52 pages • 1-hour read
Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
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Key Figures
Elinor Ostrom
Elinor Ostrom was born in 1933, in Los Angeles, California. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1954, and she later returned to UCLA for both her MA (1962) and PhD (1965) in political science. When she was in graduate school, the water basin cases mentioned in Governing the Commons were being litigated and resolved, which helped shape the trajectory of her research interests.
Ostrom spent most of her academic career as a professor of political science at Indiana University, where she and her husband, the political economist Vincent Ostrom, founded the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. She was also the first president of the International Association for the Study of the Commons, founded in 1989.
Ostrom’s focus on small-scale common pool resources (CPRs) challenged conventional academic theories at the time, as her research demonstrated that appropriators in some cases were able to resolve CPR problems and prevent depletion of the resource without privatization or the external intervention of governmental authorities. Her research garnered many awards throughout her career, including the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award for Political Economy, the William H. Riker Prize in Political Science, and the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, among other honors. In 2009, Ostrom became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her research on the commons. She died in 2012 at the age of 78.
Appropriators
According to traditional theories of collective action, appropriators, or those using the CPR, are incapable of resolving problems of overuse and depletion. External agents, such as the central government, have to impose a solution. Such theories thus suggest that appropriators have no agency. Ostrom challenges this assumption in her own research, positing that appropriators are actually critical actors in the resolution of small-scale CPR issues. In all her case studies, she describes the appropriators, including their ties to one another, their norms, and their relationship to the CPR.
According to Ostrom’s argument, the successful resolution of small-scale CPR problems requires that appropriators have input in making rules and have responsibility for their enforcement. She describes the organizations that appropriators have made to ensure proper management of CPRs. She also discusses how appropriators go about changing the rules for CPR management and when they are likely to do so. Instead of being irrelevant, as they are in traditional theories, appropriators play a prominent role in Ostrom’s case studies. They have not only agency but also complicated motivations.
Governmental Authorities
In traditional academic theories about collective action, central governmental authorities play a crucial role, needing to take charge of the CPR or privatize it to prevent its depletion. Ostrom’s research rejects this assumption, arguing that governmental authorities are likely to harm a CPR when they impose uniform rules on local appropriators.
Ostrom asserts that it is imperative that the rules for CPR use fit the local conditions and are formulated in such a way as to make enforcement easy. Central governments do not have the appropriate knowledge to tailor rules to local conditions. What is more, in some cases, they act to undermine the enforcement of local rules through favoritism and bribery. As in the case of the Nova Scotian inshore fisheries, for example, Ostrom argues that the intervention of central authorities could undermine local rules that are working well.
Although Ostrom rejects the imposition of centralized rules, she posits a role for regional and central governments in the successful resolution of CPR problems. It is helpful for governments to provide arenas for people to gather or means for individuals to challenge rules or the application of rules. She cites the example of a Sri Lankan project in which organizers were sent in to help irrigators resolve issues. For larger CPRs, regional and central agencies can be part of the managerial solution so long as local voices are represented there. In successful cases, there is often a mix of private and public entities managing the CPR, without one dictating to the other. Instead, the process involves negotiation and bargaining.
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