Her Work and its Contribution to tHe tHeory and PraCtiCe of Conservation and sustainable natural resourCe ManageMent Policy Matters iuCn CoMMission on environMental, eConoMiC and soCial PoliCy issue 19 aPril 2014

POLICY MATTERS 2014: REMEMBERING ELINOR OSTROM

28

the Cuautla and Nexapa Rivers) Palerm and 

collaborators explore the relevance of formal 

and informal institutional arrangements within 

river basins and associated irrigation districts. 

Ostrom’s work has also been applied to the 

study of fisheries management worldwide, 

and Mexico is well represented here (Basurto 

et al., 2012; Cinti, Shaw, Cudney-Bueno & 

Rojo 2010; Ibáñez de la Calle, Becerra Pérez 

& Brachet Barro 2004; Morán-Angulo 2012; 

Ortiz Paniagua 2004; Zepeda Domínguez 

2010). Basurto’s work, in particular, is relevant 

as it draws directly from the Ostrom school 

of institutional analysis (Professor Basurto 

was a student of Lin’s). In his studies of two 

Mexican small-scale fisheries in the Gulf of 

California, Mexico, he found broad divergences 

in how communities access and govern fish as 

a resource. While one community used a CPR 

regime approach, the other continued to rely 

on permits as a policy strategy (Basurto et al., 

2012), showing that both formal and informal 

rules and institutions both have a direct 

effect on the effectiveness of the resource 

governance regime. 

Beyond these more resource-specific fields 

of scholarship (water, fisheries and forestry), 

Ostrom’s work on the commons (particularly 

her study of rules and institutions in self-

governing systems) has also been applied 

more broadly to the governance of Mexico’s 

extensive resource commons. Her early 1990s 

work, which dealt with agrarian issues, is 

well suited to the study of Mexican ejidos—

land-based tenure systems managed by 

small-scale resource appropriators that share 

characteristics of both common and private 

property. For example, Schroeder Gonzalez 

undertook an applied study of ecosystems 

within the Chamela-Cuxmala ejidos (Schroeder 

Gonzalez 2006), and reported that institutions 

for resource conservation were lacking and 

indicative of a loss of social cohesion and social 

capital in the communities under study—a 

finding that resonated strongly with Ostrom’s 

view that self-governing communities need to 

develop long-range, robust, and cooperative 

institutional arrangements to ensure resources 

are not degraded by the actions of narrow-

minded, short-sighted appropriators. 

Finally, any review of Ostrom’s impact on 

Mexican commons scholarship is incomplete 

without reference to the Mexican social 

science journal Relaciones, which dedicated 

a entire volume in 2002 to the application 

of Ostrom’s work to understanding  local 

self-governance and the commons in Mexico 

(Roth Seneff 2002). This was something of a 

pioneering move, given that Ostrom’s 2005 

Understanding Institutional Diversity 

book was 

yet to be published, and she was still 7 years 

away from being awarded the Nobel Prize. 

The volume summarized mostly theoretical 

work but did include some empirical studies 

on water allocation in Izucar de Matamoros in 

northern Mexico, and forestry management 

in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve 

in Michoacan, comparing governance of 

forest resources there with those found in 

Oaxaca, southern Mexico. The standout piece, 

however, was written by Silvia Bofill Poch, who 

explored community forestry in the indigenous 

community of San Juan Parangaricutiro 

in the Purhepecha altiplano (Bofill-Poch, 

2002). In her article, Bofill Poch looked at the 

articulation (or lack thereof) and nesting of 

political institutions, social norms and power 

struggles that have reinforced class struggles 

and conflicts between governments at multiple 

scales and forestry community users. In the 

same vein as Ostrom’s work on self-governing 

irrigation units, Bofill Poch shows the 

myriad conflicts that can stem from perverse 

incentives and a lack of robust institutional 

structures tend to perpetuate negative effects 

on resources governance.

