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Acheson
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Nearly 600 participants are due to arrive on the campus of Indiana University Bloomington from throughout the world for the eighth biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP) May 31. "Constituting the Commons: Crafting Sustainable Commons in the New Millennium" will bring together political scientists, anthropologists, economists, historians, natural resource managers and other scholars to explore common-property institutions of past centuries-many of which continue into current times-and how those institutions adjust to technology and a global economy. Ideas concerning "new commons" created with the invention of new institutions and technological advances also will be hot topics. IASCP began in 1984 as the Common Property Network. The last biennial meeting in Vancouver, B.C., drew participants from 60 countries. Sessions are planned through June 4 (see schedule on line). A registration desk will be set up in the lobby of the mezzanine of the Indiana Memorial Union for those wishing to attend only specific events. Registration fee is based on personal income. Co-chairs of the conference are Elinor Ostrom, co-director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at IUB, and Nives Dolsak, a post doctoral fellow at IUB's Center for the Study of Institutions, Population and Environmental Change, which Ostrom also co-directs. Ostrom is also author of Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, published in 1990 by Cambridge University Press. The book examined governance of natural resources-fisheries or forests, for instance, that are used by many individuals in common-an issue of universal concern to policy analysts. When Ostrom was the first woman to receive Uppsala (Sweden) University's Johan Skytte Prize last year, jurors for the prestigious award cited Ostrom's book as "a modern classic." In addition to sessions, international participants will have the opportunity to take field trips to some Hoosier historical sites where "the commons" have existed in a variety of ways. Destinations include Angel Mounds, an archeological site of an ancient Native American town on the Ohio River; New Harmony, a commune which flourished in the mid-1800s; May Creek and Lothlorien, two contemporary communities that own and manage their own forests; and the Amish community of Davis and Martin counties. Featured speaker will be anthropologist James Acheson of the University of Maine. He is the author of The Question of the Commons, The Lobster Gangs of Maine and Anthropology and Institutional Economics. |
