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

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“Polycentric governance of forest resources”. 

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2

The Impact of Elinor Ostrom’s Scholarship 

on Commons Governance in Mexico

An Overview

Raul Pacheco-Vega

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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)

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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-

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