HOW OSTROM’S WORK HAS 

INFLUENCED POLICY: THE CASE OF 

WATER GOVERNANCE

Within the context of setting new regulatory 

standards for water governance in Mexico, 

bureaucrats and scholars alike have used 

Ostrom’s common pool resource (CPR) theory 

as an all-encompassing framework to allow 

for innovative institutional reforms to be 

implemented in a relatively straightforward 

fashion. In addition, because the vast majority 

of Mexican scholarship on water governance 

focuses on water allocation, redistribution 

and equitable sharing, Ostrom’s research 

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POLICY MATTERS 2014: REMEMBERING ELINOR OSTROM

29

findings are easily applied to Mexican case 

studies dealing with access to water. In my 

own research, I have departed from analyzing 

water access to focus more on the rules and 

institutions governing wastewater generation, 

distribution and treatment (Pacheco-Vega 

& Basurto 2008; Pacheco-Vega,2005, 2009, 

2012c). Using a comparative analysis of the 

sanitation policies of five Mexican States, 

Ostrom’s work has helped me to demonstrate 

that when institutional reforms such as river 

basin councils are not robust enough, they 

can be detrimental to building a potentially 

sustainable basin-wide sanitation policy. 

Lin Ostrom’s teachings were much broader 

than just a mere list of 8 design principles for 

good commons governance. Unfortunately, 

the recent popularization of her scholarship 

(following her 2009 Nobel Prize for 

Economics) have sprouted hundreds of 

notes, newspaper and magazine articles on 

her research that tend to narrow her major 

achievements down to these very principles. 

As others papers in this special issue show, 

doing so negates the many contributions of 

Lin Ostrom’s intellectual heritage. This is 

no less the case with water governance in 

Mexico. In reviewing how her contributions 

have been used by scholars to understand 

water governance in the country, three 

insights in particular should be considered. 

First, Lin Ostrom’s research demonstrated 

that communities are indeed capable of self-

organizing for sustainable water governance. 

Taking her previous empirical work on 

Spanish huertas, and applying it to Mexican 

cajas de agua

, Palerm and collaborators have 

shown that communities are capable of self-

organizing to improve conditions in their 

irrigation systems. Second, Ostrom’s insights 

on rule and norm design have helped improve 

Mexican water governance by highlighting the 

importance of robust institutions designed 

from the bottom-up. As an example of this, my 

work demonstrates how Mexican river basin 

councils can fail when institutional erosion 

occurs because of a conflict between policy 

objectives and overlapping jurisdictional 

attributions (Pacheco-Vega 2013a). And third, 

Lin Ostrom’s contribution to our understanding 

of the notion of resource governance itself 

has been extremely influential in Mexican 

water policy. As an example, the past couple 

of years have seen a flurry of works published 

that stressed the need to devolve control to 

communities as one of the necessary pillars of 

future water governance in Mexico (COLMEX, 

CONAGUA, IMTA, & ANEAS 2012). 

Taking Ostrom’s insights on decentralization as 

a main tenet of resource governance, Mexican 

water policy is slowly but surely moving in this 

direction. Her research has been influential 

in the design of the Mexican National Water 

Law (Ley de Aguas 

Nacionales

), 

where changes 

have seen greater 

emphasis placed 

on community 

participation in 

order to build 

resilient and robust 

institutions for 

water governance. 

Similarly, 

Ostrom’s work 

on institutional 

diversity and her 

emphasis on multi-

layered forms of 

governance have 

opened up policy 

discussions at the national level to increase the 

perceived value of polycentric arrangements 

and to test their feasibility at the sub-national 

level. Last year, Mexico’s National Water 

Commission (Comisión Nacional del Agua, 

CONAGUA) convened a policy workshop 

sponsored by the OECD (Organisation for 

Economic Cooperation and Development) 

where discussions around polycentricity and 

water governance in Mexico were held. These 

constituted important conversations involving 

the country’s policymakers, and they were 

informed, in part, by Ostrom’s thinking.

Officials at all three levels of government 

are now looking to improve the institutional 

design of river basin councils and river basin 

organisations. The results to date have been 

mixed, with both successful (the Lerma-

Chapala river basin), and not-so-successful 

Lin Ostrom’s 

research 

demonstrated 

that 

communities 

are indeed 

capable of self-

organizing for 

sustainable 

water 

governance.

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