Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. - book reviews

This is the most influential book in the last decade on thinking about the commons. For those involved with small communities (fifty to fifty thousand persons) located in one nation, whose lives depend on a common pool of renewable resources (inshore fisheries, grazing areas, groundwater basins, irrigation systems, communal forests), Governing the Commons has been the intellectual field guide.

The dialog between most political scientists and economists about resources remains ethereal and downright ideologically silly. Some say the state must control; some say it should all be privatized. Ho hum. Elinor Ostrom hammers at these high-IQ types, demonstrating that humans have a diversity of ways to handle their problems and that no single solution is the "best" solution. By being humane, she opens the door for the world to change and communities to change with it. She describes the importance of voluntary organizations in dealing with fluctuating and complex resources, and ends with a theoretical "design framework" which should be studied by any community wanting to cover its organizational bases.

The book is at times a hard read, because she's always slicing thought apart with Aristotelian logic and Latinate terminology. Emotionally, she downplays some of the more wild, lovely, and dangerous influences of such cultural stuff as magic, sacredness, and the karma of kinship. These are small reservations for the pivotal book on common-pool resources, political economy, institutions, and collective decision-making by citizens.

"The term "common-pool resource" refers to a natural or man-made resource system that is sufficiently large as to make it costly (but not impossible) to exclude potential beneficiaries from benefits from its use. To understand the process of organizing and governing CPRs, it is essential to distinguish between the resource system and the flow of resource units produced by the system, while still recognizing the dependence of the one on the other.

"No...well-developed and generally accepted theory provides a coherent account for how a set of principals, faced with a collective-action problem, can solve (1) the problem of supplying a new set of institutions, (2) the problem of making credible commitments, and (3) the problem of mutual monitoring.

"The most notable similarity of all, of course, is the sheer perseverance manifested in [common-pool] resource systems and institutions. The resource systems meet Shepsle's (1989) criterion of institutional robustness, in that the rules have been devised and modified over time according to a set of collective-choice and constitutional-choice rules.... Now the task is to begin to explain their sustainability and robustness, given how difficult it must have been to achieve this record in such complex, uncertain, and interdependent environments in which individuals have continuously faced substantial incentives to behave opportunistically.

"Design principles Illustrated by long-enduring CPR Institutiton

1. Clearly defined boundaries

Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself.

2. Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions

Appropriation rules restricting time, place, technology, and/or quantity of resource units are related to local conditions and to provision rules requiring labor, material, and/or money.

3. Collective-choice arrangements

Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rules.

4. Monitoring

Monitors, who actively audit CPR conditions and appropriator behavior, are accountable to the appropriators or are the appropriators.

5. Graduated sanctions

Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offense) by other appropriators, by officials accountable to these appropriators, or by both.

6. Conflict-resolution mechanisms

Appropriators and their officials have rapid access to low-cost local arenas to resolve conflicts among appropriators or between appropriators and officials.

7. Minimal recognition of rights to organize

The rights of appropriators to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external governmental authorities.

For CPRs that are parts of larger systems:

8. Nested enterprises

Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Point Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group