By Charudutta Panigrahi

 

By now we all know that The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award Nobel Prize in economic sciences, in memory of Alfred Nobel for the year 2009, to Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA, for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.

I was going through her work where she has emphasised on the proven success of the management of common property by the communities, user-groups or societies. She decries the general perception going in favour of central authority (read government) or the most abused “privatisation”. Between the central rule and privatisation we have user-governance. She has taken the examples of studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins.

User management has yielded much better results and the resource users develop capabilities to develop home grown management systems and tools which assist in decision-making and rule enforcement. User groups are sometimes also naturally enabled to handle conflicts of interest because I guess it is a natural way of aspirations for greater access to resources.

In the user transactions we generally tend to ignore economic activities because it is again a perception that in case of self-management a user group can rarely find the benefits of an economic activity evenly or proportionately distributed among the beneficiaries or users. But, in the teeth of traditional theories debunking user groups’ self-management theories, Odisa has shown great progress and ability.

It is a common knowledge that Odisha lags behind other states in economic prosperity. And that there are severe resource crunch in the society which leaves a majority of the population striving for existence and leaving the state for gainful employments. I realized this the hard way when we started the Rural Knowledge center programme in Odisa, about 7-8 years back. I realized that when presented with a resource problem the community can cooperate and act for the common good. The Knowledge Centers were designed as common centers of knowledge for the village or community with access to modern Information and Communication technologies.

Even today not many villagers have the privy to general knowledge and information concerning his welfare or his or her children’s’ welfare or even government schemes leave aside global progress or knowledge through the wikipedias or googles of the world.

They are simply bereft of all the access and services. Information doesn’t reach them as diligently and smoothly as any developing nation would have desired to.

We started the Knowledge centers with the help of the communities and importantly, managed by the communities. It was extremely challenging in the beginning with no agreement on the defined systems for community management, no unanimity in the constitution of the community committees for the management of the centers, no leadership to take charge of the centers, the economic transactions and so forth.

In the last these many years all the centers are self managed by the communities through their own representation and through their own developed systems of checks, balances and reporting. This was a great learning for me on how self-organization and local-level management works to keep common resources, whether natural (e.g., forests) or man-made (e.g., infrastructure), viable.

In the process we have unearthed numerous principles that govern successful sustainability and which defy most of the dogmatic beliefs. Community has been my best management guru.

In one of her dissertations, Ostrom discussed an issue quite pertinent to Odisha: water management. In 1945, some individuals in western Los Angeles noticed that water quality from one of the key groundwater basins under the city seemed to be declining. Salt water was found to be intruding into the system.

A few individuals formed a water association to try to solve this problem. “They bargained in the court; they created a new set of rules; they established a water replenishment district, and then started injecting water along the coast. It was incredible,” she says. “If the salt water intrusion had continued for a few more years, the basin might never have been recouped.” In what would become a long-term theme for Ostrom, this experience taught her “how disparate individuals could collectively band together to protect a common resource.”

This I believe is our way out of the deadlock of development that is staring in our faces. Our dependence on the government for every little issue of development, our growing disillusionment with the election systems, the riding menace of separatist forces, our cries for land, water, forest rights all could be dealt with our own power of self management or cooperative management.

At the time when the knowledge centers were started there was a prevailing presumption that these centers would lapse into the conventional system of NGO funding and would be “externally” managed with heavy injections of funds and resources. But over the years, with the obvious start-up hitches, they underwent economies of scale and have emerged as the single largest network of knowledge centers in India. All this at the grassroots of one of the most sluggish economies of the country and populated with tribal communities. We mostly work in the tribal dominated areas.

She has worked with the Police department and writes the following:

“The end results of this 15-year collaborative effort revealed several important conceptual processes of urban policing and turned widely held presumptions on their head”.

“The presumption that economies of scale were prevalent was wrong; the presumption that you needed a single police department was wrong; and the presumption that individual departments wouldn't be smart enough to work out ways of coordinating is wrong,” Ostrom says. Most aspects of police work in fact experienced diseconomies of scale. “For patrolling, if you don't know the neighborhood, you can't spot the early signs of problems, and if you have five or six layers of supervision, the police chief doesn't know what's occurring on the street,” she explains.

When I was reading the above observations, I could find uncanny similarities in the knowledge center programme in Odisha. In probably one of the daring experiments with “federalism” in the development sector, the knowledge centers in Odisha are all managed by the communities themselves, as I have mentioned above and any form of central rule or policies or systems has been unwarranted. Never ever, even for once the thought of having a centralized function of these centers came to us. Nor was there any necessity or scope for triangulations. This practice had its share of doomsayers warning us of collapse at every step. But to our comfort every time the whole network emerged stronger. Community resources managed and incremented by the communities.

 

Common-pool resources, shared goods such as center buidings, infrastructure, have been managed at the local levels and they offer one of the best common – property arrangements ever in the state. Similarly we have to take up watersheds, irrigation systems, fishing grounds, even crops.

 

In Governing the Commons, Ostrom began examining specific types of common resources in more detail. “I started working with colleagues in Nepal, and together we developed a large database on irrigation and developed a whole series of studies just on that,” she says. The results of that work showed that farmer-managed systems tended to be superior to government-managed ones. Ostrom again notes that concepts such as local-level monitoring help ensure forest sustainability. This recurring theme of user-level management is especially promising for sustainability because it counters the gloomy future envisioned by the “tragedy of the commons,” the concept wherein human desires to maximize individual rewards inevitably destroy long-term resource viability.”

 

With self-sufficiency not only in resources but in the creation of resources and their management, we could have simple solutions to many painful strains we encounter due to central controls. This is, however, not to depart completely from a central viewpoint.

 

However, for Odisha strapped with the migration issues, youth skills issues, farmers' suicides and growing Naxal problem,  it is high time we learn to manage our own wealth – both natural and man made and be accountable. No more blame game, please!  I started with Ostrom’s economic theory for which she has bagged the Nobel Prize and how that is appropriate for Odisha and now I am dwelling on the politics of the state. This is the beauty of economics and this is the centrality of economics in the progress of our state.