9308633 Ostrom This is a follow-up conference to one that was held at Harvard in April of 1992. The conference will bring together scholars from many diverse disciplines working on problems related to both global and local environmental issues who rarely have an opportunity to confront one another's work. Even so, there has been a remarkable convergence between two independent streams of literature in political science, economics, international relations, anthropology, ecology, and related disciplines. The convergence points to important similarities between the cooperation achieved in some international regimes and in some local common-pool resources (CPRs). The major activity of this conference is to further theoretical and empirical work on six unresolved, theoretical issues at the core of research on international regimes as well as on CPRs. These issues are well defined but not yet effectively addressed and are thus ripe for further work in the immediate future. These issues are crucially important to the understanding of cooperation in situations of collective action without hierarchical governance. The set of activities contributes to the scientific investigation of a theory of cooperation related to environmental issues at both the global and local level. In the current era of global change, the research leads to important policy recommendations emphasizing the importance of multiple scales of organization.
