Indigenous Economics by Ronald L. Trosper

Author:Ronald L. Trosper [Trosper, Ronald L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC021000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / American / Native American Studies, NAT011000 NATURE / Environmental Conservation & Protection
Publisher: University of Arizona Press

How Relationships Solve Social Dilemmas

As explained in chapter 3, relational subjects come in four types: persons and three levels of social relational subjects. A person’s characteristics result from his or her relationships, and the person’s decisions depend on an internal conversation and conversations with other persons. They care about the desires and ultimate goals of other persons as well as their own desires and ultimate goals. Persons are motivated by their natural and practical needs as well as their desires for social interaction and their appreciation of relational goods created by relationships. As they grow and change, persons choose to operate by certain rules and continually evaluate the results with their internal conversations. Persons join other persons to create relational subjects that depend upon the mutually created relational goods among the persons in a relationship.

The following text demonstrates that good relationships provide commons governance by generating the principles of commons governance that Elinor Ostrom and her co-authors developed. In 2009 Ostrom received the Nobel Prize in Economics for her work that established the capacity of people to govern themselves when dealing with a common pool resource or a group of such resources. Based on a study of communities with grazing land in the Swiss Alps and mountains of Japan, irrigation in Spain, and irrigation in the Philippines, she had proposed eight design principles for addressing the dilemma of commons governance. Each of the nine case studies was a community with many centuries of successful commons management; because she used so few case studies, she was tentative about their generality. She called them “speculative” but was also confident she had made good progress (Ostrom 1990, 90–91). By 2009 many other scholars had studied those principles. Her prediction was correct; further research led to a list only slightly changed from her original one. She provided a slightly modified list in her Nobel lecture in December 2009 (Ostrom 2010). The revisions were reported by the authors of a paper considering the amount of evidence supporting the eight principles. They determined that two-thirds of one hundred studies found the principles were satisfied in successful situations and were not satisfied in unsuccessful ones (Cox, Arnold, and Tomás 2010).

Ostrom’s work with long-lasting commons showed that humans could solve the two types of dilemmas. They found the rules that allowed them to avoid overuse of their commons, and they found a way to agree to the public good dilemma, finding a governance structure in which to decide on the ways to solve the dilemmas created by a common pool resource. Her many counterexamples refute the inevitability of the tragedy of the commons. She also worked with experimental economists to determine how individuals placed in a variety of laboratory situations could solve the dilemmas they faced. She and her collaborators offered the individuals ways to form short-term relationships by talking among themselves before going into the laboratory to act again as anonymous people trying to cooperate. They found that “cheap talk” worked; the laboratory participants agreed to solutions and implemented them without punishment.

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