A Current, Not a Store

Abstract

Go back to the plain of Valencia, but not to the cathedral door. Go out to the fields, on a weekday morning, to a stone channel running along the edge of a market garden. Water enters at the top of the slope and passes each field in turn. A farmer opens her gate for her hours, closes it, and the water moves on to the next field down. Nobody owns the water. Everybody depends on it moving. A farmer who held her gate open past her turn would flood her own field and parch her neighbour's, and in every system of this kind that has lasted, the community has a way of noticing and a way of answering. Elinor Ostrom spent her career studying channels like these. In a 2000 review in the Journal of Economic Perspectives , she drew the link this book has been building toward: that the norms of reciprocity found in the laboratory are the same norms that let real communities govern what they share. Her conditional cooperators are Fehr's conditional cooperators, standing in a field.