The last month or so has been very dominated with tech-related reading (Zuboff, Wu, Hao, Doctorow) and I wanted to go in a bit of a different direction as I move into the summer so I picked up a book on Elinor Ostrom and Ostrom's more well known work, Governing the Commons. I've been tangentially aware of Ostrom but never actually read her despite my larger interests somewhat aligning.

I've spent most of the last week reading through some of Nordman's book just to get a bit of a primer on her work before diving into her. Here's a good jumping off point:

"Ostrom’s work, influenced by her anthropologist and sociologist colleagues, put the resource users front and centre. Too often the assumption was that the resource users don’t know anything and it is up to the government to impose rules. This colonial attitude was not universally true and often harmful... What [Ostrom] learned was the government isn’t the only way to manage a common-pool resource. Neither is private property the only way. In between these extremes are communities—large and small, formal and informal—and the institutions they use to govern their resources. Community is nowhere to be found in Hardin’s tragedy of the commons." (emphasis mine)

I appreciate that this is offering a bit of a third way beyond the public-private dichotomy that is easy to get locked into. Ostrom's work seems to sit if a fuzzier middle ground, one that makes space for both sides when necessary but is more focused on the way communities have successfully managed their common resources on their own.