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The Impact of Elinor Ostrom’s
Scholarship on Commons Governance
in Mexico
An Overview
Raul Pacheco-Vega
1
Abstract
Professor Ostrom’s work has been extremely influential worldwide, and this includes important
contributions to Mexican commons scholarship and governance. From water and forest
stewardship to small-scale fisheries management, her institutional approach to analyzing
commons problems and uncovering opportunities for self-organization, where solutions to
complex resource issues are far from straightforward, has been successfully applied to case
studies across the country. This paper summarizes lessons learned from such cases, which cover
a broad range of resource areas and issues, and offers insight into the degree of impact that
Ostrom’s work has had, and continues to have, on Mexico’s efforts to more sustainably manage
its extensive natural resource commons.
Keywords: Governance, Mexico, commons, neo-institutionalism, water governance, polycentricity,
complex adaptive systems
1
Professor/Researcher, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica (CIDE), Aguas Calientes, México. Email: raul.pacheco-vega@
cide.edu
2
Plate 1: Mountain Stream, humid montane forest, communal territory of Santiago
Comaltepec, Oaxaca, Mexico. (Photo credit: James Robson)
POLICY MATTERS 2014: REMEMBERING ELINOR OSTROM
25
INTRODUCTION
Professor Lin Ostrom’s work has been extremely
influential worldwide, and her scholarship
has been applied across the sphere of Mexican
commons governance. From forest stewardship
to water governance to small-scale fisheries
management, Lin’s institutional approach to
analyzing commons problems and uncovering
opportunities for self-organization, especially
where solutions to complex resource issues are
far from straightforward, has been successfully
applied to cases around the country. This
paper summarizes the lessons learned from
a number of Mexican studies, which cover a
broad range of natural resource commons, in
order to highlight the influence of her work. I
begin by summarizing the intellectual history
of Mexican interactions with Lin’s scholarship,
before conducting a review of how her work has
been used to research and better understand
multiple types of resource commons and their
management across the country. Using water
governance as a major focus, I then describe
how Lin’s thinking has influenced policy and
offer a number of potential avenues for applied
scholarly research to build on.
I may come across as a little biased in my
writing. There is a simple reason for that—I
had been an avid student of Lin’s and her
husband, Vincent, when they came to visit
the University of British Columbia as Green
College Residential Visiting Professors. I spent
hours listening to their lectures and having
long scholarly conversations outside of the
lecture hall and cherished their subsequent
friendship, mentorship and guidance. It was
Lin and Vincent who encouraged me to engage
in water governance scholarship, and it is in
their memory that I now undertake scholarly
work on these issues in Mexico. While it was
those personal interactions with the Ostroms
that led me to the study of neo-institutionalism
and commons governance theories, it has been
the applicability of their work that has kept me
in this field since then. Lin Ostrom’s research
has left an indelible mark on environmental
policy, and I hope this article showcases some
of the ways by which her thinking has advanced
our understanding of self-governing resource
systems in a Mexican context.
OSTROM AND MEXICO
Before delving into the application of Lin
Ostrom’s work to Mexican cases of shared
resource management, it is worth outlining the
intellectual history of her involvement with
the country’s scholarly endeavours in the field
of common pool resource theory. Lin came to
Mexico several times during her life, as her
scholarly collaboration with Dr. Leticia Merino
from UNAM’s Institute for Social Research (IIS-
UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales de
la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)
blossomed. Professor Merino’s scholarship
has been integral to how we view forest
governance in Mexico (Merino Perez, 2004),
and Merino used Lin Ostrom’s work extensively
to document the institutional arrangements
that have enabled Mexico’s community-based
forest sector to develop, and flourish in some
instances, and compare these with experiences
from other countries.
Merino was also involved in some of the
watershed moments that punctuate Lin
Ostrom’s influence on Mexican commons
scholars more broadly. In 2004, Professor
Merino helped to organize, in addition to
chairing, the Tenth Biennial Conference of
the International Association for the Study of
Common Property (IASCP), held in Oaxaca in
southern Mexico. This exposed many Mexican
scholars to Lin Ostrom’s scholarship, who then
applied the frameworks and theoretical lessons
of her work more readily to case studies around
the country. As Robson and Lichtenstein’s
(2013) recent study shows, the IASCP’s Oaxaca
conference led to a significant increase in
peer-reviewed published articles from both
Mexico and Latin America more generally.
Then, more recently in 2012, and just a few
months before her passing, Lin was invited by
Dr. Lourdes Amaya Ventura to give a seminar
in Mexico City. On the back of this, a number of
additional events were organised, including one
at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana
Cuajimalpa where numerous Mexican scholars
presented draft conceptual and empirical
papers for Ostrom to provide feedback on.
While limited space precludes a review of the
papers presented at the event, it was clear
that interest in commons governance, neo-