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Research
Edited Volumes
Professor Dolšak has co-edited two volumes.
(1) The Drama of the Commons
The
first volume, “The Drama of the Commons”, was published under the aegis
of the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council’s Committee on
Human Dimensions of Global Change. The co-editors are: Professor Elinor Ostrom
(Indiana University, Bloomington), Professor Thomas Dietz (George Mason University),
Nives Dolšak (University of Washington, Bothell), Dr. Paul Stern (National
Research Council), Professor Susan Stonich (University of California at Santa
Barbara), and Professor Elke Weber (Columbia University).
This interdisciplinary volume reviews theoretical
advancements in the study of common pool resources that have been made in the
last 15 years. The volume is intended to provide a fairly broad introduction
to the field for readers unfamiliar with it and provocative research suggestions
for researchers. The first section of the book reviews the lessons policy makers
and researchers have drawn in the last 15 years. This research draws on case
studies, multivariate data analysis, controlled experimentation, and formal
modeling to examine factors affecting sustenance of common property arrangements,
in particular common property regimes and individual tradable permits. The
second section of the book examines emerging issues in the commons research,
such as dynamic effects of institutional emergence and sustenance and multiple-level
institutional arrangements, linkages across these levels, and scalability of
the lessons from one to another level.
(2) The Commons in the New Millennium: Challenges
and Adaptation
The second volume,“The Commons in the New Millennium: Challenges and Adaptation”,
co-edited with Professor Elinor Ostrom, the MIT Press, analyzes new challenges
that owners, managers, policy makers, and analysts face in managing natural
commons, such as forests, water resources, and fisheries. In particular, it
examines challenges in managing commons, caused by new findings about physical
characteristics of the commons, their complexity and interconnectedness, new
institutional arrangements both at micro (privatization) and macro level (economic
and political changes in countries and regions), and the role of financial,
social, and political capital in the commons governance. Practical applications
of the raised are discussed in light of empirical analyses of various commons
and suggestions for sustainable governance are presented. This volume draws
on selected papers presented at the 8th
Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of Common
Property (IASCP), held in Bloomington, Indiana, May 31-June 4, 2000. This
conference was co-chaired by Elinor Ostrom and Nives Dolšak. This project is
sponsored by the Ford Foundation and by the Center for
the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change, Indiana University,
Bloomington.
Professor Dolšak’s other research includes a study
of factors affecting countries’ decision to cooperate in international regimes,
in particular the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto protocol,
an examination of interlinkages between local and global air pollution caused
by electricity generation, potentials for increasing energy efficiency in the
east European countries in transition and in the U.S.A.