Monday, October 12, 2009

Common property can be successfully managed by user associations (but somehow??)

Elinor Ostrom さんとOliver E. Williamsonさんが、いわゆる「ノーベル経済学賞」を受賞されたとの由。プレス発表によると、授賞理由は、
Elinor Ostrom has demonstrated how common property can be successfully managed by user associations. Oliver Williamson has developed a theory where business firms serve as structures for conflict resolution. Over the last three decades these seminal contributions have advanced economic governance research from the fringe to the forefront of scientific attention.
とのことである。

僕はというと、恥ずかしながら、お二人とも存じ上げず。もっとも、Williamsonさんの方は、僕が無学なだけで、彼自身は、それなりに有名な経済学者のようである。逆に言うと、Ostrom さんの方は、相当な大穴だったようであるが。

とはいえ、commonsの研究が評価されての受賞ともなれば、環境屋としては、一応、知っておきたい気分になるもの。というわけで、比較的最近(今年2月)に行われた、彼女の電話インタビューのtranscriptを拝読してみた。オレゴン州立大が一般人(非専門家)向けに提供している、気候変動問題に関するpodcastシリーズでのインタビューである。以下、そこからの抜粋を。
..., so what I am concerned about is a lot of people think that the only way to cope with global change is international agreements. And if we sit around and wait for the national leaders of our respective countries to come to an agreement and operationalize it and make it effective, then people along the coast are going to lose their coasts. So, we must be thinking of diverse ways that we can increase the capacity to respond to external change. We can just call it capacity to respond to change.
... If you treat all fisheries as if the attributes of the fish made no difference at all and there’s one ideal way of managing fisheries, that’s what I’m criticizing.   
... So one of the things we’re currently doing is building a better theoretical foundation for understanding how people can solve…how can they self-organize. Because if you bought the Harden argument or you bought the real narrow economic argument of thirty years ago, then the only salvation was government. You had to have an external government that came in and told people what to do. Well, somehow the officials in that external government were…had a different… [laughs]…gene set than the rest of us.
... If we have…Collective action is the name for a lot of social dilemmas where if I’m a good guy and I really contribute, but all the other people that I’m interacting with don’t, I become a sucker. And so the theory earlier said because you’re worried about being a sucker, you won’t do anything. You’ll just be really narrow and selfish. Well, if I trust others to reciprocate any action I make that helps them, then all of us could be much better off. This is the reason that social dilemmas are dilemmas. That if we’re narrow and selfish, we come out much worse than if we are interested in the common good.
言っていることはわかるのだが、正直、これだけ読むと、メインストリームに対する「野党的批判」の域を出ていないような気がしてしまう。社会の発展上、「野党的批判」が、重要な役割を担ってきたことを疑問視する気はさらさらないが、ノーベル賞に値するのかというと…。あるいは、その点にこそ、彼女が受賞者に選ばれたことのimplicationがあるのかもい知れないが。

もっとも、上の引用は、一般向けの短いインタビューから拾ってきただけのものなので、彼女の真髄を知りたければ、ちゃんとした著作を読むべき、というのはもっともなご意見。というわけで、どなたか、「Ostromの真髄、ここにあり」てな論文を教えていただければ誠に幸いであります。
my room, Washington DC, Oct 12, 14:45

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