Since its inception, the Baha has hosted distinguished social scientists in its annual lecture series.
This year the audience, composed of academics, students, activists, and citizens alike, had the honor and privilege of listening to a lecture delivered by the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Economics, Dr. Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University. Of course, Dr. Ostrom is one individual who truly needs no introduction in this country for she had made the headlines of national papers since her arrival!
Ostrom had titled her 30-minute lecture “Institutions and Resources” which proved to be riveting; after all, it was this very work for which the Nobel Prize Committee awarded her the prize in Economics. She had specifically mentioned Nepal in her work in making evident how local communities are indeed able to organize and solve complicated matters – such as sharing the responsibility and fruits of “common pool resources.” Such resources are ones that, when used by one individual, there is less available thereafter for others.
Take water, for instance. If a household redirects a channel and consumes 10 liters of it, that is 10 liter less available for others in the community.
In her lecture, Ostrom emphasized how there are no magical formulas that would prove successful in every community endeavor – words that are perhaps cautionary for our lawmakers.
Meena Kunwar, of Liveliehood and Foretry Program, adds that LFP too implements Ostrom’s key points of adaptation, change and experimentation in projects geared towards managing resources.
As it so happens, while local people are every bit capable, there is no telling them what the one best method would be. Each community has to figure it out for themselves. So while the problems inherited by communities worldwide share similar characteristics of environmental issues in terms of water bodies, forested lands, fisheries in addition to other natural resources, basic economics also tells us there is an infinite abyss to fill with wants, but limited supplies to do so through.
For years now, researchers have sought to pinpoint and implemental an “optimal” point to meet the infinite demands of limited supplies. Such optimal points, throughout history, have been declared and regulated through government property, private property and community property to negotiate common-pool resources.
When institutions, as in rules or norms that are enforced or encouraged – and not organizations, as is the term used colloquially – are ineffective, these common-pool resources are quickly overharvested and destroyed.
It is, of course, in no villagers’ interest to overharvest and destroy a common-pool resource, but it is also in the villagers’ interest to maximize their access to the resource. So then we arrive at the problem of the free rider, of open access, where, according to the famous Scott Gordon model of 1954, farmers would harvest until the revenue equaled to their cost, only proving that rules had to be set for the optimal point to be achieved, and not exploited.
Where government ownership of land, private property systems and community property were long thought to be a panacea to counter overharvesting and destroying, it turns out the local users are in fact best equipped to function the common pool resources at the optimal point.
And how do we know this?
Research conducted in Nepal by Ostrom’s team demonstrated how the physical condition, equitable distribution, and efficient cost-benefits of local-people-managed common-pool resources outperformed that of government, private or community.
As George Varughese, of the Asia Foundation and founding member of the Social Science Baha, mentioned on the lawn after the talk, “We can’t specify how people can relate at the local level, only what the rules of the relation ought to be.”
These rules will have to be stipulated through a Constitution. So, will the Constitution that is yet to be drafted consider the findings of the Nobel Prize winner whose work was based on Nepal, or will they not only miss the deadline, but also the point?
An audio recording of the lecture delivered by Ostrom, as well as previous Mahesh Chandra Regmi lectures, has been made available at the Social Science Baha website, www.soscbaha.org.
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