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THE NOBEL prize for economics has been awarded to Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist who specialises in studying how common goods are governed, and to Oliver Williamson who has applied organisational analysis to the internal behaviour of firms. Both are conspicuously removed from the market fundamentalism and mathematical deduction hitherto dominating the discipline. Such methodological hegemonies have been toppled by the worldwide economic crisis.

The welcome recognition of non-market, sociological and behavioural factors in the discipline of economics can reduce its isolation from other social sciences and enlighten political decisions about how best to manage market failures. Prof Olstrom’s work has concentrated on understanding how and why resources such as fish stocks, forests, water, pastures and wildernesses have been governed in common rather than privately and in such a way as to preserve and sustain them.