The recent publication of Tony Blair's long-awaited memoirs has once again brought to mind discussion on "the third way". This issue has become even more topical in the wake of the economic crisis. It seemed that the world had become the preserve of the financial markets, which were able to impose their will on governments and international organizations, when the catastrophic consequences of speculation have made us rediscover the need for strong nations, aware of their sovereignty and ready to effectively control these unbridled financial agents. Action is urgently needed, and so Western governments are offering monumental "packages" from financial aid to revive Economics. It remains to be seen whether the injection of these public cash flows will achieve its intended purpose: it is often forgotten that states do not usually have a cash box full of cash to spend at will; it is in fact everyone's money, which will be needed refund in the future. How will the next generations react when they receive our bequest in the form of multi-billion dollar debts?

In the new context created by the crisis, old dilemmas arise once again: do governments deserve more trust than the markets when it comes to ensuring the well-being of citizens? Given the inertial survival of obsolete political and economic models, is it possible to think of a third way that avoids the drawbacks of statism and capitalism: inefficiency contaminated by ideology versus greed that benefits the few and excludes the many?

I do not have an answer final to these classic questions, but I would like to point out some clues, for example, offered by Elinor Ostrom, the 2009 Nobel Prize winner award Economics , who visited Europe this summer to give lectures. This professor at Indiana University received the award for her research on the management of commons, public goods such as communal pastures, fishing grounds or water. Classical economic theory asserted that in the long run these resources were doomed to extinction, since the pursuit of private profit led to selfish and ruinous exploitation. Therefore, there were only two solutions to prevent their disappearance: privatize them and distribute them among users, or nationalize them and place them under the control of a public agency. Elinor Ostrom has shown that there is a third way: in many situations, which the illustrious economist has traced throughout the world, the actors involved are capable of setting up non-state institutions that, through local cooperation and self-regulation, ensure the sustainable use of these resources. Such capacity is not tied to a particular cultural or social sphere: it can be observed in the most varied circumstances, from Japan and the Philippines to Canada, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Switzerland and Spain (of which he presents the case of the Water Tribunal in Valencia).

Ostrom already set out his theory systematically in 1990, in his classic work Governing the Commons, but since then he has not ceased in his research. He travels all over the world: Latin America, Africa, India, Nepal, Mongolia, to observe how forests, pastures and water are managed, with identical conclusions: when the goods at stake and the users are manageable, self-regulation is more effective than state intervention. This finding has consequences, for example, for environmental protection. Action emanating from the State, from above, often fails to achieve the proposed objectives, as can be seen in so many parks and nature reserves in Third World countries, which deteriorate due to the inability or negligence of the respective governments. It is necessary to involve the indigenous population in these policies, the only one capable of ensuring their effective fulfillment. In the face of systems that tend to leave everything in the hands of the market (United States) or the State (continental Europe), a third way is emerging: a civil society capable of taking the lead in autonomy and solving its own problems.