Many years ago, I met Vincent and Elinor Ostrom in the seminar room of what is now the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University in Bloomington. I then had several personal interactions with Lin Ostrom, and I’ve been back a few times to Bloomington. (I even wrote a poem about a B&B there once.) I have […]
(Santa Monica, CA) On Monday, I posted an argument that three traditions of theory and practice provide what we need for a civic theory, which is a theory of what we should do. It is different from a political theory that asks what should be done or how things should be. I can elaborate by suggesting what it would […]
(Rancho Palos Verdes, CA) Back in 2014, I argued: [Elinor] “Ostrom plus [Jürgen] Habermas is nearly all we need.” I define a good citizen as anyone who seriously asks the question “What should we do?” Citizens face a dizzying variety of hard issues, but underlying them are general categories of problems. As of 2014, I thought these […]
A new Nature article by Joshua E. Cinner and many coauthors entitled “Bright spots among the world’s coral reefs” is getting a lot of play in mass media. The authors find that, despite grievous damage to coral reefs around the world, some reefs are doing much better than predicted. Among the causes of their success are local […]
Vincent and Elinor Ostrom founded a whole school of thought–some call it the Bloomington School–that now orients the work of many scholars and practitioners around the world. Last week, about 250 people came from many countries to give papers inspired by the Ostroms’ framework as part of a conference entitled the “Workshop on the Ostrom […]