Encouraging new evidence suggests that the bulk of the world's fisheries – including small-scale, often non-industrialized fisheries on which millions of people depend for food – could be sustained using community-based co-management.

Alternatives to the "tragedy of the commons" detailed for managing natural resources CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 16 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Nobel Prize winners Douglass C. North, Elinor Ostrom, and Thomas C.

Research conducted in a computerized microworld by scientists at Arizona State University and Indiana University, including Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, show how common-pool resources – such as fisheries, forests, water systems or even bandwidth – can be managed effectively by self-organized user groups under certain conditions.

NSF funding in basic research yields great payoffs in scientific contributions worldwide.

The often-used one-size-fits-all approach to policies aimed at achieving sustainable social-ecological systems needs to be updated with a diagnostic tool to help scholars from multiple disciplines better frame the question and think through the variables, asserts social scientist and political economist Elinor Ostrom.