Elinor Ostrom, Institutions and



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Elinor Ostrom, Institutions and

Governance of the Global Commons

Second Draft

Robert Hoffman and Derek Ireland July 2013

Table of Contents




Page

Abstract

2

  1. Introduction and Background

3

  1. The Basic Building Blocks of the IAD Framework

3

  1. IAD Framework and Eight Design Principles Important to CPR Management Success

8

  1. Applying the IAD Framework and Design Principles to the Global Commons




13

5.0 Concluding Comment

18

Appendix A: Extending the Ostrom Analytical Framework to

Non-Resource Common Pool Resources (CPRs)



19

Appendix B: Multi-Disciplinary CPR Analysis for Identifying Polycentric Governance Solutions


21

References and Selected Bibliography

24

Exhibit I: Basic Components of the IAD Framework

9

Exhibit II: The Internal Structure of an Action Situation

10

Abstract

The purpose of this discussion paper is to examine why the governance of the commons is an appropriate frame of reference for examining the interrelationships between humans and the biophysical world, and to describe the critical role played by Elinor Ostrom and her many colleagues in furthering our understanding of this frame of reference as captured in their Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework.

The paper emphasizes the major insights from the Ostrom research program on the institutional analysis of common-pool resources (CPRs) that are particularly important to governance of the global commons; and summarizes the opportunities, limitations and analytical and governance challenges to extending their analytical framework and eight design principles to examining and finding solutions to global common-pool resource dilemmas. Governing, protecting and expanding common-pool resources are essential to the survival of the planet. “Doing nothing” is no longer an option.

Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues provide the following optimistic messages for avoiding the “tragedy of the commons”. Effective and sustainable solutions to protecting natural resource and other CPRs have been found, established and successfully implemented by resource users and other groups in more advanced and developing economies for many decades and centuries. The “tragedy of the commons” is still a major threat, but these tragedies are not inevitable and can be mitigated and remedied through relatively small and implementable changes to the CPR’s “action situation”.

Ordinary citizens, resource users and local communities often know more about managing CPRs than politicians and government bureaucrats. In many contexts, the formal laws, regulations, rules and organizations of governments are not needed and sometimes get in the way of more informal and better managed governance systems that are already in place or could be established in the future. Effective, robust and sustainable CPR governance systems rarely involve monocentric governance structures with one dominant center of authority. Instead, they are polycentric governance systems, which are nonhierarchical and encompass multiple independent decision-makers who interact, work and learn together to achieve commonly valued objectives and outcomes. Governments in these CPR contexts are more effective as information providers, facilitators, and partners to local resource and other communities and non-government groups.

Extending the Ostrom framework from local CPRs to climate change and other global CPRs dilemmas requires “better than rational” solutions where the benefits (outflows) to “appropriators”, consumers and other beneficiaries are appropriately aligned and reasonably consistent with their contributions (inflows), fairness and equity considerations, and other social norms important to the global scale CPR community. The major challenges for the future are to build on the Ostrom legacy, better understand, learn from, apply and extend her many insights and contributions, and thereby greatly enhance our assessment, governance and protection of the global common-pool resources that are so important to future generations.



  1. Introduction and Background

The purpose of this paper is to examine why the governance of the commons is an appropriate frame of reference for examining the interrelationships between humans and the biophysical world and to describe the critical role played by Elinor Ostrom and her many colleagues in furthering our understanding of this frame of reference as captured in their Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework. Extending and applying their framework to the global commons is becoming increasingly essential to successfully addressing the looming and interdependent challenges of climate change, supporting a growing global population with nourishment, shelter and other necessities, and other global commons dilemmas.

The “tragedy of the commons”, namely the over exploitation and degradation of the commons, was seen by Garret Hardin (1968) and other scholars as the inevitable consequence of the conflict between the human propensity for the pursuit of self-interest and the need to sustain the benefits derived from the preservation of the commons for local and other communities.

Over a period of more than fifty years until her untimely death in 2012, Elinor Ostrom greatly advanced our understanding of the role and importance of institutions of all kinds to examining and managing the relationships between human beings and the biophysical world that sustains us. Her research program and analytical framework indicated that the conventional wisdom of either enclosure through private ownership or government intervention through state ownership and state enforced laws and regulations are inadequate to deal with the “tragedy of the commons”.

