Sublime

She’s a Nobel Prize–winning economist who has identified eight features necessary to maintain a stable community property resource.1 This wisdom applies to many of the communities you’ll grow. While Ostrom’s work overlaps with ideas I have already shared, it focuses more on long-term community management than on creating belonging and is worth expl

Ostrom identifies “common pool resources,” which have two characteristics: they produce a steady stream of benefits accruing from the resource, and it is very difficult to exclude individuals.

“Were there practices for the long-surviving institutions that are not there for the failed systems?” Decades of research led her to codify eight “design principles” for stable local common pool resource management.

Elinor Ostrom,

Elinor Ostrom,

Given that, Ostrom argued, collective ownership was actually better for everyone than private property. Dividing the land into small parcels, each owned by a separate person, increases risk, since there is always the possibility of some disease hitting the grass in any given small area.

she sees the primary role of government as keeping the process of development open-ended by preventing violence, fraud, monopolies, and monocultures, and by stimulating—but not prescribing—various forms of knowledge and practice.

D. S. Wilson, E. Ostrom, and M. E. Cox, “Generalizing the Core Design Principles for the Efficacy of Groups,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 90, Supplement (June 2013): S21–S32.