In the face of a globalised “tragedy of the commons” – ecological crisis driven by exploitative use of the natural world for short term economic gain – what are the most urgent individual and collective responses that need to be made in order to avert full scale human tragedy and build resilience?

Nobel Laureate Professor Elinor Ostrom will address the future of the commons in the context of the 2011 Dialogues with Tomorrow discussion series.

Response to Professor Ostrom will be lead by Rod Oram and Aroha Mead.

Professor Ostrom is the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Economics. Her research on the commons “has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized” (The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences). She is based at Indiana University Bloomington.

Rod Oram is a business journalist and trustee of The Hikurangi Foundation.

Aroha Mead is a Senior Lecturer in Maori Business at Victoria University Management School.