I’m realizing our docs on this are a bit scattered, so I’ll look into fixing that, but in the mean time…
Only Organization Admins can create namespaces, create orb names, and create “production” releases of orbs. All org members can publish “dev” versions of orbs once the orb name itself has been provisioned in the namespace by an Organization Administrator. We did this to help limit inadvertent or unauthorized publishing of production orbs within our existing security model.