Through case studies of actual common-pool resource (CPR) governance situations as well as experimental, game theoretic, meta-analysis studies, and other multi-disciplinary empirical and theoretical research, Ostrom and her colleagues found that “the tragedy of the commons” is not inevitable; and developed and applied an analytical framework for conceptualizing, addressing, and resolving common-pool resource problems. Based on her research on institutions and the governance of the commons, she was awarded with Oliver Williamson the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009. This is a remarkable achievement since she was a political scientist and had received limited recognition among mainstream economists. In preparing this paper, major emphasis is placed on more recent articles and working papers on the IAD Framework that are especially relevant to applying the IAD framework to the global commons. 1



  1. The Basic Building Blocks of the Insitutional Analysis and Development Framework

The purpose of this section is to introduce the basic building blocks of the Ostrom research program and analytical framework which in our view are most important to extending the program and framework to the global commons.

For Ostrom and other institutional analysts, institutions are essentially the “rules of the game” that facilitate, guide and constrain the conduct of individuals and organizations. “Institutions may be seen as commonly understood codes of behaviour that potentially reduce uncertainty, mediate self-interest, and facilitate collective action” (Ostrom and Cox 2010:4-5).

Institutions encompass the laws, rules and regulations of government as well as the informal rules and social norms that are essential to the fair, efficient, and effective operation and “governance” of families; our personal, social and business relationships with others; neighbourhoods and local communities; companies, business networks, and supply chains; government bureaucracies and non-governmental organizations; and common-pool resources of all kinds and at all spatial scales from neighbourhoods and local communities to the global commons.

In the Ostrom IAD framework, the term the “commons” is “informally used to refer to public goods, common-pool resources, or any area with uncertain property rights. [However, for] analytical purposes it is necessary to be more specific” (McGinnis 2011:174-175). Many of these specifics from the Ostrom research program are addressed in the rest of this working paper. The term “common-pool resources” has many advantages over the term used previously: common property resources. The property rights regime: private, public, or common property, often plays a comparatively minor role in determining CPR governance and success. Moreover many of the better managed CPRs involve a mix of two or all three property regimes, leading to co-management arrangements.

In simplified form, governance in the Ostrom context essentially determines “who can do what to whom, and on whose authority” (McGinnis 2011a:171 – italics in the original). For the most part, Ostrom and her colleagues applied institutional analysis to the governance of natural resource common-pool resources (CPRs) in developing and more advanced economies. However, Ostrom’s analytical framework has also been applied to the non-resource “commons”.

Very early in their research program, Ostrom and her colleagues realized that the tragedy of the commons could be avoided and in fact was being avoided through multiple institutional and governance instruments, and that the dichotomy of either enclosure through private ownership or government intervention through state ownership and state enforced laws, regulations and rules was neither helpful nor appropriate. Based on this insight, Ostrom defined four types of goods in terms of their degree of exclusion and subtractability (which Ostrom prefers over the concept of rivalry used in the conventional economic literature).









Degree of Subtractability/Rivalry







Low

High

Degree of Excludability

Difficult to Exclude

Public Goods

Common-Pool Resources

Easy to Exclude

Toll or Club Goods

Private Goods

Source: Ostrom, Gardner and Walker (1994, page 7).
Private goods are characterized by the relative ease of excludability and high subtractability, which indicates that when I eat an apple, the apple is no longer available to my neighbour (easy exclusion) and the number of apples available in the global economy is reduced by one (high subtractability). Public goods (such as national defense and world peace) are the polar opposite of private goods. Excluding free-riders and non-contributors from benefitting from the public good is difficult if not impossible while subtractability from the public good is negligible.

Common-pool resources fall between public and private goods. On the one hand, CPRs have high subtractability (like private goods), which often results in overuse, congestion, pollution, or even destruction of a common-pool resource (Ostrom, Gardner and Walker 1994). Therefore, in terms of subtractability, CPRs are different from public goods where the benefit I receive from the military does not subtract from the benefit received by my neighbour.

On the other hand, CPRs are similar to public goods on excludability. This is because excluding free-riders and non-contributors from benefiting from the resource is difficult and costly although not impossible in many CPR contexts. There are strong incentives for individuals and organizations to become free riders, because appropriators and other users can benefit from a CPR and public good without contributing to its provision, maintenance, protection, rule-making and rule enforcement. Therefore, the institutions and governance systems designed by individuals to govern any common-pool resource must address the dangers of both overuse/too much subtractability (including too much pollution in the case of airsheds and watersheds) and too much free riding (Dolsak and Ostrom 2003:8.).

