I am glad that Pete Boettke brought up the Nobel to Elinor Ostrom in 
connection with this. I was thinking of doing so myself. Pete may 
disagree, but I see her work (and that of some others) as developing 
an interface between two extremes, a system of state-collective 
ownership and a system strictly private property rights of a 
conventional sort. Her work, crystallized initially in her 
breakthrough book of 1990, Governing the Commons, showed that the old 
argument in the literature about the "tragedy of the commons" was 
very misleading. That literature posed things as the conventional 
dichotomy, and the supposed "common property problem" in fisheries 
identified by Scott Gordon in 1954 and the early 1960s Garret Hardin 
"Tragedy of the Commons" set the stage for this view.

Ostrom and others noticed that many small groups have been able to 
manage common property by setting up systems to manage access. A 
classic example has been the Swiss alpine grazing commons, whose 
rules of management date back to the 1200s. She has studied both in 
the field in various poorer countries the management of such commons 
as forests, fisheries, and irrigation systems, as well as in 
experiments in the laboratory about how different such systems of 
management work. This suggests the idea links to spontaneous order in 
that such groups can form their own systems outside of the 
conventional dichotomy. this puts this literature outside the usual 
ideological categories, cutting across left and right with ideas tied 
to self-management and decentralization.

I will note some predecessors and cohorts. In particular, there was a 
key paper in 1975 in the Natural Resources Journal by the late 
Siegfried von Ciriacy-Wantrup (1906-1980) and his former student, 
Richard C. Bishop of the University of Wisconsin, entitled "Common 
Property as a Concept in Natural Resources Policy," reprinted since 
in three different books, which made the basic point. They noted that 
the nature of property ownership was not the same necessarily as the 
system of property control and management, and that for natural 
resources the problem of overexploitation came from open access. 
Small groups monitoring each other and outsiders can control access, 
at least sometimes, while a private property owner who cannot control 
access cannot avoid others overexploiting his property, as in the 
notorious case of the Great Plains farmers prior to the invention of 
barbed wire who could not keep the cattle herds from flattening their 
crops.  Daniel Bromley also published ! a ! ! book in 1990 as well as 
Ostrom that made many of these points.

Why she deserves the prize more than them is that she took this idea 
much further, studying it extensively in the field and the lab.  I 
note also that she has recognized the work of others, and it is also 
interesting that she is officially a political scientist rather than 
an economist.

Whille I am at  it, I would note that some of the earlier discussion 
about the difference between what goes on inside a firm and what goes 
on in an inter-firm market is central to the concerns of Ostrom's 
co-recipient, Oliver Williamson, the most cited economist of all time.

Barkley Rosser