The October 2009 issue (Vol. 26 No. 4) of Development Southern Africa (DSA) is dedicated, very timely, to the debate around the Governance of the Commons. Why is this issue of DSA so timely? Because Elinor Ostrom just received the Nobel prize for Economics for her contribution to the governance of the commons. In a nutshell, Ostrom won the Nobel prize for showing that privatising natural resources is not the route to halting environmental degradation. 

The editorial of the attached special issue reads as follows: “In his seminal paper The Tragedy of the Commons, the American scientist Garrett Hardin used a parable to explain how a shared pasture will inevitably be overgrazed if all the cattle owners are intent on maximising the number of their cattle. Hardin argued that for herders sharing a common pasture (the commons) on which they are all entitled to let their cows graze, each herder's interest is to put as many cows as possible onto the pasture. After all, the individual gets all the benefits from the additional cows, while the damage to the commons is shared by the entire group. However, these individually rational decisions mean that all will suffer in the end: ‘Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all' (1968:1244). The central question that Hardin posed is about the problem of access to resources and the appropriate institutional arrangements required for fair and equitable distribution”.

Is privatisation the best solution? If everyone has ownership of small parcels they will treat the parcels better than when they share it. However, Ostrom says government may not be the best allocator of public resources either. In her lifelong work on forests, lakes, groundwater basins and fisheries, she shows that the commons might be an opportunity for communities themselves to manage a resource. She demonstrates that communities, when given the right to self-organise, can democratically govern themselves to preserve a resource.