The challenges and opportunities of governing the commons were not fully recognized until Ostrom developed common-pool resources as a distinct type of good that needed its own analytical frameworks and multiple methods of analysis, including detailed case studies of actual CPR situations, meta-analyses of completed case studies on CPRs, cooperative and non-cooperative game theory, econometrics, and experiments in the laboratory.

Another major advantage from doubling the types of goods from the dichotomy of public versus private goods is the recognition that subtractability of use and excludability are not either/or concepts but rather can vary on a continuum from low to high. Recognizing that subtractability and excludability are continuous functions is very important to the identification, analysis and management of common-pool resources (Ostrom 2009:412).

The four-part breakdown also allows greater flexibility, nuance and realism across the four types of goods. For example, the rule-making process and the resulting institutions and rules for governing a common-pool resource are more like public goods because: (i) subtractability is not a problem (my application of the rules does not prevent somebody else from using and benefitting from the same rules); but (ii) excluding free-riders and non-contributors to the rule-making process from accessing and benefitting from the same rules is even more difficult than excluding free-riders from benefitting from the actual common pool resource.

Because CPR rule-making and governance have many features in common with a public good, increasing the number of CPR participants can add to the inflows and resource stocks that are available to generate benefits for all participants. The economies of scale and scope from CPR rule-making and governance can offset some of the challenges of greater numbers, heterogeneity, transactions costs, and risks of disputes and conflicts that are associated with larger common-pool resources and social-ecological systems at higher spatial scales (Ostrom 2002: 1328-1336).

Once common-pool resources were identified as a distinct “good” with its own characteristics and challenges, the Ostrom research program turned its attention to applying the IAD framework and multiple theoretical and empirical tools to a wide range of natural resource and other common-pool resources. At the outset, most of this research focused on natural resource CPRs such as: lakes, rivers, groundwater basins, irrigation, and other water systems, forests, grazing pastures, and lobster and other fisheries that have often (but not always) been managed successfully by local communities in developing and more advanced countries. These were the subject of the many case studies of actual CPR experiences conducted by the Ostrom Team over the past quarter century.

This research was then extended by the Ostrom Team to multi-country and global CPRs such as integrated water management systems that cross national borders and the global atmosphere/climate change. And in recent years, Ostrom, her colleagues and other scholars have applied the CPR concept and IAD framework to less tangible common-pool resources such as the American health care system, social capital, the information commons and business reputation, networks and ecosystems including global supply chains, which arguably could take on greater importance as we move from local to global CPR management (see Appendix A).

Common-pool resources and their effective governance have many features in common regardless of sector, spatial scale and other attributes. This allows scholars to conduct meta-analysis type studies that compare the experiences and lessons from many different common-pool resources. The typical common-pool resource includes:


  1. a resource stock (“stock of assets”);

  2. inward and outward flows into and out of the resource stock (i.e. provision of inputs and generation of outputs/appropriation from the stock);

  3. “rules-in-use” to ensure that the resource stock is protected, maintained, replenished and preferably expands through time and is not diminished and “polluted” through over use and inappropriate use; and,

  4. some formal or informal governance entity to enforce the rules, ensure that the provision of inputs are adequate to maintain the stock, prevent over use and misuse, ensure the benefits and costs are distributed in a manner that is consistent with local conditions and social norms, and apply “graduated” financial, social and other penalties to non-cooperators, non-contributors, free-riders and “polluters” of the common-pool resource.

The successful management of CPRs at all spatial scales throughout the world has often involved what Ostrom and her colleagues call polycentric governance systems, which encompass multiple decision makers operating at different geographic scales, with different structures, functions, norms, values and interests – who find ways to cooperate and coordinate their activities in order to achieve common goals.

Multi-layered polycentric governance systems generally work much better compared with: (i) command-and-control monocentric systems owned and/or operated by government, (ii) treaty and other obligations under a single international agreement, (iii) decentralization to a local government, (iv) privatization and related market based solutions; and (v) other simpler (and arguably simple minded) “panaceas” that apply a single governance-system “blueprint and cure-all” to complex and diverse CPR and related problems. The more complex the problem, the greater the tendency for international organizations, governments, businesses, civil society groups, and individuals to seek out and apply simpler heuristics, strategies and monocentric governance solutions (Ostrom 2012:70-72).

