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

26

institutionalism and polycentricity had risen 

greatly since Lin’s earlier visits to the country.  

A REVIEW OF OSTROM’S INFLUENCE ON 

MEXICAN COMMONS SCHOLARSHIP

There appear to be four broad categories of 

scholarly output from Lin Ostrom that apply 

to Mexican commons governance. The first 

one is perhaps the most popular; the concept 

of common pool resources (CPRs) and the 

idea that self-organizing communities can 

build institutions (understood as the rules and 

norms that regulate agents’ interactions) for 

resource self-governance. Taken from her 1990 

book, Governing the Commons, Ostrom’s Design 

Principles for commons institutions have been 

widely used as an analytical lens by which 

Mexican scholars examine the robustness of 

resource governance systems. 

The second category concerns the framework 

that evolved partially from Susan Kiser and 

Elinor Ostrom’s grammar of institutions and 

partially from an evolutionary process of 

understanding how institutions emerge: the 

Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) 

framework (Gibson, Andersson, Ostrom, & 

Shivakumar 2008; 

Olivares & Sandoval 

2008; Ostrom, 

Gibson, Shivakumar, 

& Andersson 

2001; Ostrom 

2011; Pacheco-

Vega 2005). IAD is 

both an analytical 

framework and a 

set of heuristics that 

enable scholars to 

study how resource 

governance systems 

function, through 

the identification 

of structural 

variables that 

affect institutional 

arrangements 

(Ostrom 2010, 

2011; Pacheco-Vega 

& Basurto 2008; 

Pahl-Wostl, Holtz, 

Kastens, & Knieper, 2010). I have been among 

the main proponents of IAD applications to 

Mexican water governance, using the Lerma-

Chapala river basin as the case study of 

choice (Pacheco-Vega & Vega 2008a, 2008b; 

Pacheco-Vega 2005, 2007a, 2007b, 2012a, 

2012b, 2012c). This work has found that 

institutional reforms for water governance 

in Mexico such as river basin councils are not 

robust enough to facilitate proper sanitation 

policy. More recently, Briseño Ramírez 

followed a similar strategy in undertaking an 

institutional analysis of water management in 

the metropolitan area of Guadalajara in Mexico 

(Briseño Ramírez 2012), finding that the 

structures of resource governance at the local, 

state and regional levels are weak, and that the 

dilution of jurisdictional responsibilities lead 

to deficient institutional structures that further 

undermine water management at the regional 

level. These findings are consistent with my 

frequent criticisms of the river basin council 

as an arena for water management in Mexico 

(Pacheco-Vega 2012b).

The third category deals with Ostrom’s work 

on polycentricity. Milman and Scott (2010) 

used Ostrom’s work in this area to examine 

the shared Santa Cruz Aquifer that runs 

alongside the US-Mexico border. Their findings 

confirm what we already knew thanks to Lin’s 

research: that a non-polycentric approach 

can lead to overlapping authority and blurred 

jurisdictional boundaries, thereby weakening 

resource governance regimes and limiting 

proper binational groundwater management. 

Yet by exploring the degree to which Mexican 

water governance is moving towards more 

polycentric models (Pacheco-Vega 2013a, 

2013b), my own work – comparing the 

geographies of wastewater in the central cities 

of Leon and Aguascalientes and analyzing a 

dataset of 26 river basin councils in Mexico—

finds that such governance arrangements in 

Mexico are still in their infancy and remain 

poorly understood. 

The fourth category concerns the broader 

decentralization of natural resources 

governance and how devolving decision-

making power to lower levels of organizational 

structures can contribute to building better, 

Ostrom’s 

Design 

Principles 

for commons 

institutions 

have been 

widely used as 

an analytical 

lens by which 

Mexican 

scholars 

examine the 

robustness 

of resource 

governance 

systems. 

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POLICY MATTERS 2014: REMEMBERING ELINOR OSTROM

27

more robust rules for resource management. 

A glut of recent work on Mexican resource 

management has been espousing the 

effectiveness of a decentralized governance 

model (Bravo Pérez, Castro Ramírez, & 

Gutiérrez Andrade 2005; Caire Martínez 2004; 

Caldera Ortega 2012; Camacho, Aguilar, & 

Cercantes 2012; Cortez Lara 2005; Domínguez 

2012; Galindo-Escamilla, Palerm-Viqueira, 

Tovar-Salinas & Rodarte-García 2008; González 

Santana, n.d.; Licea Murillo 2012; López Mera 

& Chávez Hernández 2012; Murillo Licea 2012; 

Paré & Robles 2000).

Beyond the field of water governance, Ostrom’s 

influence has been equally apparent in the 

study of other natural resource commons in 

Mexico. In the forest sector, for example, the 

aforementioned Leticia Merino is among a 

group of Mexican scholars to have made use 

of Ostrom’s work, having spent many years 

studying the country’s self-organizing forest 

communities. The country’s community 

forests offer an excellent opportunity to 

empirically apply Ostrom’s thinking given that 

they function as something of a laboratory 

for researching how self-organization affects 

forest conditions over time. Merino-Perez 

and Hernandez-Apolinar (2004), for example, 

analyzed forest conservation initiatives within 

the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, 

Michoacan, from 1986 to 2000, focusing on the 

experiences of two ejido communities: Cerro 

Prieto and Donaciano Ojeda. In the former they 

found that pernicious self-reinforcing negative 

incentives led to illegal timber extraction, 

while in the latter, nested formal and informal 

institutions had helped to generate incentives 

for forest conservation and the regulation of 

timber extraction. 

Other stand-out case studies include Lujan 

Alvarez’s (2003) work that argues for the 

creation of participatory multi-stakeholder 

roundtables to empower forest communities 

to properly manage their timber resources. 

He used Ostrom’s work to set the stage 

in highlighting the need for community 

participation mechanisms in the governance 

of Mexico’s forest resources. Among the many 

non-Mexicans working in the country, several 

studies inspired by Ostrom have influenced 

Mexican natural resource policy. Antinori 

and Bray (2005), for example, contributed 

to our understanding of community-based 

forest enterprises in Mexico, which drew 

on insights from the common property 

literature with regards to self-organization 

and community engagement. Ostrom´s work 

has also demonstrated that strong cooperation 

by all actors is necessary to achieve good 

governance—something Barsimantsov 

(2010) picked up on when identifying non-

governmental organizations (NGOs) as key 

actors in implementing sound resource 

management strategies. In his comparison 

of forest governance in the Mexican states 

of Oaxaca and Michoacán, Barsimantsov 

(2010: 62) found that “unless communities 

can internalize timber extraction and 

community development activities, external 

non-governmental actors will be critical in 

community forestry and therefore must be 

considered in creating development strategies.” 

Jacinta Palerm is another leading Mexican 

scholar to frequently use Ostrom’s scholarly 

work to provide 

context to 

analyses of 

irrigation systems 

management in 

Mexico (Palerm 

Viqueira, Rivas, 

Ávalos Gutiérrez, & 

Pimentel Equihua, 

2004; Palerm 

Viqueira 1999, 

2000, 2003). With 

frequent reference 

to Ostrom, the 

work of Palerm 

typically focuses 

on organizational 

structures and 

the hierarchy of 

division of labor 

in irrigation 

management in 

central Mexico. 

Nevertheless, in 

some key work 

(particularly 

those involving 

The country’s 

community 

forests offer 

an excellent 

opportunity 

to empirically 

apply Ostrom’s 

thinking given 

that they 

function as 

something of a 

laboratory for 

researching 

how self-

organization 

affects forest 

conditions over 

time.

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