The village that shared a wall

Economists once taught a confident story about shared resources. If a pasture belongs to nobody, each herder has reason to add one more animal, since the benefit is theirs and the cost of overgrazing is spread across everyone. Follow the logic and the pasture is destroyed. The conclusion drawn was that shared things must be either privately owned or managed by a state.

Elinor Ostrom spent decades looking at actual shared resources and found the conclusion did not match the evidence. Irrigation systems in Spain and the Philippines, forests in Nepal, fisheries in Turkey and mountain pastures in Switzerland had been managed in common for centuries, in several cases for more than five hundred years, without collapsing and without being privatised or nationalised.

What the successful cases shared was a set of unglamorous features. The boundary of the resource and of the group entitled to use it was clear. Rules matched local conditions rather than being imported. The people who followed the rules were the people who wrote them. Monitoring was done by users watching each other, not by an outside inspector. Penalties started small and rose with repetition. Cheap, local ways of settling disputes existed.

Ostrom's point was not that communities always succeed. Many fail. It was that the failure is not inevitable, and whether it happens depends on design features that can be identified, copied and taught.

She received the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009, the first woman to do so, largely for the inconvenient act of going to look.