By Richard Gaines
Staff Writer

The Nobel Prize in economics bestowed upon Elinor Ostrom this week largely honors her work showing that commonly owned resources can be preserved and managed by stakeholders as well as or better than by governments or through privatization.

And many within the fishing community are noting her position as a strong statement against the “catch-share” management format being pushed for New England and other fisheries.

With the administration of President Obama, himself a Nobel Peace Prize-winner, embarked on a zealous effort to convert as many of the nation’s fisheries into systems of private ownership — whether called “catch shares,” or individual transferable quotas (ITQs) — and fishing communities complaining of central state bureaucratic tyranny, Ostrom’s shift from academe into the spotlight has thrust her ideas straight into a fierce debate.

The universal essential for Ostrom in any scheme for the management of common resources such as fisheries is local responsibility for those resources.

That idea resonates from the Atlantic Coast of New England to the farthest reach of the American brand in the Western Pacific. There, citizens of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, having had a vast marine protected area imposed on them by President George W. Bush to the applause of the Pew Environment Group, now are protesting the “same top-down” approach of President Obama’s Interagency Ocean Task Force.

John Gourley, a Saipan activist, figuratively locked arms with Ostrom in a Thursday letter to the task force.

“Her work in the management of resources, such as forest, fisheries, oil fields, grazing land, and irrigation systems,” Gourley wrote, “showed that they can be managed successfully by the people who use them, rather than by governments or private companies.

“(Ostrom) states, ‘What we have ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of real involvement in the people involved — as opposed to just having somebody in Washington … make a rule.’ I believe this to be a very astute and pertinent comment for the Task Force to consider.”

Closer to home, in the New England fishery where the relationship of subject fishermen to their federal overseers has been characterized as “dysfunctional” by Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Ostrom overnight has become part of the conversation.

“Ms. Ostrom is a ‘guiding light’ for our fishing industry,” Mary Beth de Poutiloff of Provincetown wrote in an e-mail to industry colleagues, noting fishermen’s mass protest being planned for NOAA’s regional offices in Gloucester in two weeks.

“She uses incredible common sense and examples to support her ideas,” de Poutiloff wrote. “The system using common ownership with rules developed and enforced by the users, can work just fine. Perhaps, this is what ails us now, as NOAA has no concept or connection to the work and real lives of fishermen.”

A professor of political science — not economics — at Indiana University, Ostrom underscored in her Nobel acceptance comments the essential need for local ownership in the obligation to conserve common resources.

“One of the absolutely key, most important variables as to whether or not a forest survives and continues is whether local people monitor each other and its use — not officials, locals,” she said.

Her award and comments come as the New England Fishery Management Council prepares to hold a workshop on catch shares Tuesday and Wednesday at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, N.H., featuring people from across the nation with experience in the catch share and ITQ systems installed in other fisheries.

But with the fundamental decision about the worth of privatizing the fisheries already made — enunciated with certitude by Lubchenco, as soon as she was confirmed by the Senate last March — the purpose of the Bretton Woods conference, according to management council staff, is to learn the tricks and traps of catch shares and how best to create private rights to swimming resources that have been understood to be commonly owned since the founding.

One school of thought — that of the Environmental Defense Fund, which boasts Lubchenco as a former high official — is that the alignment of the investment imperative with conservation assures profit and stability. David Festa, an EDF vice president, advised an investors’ conference at the Milken Institute last winter that investors might expect profits of 400 percent or more by buying up fishermen’s catch shares.

“It’s not telecom money, but it’s real money,” Festa advised a small but influential private audience of mutual and hedge fund managers and ENGO — environmental non-government organization — officials at an April 28 panel on “Innovative Funding for Sustainable Fisheries and Oceans.”

EDF and Pew have been largely responsible for launching Lubchenco from her own academic platform to government office. And from the halcyon days of the pre-crash markets, they have made catch shares the de facto policy of the nation in the late stage of fisheries recovery policy.

“Elinor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should either be regulated by central authorities or privatized,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Nobel Prize sponsor, said in its announcement Monday.

The conventional wisdom traces to a seminal 1968 article, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” whose author Garrett Hardin concluded, as much of fisheries’ history seemed to affirm, that “the users of a commons are caught in an inevitable process that leads to the destruction of the very resource on which they depend,” Ostrom and four colleagues noted in a 1999 article in Science.

A member of the faculty at Indiana University, Ostrom’s career focus has been on the problem of common property, beginning with the drinking water of Southern California, a common essential iconized by Roman Polanski in “Chinatown.”

In his blog TierneyLab, The New York Times’ columnist John Tierney on Thursday reviewed Hardin’s work and Ostrom’s critiques and revisions.

“Dr. Hardin and his disciples had failed to appreciate how often the tragedy of the commons had been averted thanks to the ingenious local institutions and customs … ”

Tierney went on to quote from an interview Ostrom had given at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University:

“International donors and non-government organizations, as well as national governments and charities have often acted, under the banner of environmental conservation, in a way that has unwittingly destroyed the very social capital — shared relationships, norms, knowledge and understanding — that has been used by resource users to sustain the productivity of natural capital over the ages.”

Emily L. Kieley, a research assistant in the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth School of Marine Science, assisted in the research for this story.

Richard Gaines can be reached at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com