View from Africa on Ostrom's Nobel Prize

Photo by WFIU Public Radio from Flickr.com under a Creative Commons license (Attribution, NonCommercial).

By Korir Sing’Oei

This article first appeared in Pambazuka News

Much time has already been spent in justifying or dismissing President
Obama’s selection for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. In contrast, little
attention has been paid to the other Nobel awardees, particularly Elinor
Ostrom, the 73-year-old woman professor of development economics at
Indiana University, who together with Professor Oliver E. Williamson,
shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics. I argue here that the choice
of Ostrom for this important award is perhaps more significant for
Africa’s poor than the recognition bestowed upon president Obama, our
collective pride for the Obama’s international respect notwithstanding.

Since the 1960s, the predominant policy prescription for ensuring the
sustainable exploitation of land resources in Africa has been the
individualisation of land held under custom. This move was largely
driven by neoclassical economists led by Garrett Hardin, who called his
famous 1968 essay on shared resources “The Tragedy of the Commons”.

Hardin persuasively argued that a shared village grazing pasture would
tend to get overused and eventually destroyed because more people
utilised the common grazing ground without paying for the cost of
maintaining it, a phenomenon known in economics as free-riding. This
view has inspired a variety of land reforms with a general trend toward
market-oriented access to, and the privatisation of, land through
private entitlement. The premise was simple: individualised tenure
offers the best certainty in land rights, which provides incentives for
sustainable use and facilitates access to credit for investment in
agriculture and natural resources, hence contributing to increased
productivity and improved natural-resource stewardship.1

Evidence now suggests that this individualisation of common property has neither
yielded the economic and environmental returns envisaged nor improved
living standards for those affected. For instance, according to Rutten,
a Dutch scholar who undertook extensive research work in Kajiado—one
of the three Maasai districts in Kenya where the individualisation of
title was pursued through the establishment of group ranches with
funding from the World Bank and DfID (UK Department for International
Development)—grazing land had reduced by well over 40 per cent over
the period 1982 and 1990, leading to increased vulnerability and
destitution of pastoralists,2 not to mention accelerated wanton
environmental degradation.

By awarding Ostrom the prize, the Nobel Committee indicated that a paradigm shift has occurred and that in fact Hardin’s famous tragedy of the commons theory should no longer be treated with
reverential deference. Consequently, the developmental superstructure
based on Hardin’s theory must yield to more cooperative property
regimes. Ostrom’s research suggests that far from a tragedy, the commons
can be managed from the bottom-up for a shared prosperity, given the
right institutions. In her study “Governing the commons: the evolution
of institutions for collective action” (1990), based on numerous case
examinations of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes and
groundwater basins, Ostrom observes that resource users frequently
develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule
enforcement to handle conflicts of interest.

On this premise, she proceeded to propose eight “design principles” of stable local common pool
resource management, most of which are not too dissimilar to
those already in place in pastoral commons in the Sahelian regions of
Africa.3 These Sahelian common property systems, now codified as
“pastoral codes”, allow for the surveying, mapping and
recording of “all forms of existing and practiced land rights, such as
they are perceived and presented by the holders of these rights
themselves”.4 Ostrom’s proposals suggest that while markets can
organise production and consumption pretty efficiently, they can only do
so when supported and nurtured by networks and communities. In Ostrom’s
thesis therefore, private associations often, unaided through state legislation, have managed to avoid the tragedyof the commons and develop efficient uses of resources.

The recent adoption by the African Union (AU) of the “Framework
Guidelines on Land Policy in Africa” under the guidance of the late
Professor Hastings Okoth Ogendo and the ongoing attempts by the AU and UN-OCHA
(United Nations—Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) to formulate a continental policy on pastoralism suggest
increasing macro-policy recognition of the importance of common property
regimes and also suggest, implicitly, that Hardin’s postulates
is no longer stand as holy ground. Similarly, the current emphasis on
participatory forest management points to the importance of local
community cooperation as the singular logic in sustainable environmental
resource use. This is in contrast to the individual-responsibility
models of the last three to four decades. Coming hot
in the heels of these developments, Ostrom’s Nobel prize should serve to
catalyse efforts aimed at the protection and promotion of indigenous
systems of resource utilisation in Africa.

Because the resilience of indigenous systems of land management have
time and again proven that commons do not have to end in tragedy,
Ostrom’s Nobel is well-deserved. More importantly though, her prize is
deserved because the utilisation of her economic theory will unlock the
potential of common-property regimes which, if better deployed, could
serve to ensure a more people-centred face of national development in
Africa. Such a shift will protect vulnerable communities and individuals
from the unchecked market and environmental shocks that presently
imperil their existence and threaten global food security.

 NOTES

[1] Economic Commission for Africa, Land Tenure Systems and their
Impacts on Food Security and Sustainable Development in Africa (2004), p
15.
[2] M.M.E.M., Rutten Selling wealth to buy poverty : the process of the
individualization of landownership among the Maasai pastoralists of
Kajiado district, Kenya, 1890-1990 (1992, Verlag breitenbach Publishers,
Saarbrücken, Fort Lauderdale)
[3] Volker Stamm Darmstadt, ‘New Trends in West African Land
Legislation? The Example of Cote d’Voire and Mali’ available at
http://www.iied.org/publications>
[4] Id.

Posted December 8, 2009