Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions) [ペーパーバック]

Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons is a wonderful introduction to the world of "common pool resources," a.k.a. CPRs. Technicalities aside, a CPR is a resource that grows over time but can be harvested by more than one person. The classic example of a CPR is the English grazing commons, popularized in Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons." Forests, fisheries, and smog-free air are also good examples.

In her book, Ostrom takes an ethnographic approach to studying the management and mismanagement of CPRs. The key question for managing such commons is sustainability. Without some kind of enforceable agreement among those who would harvest a CPR, the resource will rapidly be depleted and possibly destroyed. Ostrom argues that good collective management can arise naturally from communities of people with a mutual interest in the sustainability of commons. In a series of detailed case studies, she lays out conditions ("design principles") that seem to allow -- or prevent -- the good governance of the CPR in question.

Once you've seen these design principles, they seem to pop up everywhere. "Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions" sounds a lot like the idea of local adaptation in the diffusion of innovations literature. "Monitoring" sounds like the role middle managers play in corporations. "Minimal rights to organize" sounds like the First Amendment.

Overall, Ostrom's book is an open-ended classic. It provides a great description of common pool resources through the lens of ethnographic case studies, plus a framework for looking at CPR problems in general. Ostrom never advances of specific theory of governance. Instead, she lays out many interesting and suggestive examples and principles. The field of CPR research has expended in many directions since Ostrom started it -- it's worth going back to the source to see where it all began.

Hints on how to read this book:

* To really motivate your reading, alternate chapters with Jared Diamond's Collapse. (But skim Collapse; it can be tedious.) Reading about how mismanagement of common pool resources led to the failure of entire civilizations will put an edge on your curiosity about how we can do better.

* As you read Governing the Commons, play the "Is a [blank] a CPR?" game. Switch on a radio to any news program. As soon as the topic becomes clear, mute the radio and ask yourself if the situation can be described as a commons. (The sub-prime bailout? Presidential elections? Somali piracy?) Odds are the answer is yes. It doesn't have to be a natural resource to be a common pool resource -- this analytical frame is extremely handy.

* If you're a scientist, don't read Ostrom looking for a clear, falsifiable theory. She never gives one. Instead, she describes a broad framework for considering the interaction between environment and government. It's a great seedbed of ideas -- but those ideas will need to be cultivated before they can be tested.

* Ask yourself about scaling cooperative management. Unfortunately, Ostrom never tackles this problem. She never gives much thought to whether what works in small communities can be scaled to the level of nations or the world. She can't -- ethnography simply can't cover that much ground. Consequently, "scaling" remains (even after 20 years) one of the great unanswered questions of collective governance.

PS -- If you figure the scaling problem out, please do us all a favor and fix global carbon emissions.

Ostrom attempts to refute the belief that only through state and or market-centered controls can commonly pooled resources (CPRs) be effectively governed. Ostrom writes, "Communities of individuals have relied on institutions resembling neither the state nor the market to govern some resource systems with reasonable degrees of success over long periods of time" (p. 1). Governing the Commons sets out to discover why some groups are able to effectively govern and manage CPRs and other groups fail. She tries to identify both the internal and external factors "that can impede or enhance the capabilities of individuals to use and govern CPRs."

The first section of the book examines both state-controlled and privatization property rights regimes, and illustrates failures in both regimes; namely, that central authorities often fail to have complete accuracy of information, have only limited monitoring capabilities, and possess a weak sanctioning reliability. As such, a centralized governing body may actually govern the commons inaccurately and make a bad situation worse. In the case of privatized property rights regimes, Ostrom illustrates two main points: 1) it assumes that property is homogenous and any division of property will be equitable; and 2) privatization will not work with non-stationary property (fisheries, for example).

After discussing the state-controlled and privatization property rights regimes, Ostrom attempts examine the causes of successful CPR governance, and the catalysts which lead to failure. Being part of the "new institutionalist" school, Ostrom seeks to examine the rules, structures, and frameworks within the various CPR governance structures. Ostrom has discovered a number of "design principles" within the successful CPR governance cases. These principles include: 1) a clear definition of boundaries, 2) monitors who either are appropriators of the resource or accountable to the appropriators, 3) graduated sanctions, 4) mechanisms controlled by the appropriators used to mediate conflict and when necessary, change the rules, 5) a congruence between the rules used and the local conditions.

In other words, Ostrom suggests that these "design principles," form a cooperative institutional structure. If the correct institutions are in place, the players will see cooperation as the best means to gain optimal outcomes. These mechanisms create a confidence between players that defections will be minimal, and those that do defect will be sanctioned accordingly. Additionally, the institutional structures create an environment in which resources are distributed in such a way that all (or at least most) players benefit. As such, many of these institutional structures must be accompanied by a good deal of trust between players. This can only be developed over time and is most likely to succeed when the number of players in the CPR is reasonably small.

"Governing the Commons" has become a classic, not only within the literature of political science, but more broadly throughout the social sciences. In the book, Elinor Ostrom argues brilliantly and compelling for a third way of avoiding Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons," in addition to privatization (conversion of the commons to private property) or government regulation (conversion of the commons to public property). Though numerous examples, Ostrom demonstrates how users of common property resources have managed, in various places around the world, to sustainably manage those resources through local, self-regulation. In other words, common property regimes can avoid the "tragedy of the commons."

Ostrom recognizes that common property management regimes do not always work. Indeed, the seem to fail as often as they succeed. To explain why this is the case, and to help predict the likelihood of success or failure, Ostrom develops an elaborate and very useful model of common property success/failure. In the 15 years since she published "Governing the Commons," that model has not been significantly improved by other scholars. Her book remains as current and important today, as it was when she first published it in 1990. It is required reading for all social scientists, indeed anyone, interested in resource conservation and property systems.