|Peter Boettke|
I am in Arizona for one of our Adam Smith Fellowship programs focused on examining the work of Vincent and Elinor Ostrom. In Governing the Commons, Elinor makes the following observation about the managing of Canadian fisheries: "Instead of finding means for strengthening locally evolved rules systems to ensure that access and use patterns would continue to be controlled in those territories where effective rule systems had already been devised to match local environmental and technological systems, Canadian policy has been to develop one standard set of regulations for the entire cost." The effort resulted in producing institutional fragilities.
During our discussion of learned from Casey Pender of the Canadian bank Big Sea's Fisherman's Lament, where they sing:
And I spent my whole life, out there on the sea
Some government bastard now takes it from me
It's not just the fish, they've taken my pride
I feel so ashamed that I just want to hide
I fished with my father, so long long ago
We were proud of our trade, and in us it did show
We held our heads high, there was lots of fish then
That was the time, when we were proud men
We challenged great storms and sometimes we won
Faced death and disaster, we rose with the sun
We worked and we toiled, we strained our men brane
We were a proud people, will we ere be again?
So much to learn from the Ostroms about institutional analysis, self-governing societies and democratic ways of relating to one another.
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