At the IASC2017 Conference, the 2017 Elinor Ostrom Award on the Collective Governance of Commons will be awarded in three categories: young scholars, senior scholars, and practitioners. The Award was created in 2012 in honor of Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012), an exceptional academic who, throughout her career, had challenged the conventional vision of individuals who act only as rational utility-maximizers and are neither able to cooperate, not to create, own, or use collective goods sustainably, except under external authoritarian rule or by dividing those goods into small units and privatizing them. By demonstrating that collaboration is possible, frequent, and occurs among individuals of different rationalities and in different contexts, Ostrom promoted a paradigm shift in political science and economics, as well as behavioral and social sciences in general.
The Elinor Ostrom Award is being awarded biennially at the Biennial IASC-Conferences, for the first time in 2013; the 2013, 2015, and 2017 editions have been made possible by the generous support of the Ford Foundation. The Award, created to honor and develop the legacy of Elinor Ostrom, aims to acknowledge and promote the work of practitioners, young and senior scholars involved in the field of the commons. According with Ostrom´ s large legacy the scope of the Award aims to be broad, including academic and applied work on traditional commons (forests, water bodies, pasture lands, fisheries, etc.), local commons, interlinked commons (forests and watersheds, fisheries and coastlines, etc), global commons, knowledge, cultural and virtual commons. For more info and the winners of the previous editions of the award, please visit the webpage of the Elinor Ostrom Award.
