Nominations for the 2021 Elinor Ostrom Award for Collective Governance of the Commons are now open!
Deadline to submit nominations is 28 February 2021.
The Elinor Ostrom Award for Collective Governance of the Commons aims to acknowledge and promote the work of practitioners and young and senior scholars involved in the field of the commons. The scope of the award is broad, and includes academic and applied work on traditional commons (forests, water bodies, pasture lands, fisheries, etc.), local commons, interlinked commons (forests and watersheds, fisheries and coastlines, etc), global commons, knowledge, cultural, and virtual commons.
“The most important lesson…derived from the intellectual journey I have outlined…is that humans have a more complex motivational structure and more capability to solve social dilemmas than posited in earlier rational-choice theory…(which) leads me to argue that a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans.” – Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize Lecture, 2009.
The Elinor Ostrom Award is an opportunity to bring some recognition to those involved in developing, operating, or studying “institutions that bring out the best in humans” and also an opportunity to demonstrate what can be achieved when people work together in innovative ways to manage ‘their commons’, or provide new insights through diligent scholarly research.
The Elinor Ostrom Award – 2021
The Elinor Ostrom Award on Collective Governance of the Commons runs every two years and coincides with the IASC biennial global conferences on commons. Due to the Pandemic, the IASC 2021 Commoning the Anthropocene Conference will be the first fully online global commons conference, organised through Arizona State University in the USA.
The Award is now open for nominations for the 2021 round. There are three categories of the Award made to recognize the work of both practitioners and scholars of commons:
1. Practitioners
Awarded to individuals, communities, or groups involved with the creation, protection, sustainable use, and management of common resources.
2. Junior Scholars
Awarded to those involved in commons studies, community-level management, or policy and governance, associated with research, teaching, or advising commoners.
3. Senior Scholars
Awarded to those involved in commons studies and to acknowledge commitment to, and impact on, training and/or advising new generations of commons scholars and/or practitioners.
If you know a person, a group, or a community working with commons that you think deserves recognition then this is your chance to nominate them for this award. The award is open to all areas of the world.
The call for nominations is open until 28th February 2021.
Goals
- To acknowledge Ostrom’s legacy for scholarship and policy-making while making it accessible to wider and more varied audiences, within and outside the realm of international academia.
- To promote Ostrom’s commitment to the training of students, young colleagues and practitioners.
- To promote research on the commons, collective action and governance of commons, as well as its application to the governance and sustainability of socio-ecological, cultural and knowledge commons of different types and scales.
- To acknowledge and give visibility to applied policy and civic experiences of governance, management, protection, and/or creation of different types of commons in different regions of the world, particularly those related to great contemporary socio-environmental and social exclusion challenges.
Cover image by Sonyuser.
