environment

Sometimes it’s easiest to see a commons when it exists in a bounded geographic space that incubates a distinctive culture and set of social practices. That can certainly be said about the mountainous areas of southern West Virginia, where people’s interactions with the landscape have bred communities whose lives revolve around their interactions with the landscape.

Could Professor Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize for Economics betoken a shift in development policies used in Africa? Korir Sing’Oei, an international human rights lawyer with a focus on indigenous and minority rights law and policy, believes Ostrom’s Nobel could have a significant impact on Africa’s poor.