Lecture by Elinor Ostrom

Lecture by Elinor Ostrom - at Nobelprize.org
I guess we all know the 2006 Nobel peace prize winner Muhamad Yunus, (his name has become synonymous with business social entrepreneurship) but when someone (I can't remember who it was) talked about Elinor Ostrom as a side comment in one of the summer school events, I think it is fair to say that I wasn't the only one in the room hearing the name for the first time.
I want to thank Rocío for sending us this link. It is a lecture of the 2009 economic Nobel prize winner, where in less than half an hour brilliant lecture she manage to summarize her life project, about common pool resources and the governance regimes of those resources that aren't necessarily government nor private (though she did not mention the term Civicness or Civil Society once). Or as the anonymous PhD student from the 'A Fine Theorem' blog put it: "[Ostrom's] basic insight is that… …there are countless empirical examples of common property management without direct government involvement".

On several occasions in the summer school we talked about the important effort to make (somewhat restricting but usable) working definitions of social and organizational formations. We also talked about the importance of making visible, through theoretical and empirical research, other ways of what can be consider as part of the economy.
All these issues are being addressed in Ostrom's lecture. I particularly recommend watching the 17 to 24 Minutes of the video.

Technical note: If the streaming doesn't go well, you can download the whole video file from the nobel prize site. The lecture is also available as a pdf file.

Enjoy,
Asaf