Polycentric governance solutions are especially needed when the “CPR spaces” to be governed involve: substantial risk, uncertainty, complexity, non-linearity and dynamics; multiple individual and organizational (corporate) actors; multiple interests, tiers, layers, spatial scales, dimensions, human-environmental interactions, and resource and non-resource CPRs; multiple formal and informal policy, regulatory and governance systems and subsystems; and “super wicked problems”. In short, polycentric governance solutions are especially needed when the Ostrom IAD framework is extended from local CPRs to the global commons.

Aligica and Tarko (2012: 251) summarize polycentricity as follows.

“Polycentricity emerges as a nonhierarchical, institutional, and cultural framework that makes possible the coexistence of multiple centers of decision making with different objectives and values, and that sets up the stage for an evolutionary competition between the complementary ideas and methods of those different decision centers. The multiple centers of decision making may act either all on the same territory or may be territorially delimitated from each other in a mutually agreed fashion”.

Compared with unitary monocentric governance systems, polycentric systems are more inclusive, flexible, adaptable and resilient, are better able to accommodate fundamental change and external shocks, and provide greater space to individuals, households, neighbourhoods, local community and other citizens groups, indigenous people and other “outsiders” to contribute to rule making and ensure that the rules are appropriately enforced.



The Ostrom research program emphasizes that successful CPR governance is based on: communication, graduated sanctions, and a common vision; trust, reciprocity of trust, fairness, cooperation, and reputations for fairness and trustworthiness; social cohesion and capital and mutual obligations; shared information, knowledge, learning, beliefs, and “mental models” (ways of thinking about the world); and the ability to build and utilize “political capital” to influence the decisions of and secure support from governments (Birner and Wittmer 2003). Analysts and decision-makers must go beyond the rational agent model of conventional economics in order to identify and facilitate CPR choices, decisions and governance regimes that are “better than rational” (see e.g. Ostrom 1998a).

  1. IAD Framework and Eight Design Principles Important to CPR Management Success

Elinor Ostrom’s legacy is extraordinarily important for the future of the planet. Her research program emphasizes why common-pool resources at all spatial scales need to be governed, protected and expanded. “Doing nothing” is no longer an option. She provides us with the analytical frameworks, design principles and other tools, instruments and insights that are needed to examine in detail and find solutions to local and global CPR dilemmas.
Ostrom’s experimental and field research illustrate that the “tragedy of the commons” of Hardin (1968) is still a major threat, as illustrated by the “roving bandits” that irresponsibly exploit valuable marine species in coastal waters. However, in many contexts, these common-pool resource tragedies are not inevitable, and often can be avoided through small changes to the “action situation” such as better communication, more frequent interactions, graduated sanctions, and easy to identify “markers” of non-cooperative activity (Ostrom 2007).
Her guidance on scaling up and broadening the reach of the IAD framework and eight design principles to climate change and other global CPR dilemmas captures the insights from related literatures on: social-ecological systems and “super wicked problems”; behavioral, institutional, evolutionary, network, and regulatory economics; epistemic communities and public policy and administration networks; market institutions and the sociology of markets; and the corporate management literature on business reputation, strategy, groups, networks and ecosystems including national and global supply chains. The major challenges for the future are to build on the Ostrom legacy; better understand, learn from, apply and extend her many insights and contributions; and thereby greatly enhance our ability to assess, govern and protect the global common-pool resources that are so important to future generations.
Accordingly, the IAD framework is now being extended in ways that are highly relevant to protecting the global commons, such as to: (i) geographically larger non-metropolitan local public economies such as eco-regions; (ii) complex institutional linkages that cut across geographic scales; and (iii) social-ecological systems (SES) frameworks, which give greater attention to the biophysical and ecological foundations of institutional systems and can contain several individual resource and non-resource CPRs. The SES framework requires multiple levels of analysis that place greater weight on the interrelationships, interactions and governance linkages between different common-pool resources (see e.g. Ostrom and Cox 2010).
The following exhibit attempts to summarize the basic components of Ostrom’s Insitutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework.


External Variables -- Inputs to IAD Framework and External Context for the Action Situation
Exhibit I: Basic Components of the IAD Framework


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