Solving Collective Action Dilemmas: Beyond Markets and States

It is often assumed, even within the economics discipline, that there are two predominant ways to solve collective action dilemmas. The first is to make a common resource someone’s private property, and the second is to transfer ownership of the resource to a government. That is, either markets or states will supply rules for using common spaces and assets sustainably.

Elinor Ostrom, the 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, challenged this assumption. By studying how hundreds of communities around the world managed common pool resources, she discovered that there exists a wide diversity of institutional responses to collective action dilemmas beyond markets and states.

In this video, we will look more closely at her core contribution to the study of governance. We will then consider how these theoretical insights apply in real-world case studies in the next sessions.