Ostrom’s Law and the Commons

Elinor Ostrom studied the interaction of people and ecosystems for many years and showed that the use of exhaustible resources by groups of people (communities, cooperatives, trusts, trade unions) can be rational and prevent depletion of the resource without government intervention.

Her later, and more famous, work focused on how humans interact with ecosystems to maintain long-term sustainable resource yields. Common pool resources include many forests, fisheries, oil fields, grazing lands, and irrigation systems. She conducted her field studies on the management of pasture by locals in Africa and irrigation systems management in villages of western Nepal. Her work has considered how societies have developed diverse institutional arrangements managing natural resources and avoiding ecosystem collapse in many cases, even though some arrangements have failed to prevent resource exhaustion. Her work emphasized the multifaceted nature of human–ecosystem interaction and argues against any singular "panacea" for individual social-ecological systems problems.

Her proposal was that of a polycentric approach, where key management decisions should be made as close to the scene of events and the actors involved as possible." Ostrom helped disprove the idea held by economists that natural resources would be over-used and destroyed in the long run. Elinor Ostrom disproved this idea by conducting field studies on how people in small, local communities manage shared natural resources, such as pastures, fishing waters in Maine and Indonesia, and forests in Nepal. She showed that when natural resources are jointly managed by their users, in time, rules are established for how these are to be cared for and used in a way that is both economically and ecologically sustainable. 

Ostrom’s Law is an adage that represents how Elinor Ostrom's works in economics challenge previous theoretical frameworks and assumptions about property especially the commons. Ostrom's detailed analyses of functional examples of the commons create an alternative view of the arrangement of resources that are both practically and theoretically possible. This law is stated succinctly as:

“A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory.”

The discussion of commoning as a process rather than as a fixed entity also serves to bring new elements to the discussion of the commons. Its focus on social relations endues such processes with an emancipatory potential. Importantly, even if some commons are temporary or fail according to a conventional understanding of the term, their contribution to the members of the community and the social practices and psychological shifts that have arisen are still influential, having contributed to creating new subjectivities and sensibilities. Therefore, in this understanding, commoning can be temporary and this does not entail a problem or a failure. Commoning is a learning process, and the so-called failure of some commons might result in the creation of new ones.