Tragedy of the Partnership: A Critique of Elinor Ostrom

Walter Block and Ivan Jankovic

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2016, vol. 75, issue 2, 289-318

Abstract: Elinor Ostrom thinks she has discovered a third way apart from private and government property: the commons. In her view, there is no “tragedy” associated with this third option. The present article takes strong issue with her. Our claim is that she has not properly distinguished between a commons and partnership arrangements. In the former case, outsiders cannot be excluded from entry; in the latter, they can. The reason for this confusion between the commons and private property in Ostrom's work is that she believes private property is possible only if government protects and enforces it. We show by using various historical examples that this assumption is wrong, and hence the central tenet of Ostrom's model of the commons fails.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/ajes.12141 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ajecsc:v:75:y:2016:i:2:p:289-318

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0002-9246

Access Statistics for this article

American Journal of Economics and Sociology is currently edited by Laurence S. Moss

More articles in American Journal of Economics and Sociology from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().