Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons: Institutional Diversity, Self-Governance, and Tragedy Diverted.

• Author: Herzberg, Roberta Q.

Just thirty years ago, virtually every common-pool resource (CPR) setting was viewed as a tragedy waiting to happen or an opportunity for the state to swoop in to save the day with a regulatory plan limiting individual choices or restructuring property rights (Hardin 1968). Elinor Ostrom's work Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990) changed the trajectory of CPR research and opened up the potential for institutional self-governance more broadly. Building on the important foundation Ostrom laid, scholars and policy makers today consider what might be needed to find sustainable, cooperative solutions to the "tragedy of the commons" and suggest how communities of individuals develop the capacity to create those conditions for themselves. As Governing entered the literature, it provided the analytic and empirical support to those who argued that individuals could address their common dilemmas locally, often working them out over time, without depending on Leviathan to enforce social outcomes.

Certainly, Ostrom's Governing changed the nature of work on CPRs, but its influence went beyond commons to address the classic dilemma of how individuals can craft the institutions that will shape their collective decisions. It was a popular concern at the workshop that Ostrom directed, guided by Alexander Hamilton's famous query in Federalist No. 1 "whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force." (1) Ostrom argued that individuals in CPRs are capable of establishing rule systems that can prevent the worst possibilities predicted by Garrett Hardin and others. The title of her book really said it all--commons can be governed by relying on institutions that have evolved in response to the interests of the residents acting collectively. This classic work, therefore, is as much about the importance of self-governance and local-rule development as it is about the resource challenges that individuals face. Its relevant audience stretches beyond those concerned with the unique environment of common-pool settings to inform those interested in institutional design, self-governance, and liberty more generally.

We might further consider the impact that Governing the Commons hat] in terms of Ostrom's own success in her intellectual community. The success of Governing distinguished Elinor Ostrom as an important political economy scholar in her own right and moved both her and her work out from under the shadow of her spouse and collaborator, Vincent Ostrom. Although those familiar with her work before Governing had long recognized her distinct contributions, Vincent's longer history of work on constitutional theory, federalism, and polycentricity gave him greater visibility in their earlier joint projects. Governing established a separate arena that became the platform from which Elinor would gain the attention of the world, including her selection as corecipient of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2009. Interest in her work on commons crossed the usual disciplinary boundaries and national borders. This international interest undoubtedly raised her prominence as a scholar and as an academic leader, which in turn helped to raise awareness of Governing. In this essay, I briefly outline Governing's major contributions to explain why it remains important and suggest questions that remain for future students of the field.

Variety and Self-Governance

Perhaps Governing's greatest contribution is that it changed the way we think about citizen options in CPR settings. Before 1990, CPRs were predicted to have one of three clear results--complete destruction, division into private property, or management by an external (state) authority. The tragedy of the commons, the analytic puzzle Ostrom took on in Governing, occurs when users of a CPR are incentivized to overuse and deplete that resource (Hardin 1968). CPRs are both subtractable (I can take my fish home from the fishing pond) and subject to high costs of exclusion. These two features leave CPRs vulnerable to tragedy because it is costly to exclude those who overuse the resource, and yet their use depletes the resource for others. Nobody wants to be a sucker, conserving the resource, while others deplete it. Yet if many defect from a sustainable level of resource use, Hardin predicted that all would suffer as the resource is fully depleted.

Most people agree that destruction is worse than the other choices, so that leaves two options--privatization or Leviathan. Ostrom asked, What happens when citizens can think beyond this simple dichotomy to resolve their social dilemmas? Instead of these limited abstract options, an authoritative-state approach such as the Hobbesian sovereign on one side and the privatization of all common property on the other, Ostrom saw a third way. She suggested that these simple models ignore institutional details that are crucial to how residents use real-world CPRs. Governing: identified a wide continuum of social institutions that individuals use to solve the social dilemma and introduced a new option: self-governance by resource users. Rather than call on Leviathan, resource users can craft rules for themselves that will constrain overuse. As Ostrom noted, "Institutions are rarely either private or public, 'the market' or 'the state.' Many successful CPR institutions are rich mixtures of private-like and public-like institutions defying classification in a sterile dichotomy" (1990, 14). (2) Although no "panacea" (Ostrom 2007), institutional self-governance offers this third way. Self-governing...