We Are Reading:
“The Governance of the Commons” by Elinor Ostrom
Welcome to our new series, We Are Reading! This initiative aims to bring our community closer together through the joy of reading.
In this We Are Reading article, we’ll unravel Ostrom’s insights, discover the power of collective action, and explore the potential of a decentralized future. Don’t miss out — come explore with us!
“The key to my argument is that some individuals have broken out of the trap inherent in the commons dilemma, whereas others continue remorsefully trapped into destroying their own resources. This leads me to ask what differences exist between those who have broken the shackles of a commons dilemma and those who have not.”
— The Governance of The Commons, Elinor Ostrom
Before Elinor Ostrom’s, the governance of common resources was a tragedy. That’s what theorists called; “the tragedy of the commons”, because they assumed that those common spaces or resources were “a la buena de Dios”. The spaces for common use, or Common-pool Resources (CPRs), were places of the wild, of natural chaos, and without a Leviathan, an iron government to manage them at its whim and will, they were destined for inevitable ruin. To absolute degradation. After all, wasn’t it Hobbes who said, “Man is wolf to man”?
“The prisoners in the famous dilemma cannot change the constraints imposed on them by the district attorney; they are in jail. Not all users of natural resources are similarly incapable of changing their constraints. As long as individuals are viewed as prisoners, policy prescriptions will address this metaphor. I would rather address the question of how to enhance the capabilities of those involved to change the constraining rules of the game to lead to outcomes other than remorseless tragedies”
It is truly beautiful the way Elinor Ostrom presents this problem at the beginning of The Governance of the Commons and how she gropes in the dark libraries of economic policy for that word, for the word. I can see her now, sitting at her desk scribbling options. What word can I use that implies victory and doesn’t sound bellicose? How can I replace the word “tragedy” there in that verbal phrase? Finding the right word, le mot juste can change everything.
Elinor didn’t find it, the time had not yet come for it, but it was close; just twenty years before the appearance of Satoshi Nakamoto. She didn’t find the word she was looking for because that’s often what happens, technology moves faster than minds, and things roam the world unnamed. But, sooner or later they arrive.
Sooner or later names arrive, words finish their autumnal descent into the world of things and end up taking ownership of them forever. Elinor didn’t manage to come up with “decentralization” but that’s what she was talking about. Elinor Ostrom was talking about decentralization almost twenty years before anyone else, and she had the clarity to foresee that sharing common goods was not only possible but was the only way to have certain things, that sharing common goods was not only possible but that’s what the future would be about, that there was no other possible future than that of common goods.
It was a matter of asking the question and soon, in her research, Elinor could glimpse that she had opened a crack in the wall, a crack that was much larger than she had imagined at first. She studied the Swiss Alpine slopes and their communal use in the summer, the extensive lands of Japan, more than 12 million hectares of forests and mountain meadows shared by thousands of rural villages for centuries, the orchards in Spain managed by its appropriators since the Middle Ages.
“Instead of basing policy on the presumption that the individuals involved are helpless, I wish to learn more from the experience of individuals in field settings. Why have some efforts to solve commons problems failed, while others have succeeded? What can we learn from experience that will help stimulate the development and use of a better theory of collective action — one that will identify the key variables that can enhance or detract from the capabilities of individuals to solve problems?”
One of the first things that Elinor Ostrom discovers is that the entire theory of the tragedy of the commons is precisely that; a theory. Reality is always more complex, a combination of subtleties and gradations. Institutions are rarely either purely private or purely public, nor do they entirely belong to “the market” or “the state.” Many successful institutions for managing common resources are a rich mixture of “private” and “public” characteristics, defying classification in a sterile dichotomy. There is no single solution to the problem of common goods; it is not about the iron fist of the State or the invisible hand of the Market, but about a variety and diversity of possible at-hand alternatives.
“Instead of there being a single solution to a single problem, I argue that many solutions exist to cope with many different problems. Instead of presuming that optimal institutional solutions can be designed easily and imposed at low cost by external authorities, I argue that “getting the institutions right” is a difficult, time-consuming, conflict-invoking process”
That’s what the governance of the commons is ultimately about. Successfully governing a common good among a group of people will require an investment of time and energy, especially in communication. Clear rules of the game must be established and adhered to. Because those who fail to organize themselves will inevitably face failure concerning the use of common resources. Those who fail to organize around a common good will suffer shared and irreparable losses.
Design principles illustrated by long-enduring CPR institutions in The Governance of The Commons by Elinor Ostrom:
1. Clearly defined boundaries; Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself.
2. Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions; Appropriation rules restricting time, place, technology, and/or quantity of resource units are related to local conditions and to provision rules requiring labor, material, and/or money.
3. Collective-choice arrangements; Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rules.
4. Monitoring; Monitors, who actively audit CPR auditions and appropriator behavior, are accountable to the appropriators or are the appropriators.
5. Graduated sanctions; Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offense) by other appropriators, by officials accountable to these appropriators, or by both.
6. Conflict-resolution mechanisms; Appropriators and their officials have rapid access to low-cost local arenas to resolve conflicts among appropriators or between appropriators and officials.
7. Minimal recognition of rights to organize; The rights of appropriators to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external governmental authorities.
For CPRs that are parts of larger systems:
8. Nested enterprises; Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.
“The origins of institutions and changes in institutions frequently are considered to be fundamentally different. In this view, origin is characterized as a situation in which individuals move from having no rules to having a set of rules. In such a view, the origin of institutions is thought of as a major, one-step transformation, whereas institutional change is viewed as involving incremental changes in existing rules”
It seems that successful CPRs have managed to develop strong institutions and achieve what Elinor Ostrom calls “institutional equilibrium”. Institutional equilibrium is reached when rules within rules are developed, meaning different normative levels where the group of individuals agrees to change operational rules while maintaining and preserving the general and collective rules adopted through past experiences. Institutional robustness is achieved when the change of one rule does not modify another level of rules, and the normative system survives. For a rule to be changed, there must be a prior rule. Elinor Ostrom sees institutional change as a continuous process of normative transformation.
According to Ostrom, when individuals have lived and shared a certain group of experiences for a substantial period and have developed and shared norms and patterns of reciprocity, then they possess social capital with which they can build institutional arrangements to solve CPR dilemmas.
Social capital might then be the missing key; the cornerstone for building planetary decentralization. But, as getting the institutions right, building social capital might be also a difficult, time-consuming, conflict-invoking process. Building social capital might need time and patience.
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