Plenary Session (Aula Magna)
Friday, June 21st
The Living Legacy of Elinor Ostrom
Daniel H. Cole (Indiana University)
Daniel H. Cole is Professor of Law and of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University-Bloomington, where he also serves as Chair of the Advisory Committee of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. Professor Cole is the author or editor of seven books and more than 40 articles, most of which concern topics at the intersection of the law and economics of property, natural resources, and environmental protection. His latest volume, co-edited with the late Elinor Ostrom, is Property in Land and Other Resources (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy 2012).
“Unfinished Business in the Ostrom Workshop:
The Program in Institutional Analysis of Social-Ecological Systems (PIASES)”
Elinor “Lin” Ostrom is best known for her work showing that common property management systems can, and in many cases do, effectively conserve scarce common-pool resources over long time periods. Somewhat less well known are the important methodological contributions she made to the social sciences by developing, first, the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework, and more recently, the Social-Ecological Systems Framework. In this presentation, I will briefly describe those two frameworks, address their respective flaws and limitations, and discuss an ongoing project that Lin started in 2009 with Workshop colleague Mike McGinnis to combine her two frameworks into one, known as “The Program in Institutional Analysis of Social-Ecological Systems” or PIASES. Since Lin’s death, Mike McGinnis, graduate student Graham Epstein, and I have started that project afresh. I will present the most recent updates to our (and Lin’s) PIASES framework.
Marco Janssen (Arizona State University)
Marco Janssen is the director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity and an Associate Professor both within the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University (USA). He received his PhD in Mathematics in 1996 from Maastricht University (Netherlands) on integrated assessment modeling of global change. During the last 15 years he has increasingly worked on collective action and the commons at different scales, of different resources using different methods. Most of his research is collaborative in international projects in which his involvement is largely related to the methodology. In 2010 he co-authored with Amy Poteete and Elinor Ostrom the book “Working Together” on the multi-met hod approach. Current research focuses on robustness of small-scale irrigation systems to climate change and globalization, and the ability of behavioral experiments as tool for catalyzing behavioral change of collective action problems.
"Robustness of Social-Ecological Systems"
Elinor Ostrom is known for her theoretical framework to study the conditions in which people are able to govern their common resources. During the last 15 years of her life she teamed up with a wide variety of disciplines including ecologists and engineers to advance a broader theme on the robustness and governance of social-ecological systems. In this talk I synthesize the work on the robustness of social-ecological systems, and speculate on future research avenues beyond natural resource management.
