Books by Buck

Susan Buck is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of Environmental Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Before earning her Ph.D. in public administration at Virginia Tech, she supervised the Wetlands Research Laboratory at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. In addition to Understanding Environmental Administration and Law, she has written The Global Commons (Island Press, 1998), co-authored a text in public administration, and contributed numerous articles and book chapters on environmental policy and law. Dr. Buck lives in Greensboro, North Carolina. As a political economist, Elinor Ostrom studied how institutions--conceptualized as sets of rules--affect the incentives of individuals interacting in repetitive and structured situations. Ostrom and her colleagues at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University developed the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, which enables them to analyze diversely structured markets, hierarchies, common-property regimes and local public economies using a common set of universal components. Large-scale studies of urban public economies demonstrated that systems composed of a few large-scale producers of services, such as forensic laboratories and training academies, combined with a large number of autonomous direct service producers (such as crime and traffic patrol) perform more effectively at a metropolitan level than a few consolidated producers. More recent empirical studies in the field and in the experimental laboratory have challenged the presumption that individuals jointly using a common-pool resource would inexorably be led to overuse, if not destroy, the resource. The design principles characterizing robust self-governed resource systems have been identified. An initial theory of institutional change has been formulated and is being tested. In 2009, Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to receive the prestigious Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Dr. Ostrom passed away on June 12, 2012.