on rivers. These are common assets, but if everyone uses this asset for their own needs without concern for other users, then the wider community that depends on the river can suffer. This is the famous Tragedy of the Commons first described by Garrett Hardin back in 1968.
Rivers also – especially as far as Advance Aid’s work is concerned, the Zambezi in Southern Africa – have a tendency to flood and this can lead to massive displacement of people and large-scale homelessness.
Today the problems facing the Zambezi and the people who live along it has been described in this interesting article. All of this may seem a long way from our usual topics of Emergency Relief materials and non-food items, but river basin management is a crucial part of development in many countries and, when it is done well, it can also play a large part in ensuring that avoidable emergencies are indeed avoided.
Elinor Ostrom’s work has played a major part in our understanding of these issues and she deserves the thanks and applause of the development community today.
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