Research

In 2009, Elinor Ostrom won the Noble memorial prize in economics sciences for, in the words of the prize committee, “demonstrating how local property can be successfully managed by local commons without any regulation by central authorities or privatization.” This account of Ostrom’s contribution focuses on how her work presented a “third way” of governing […]

Discussions of Elinor Ostrom’s key contributions to the study of polycentric governance of complex institutions are often framed as a challenge to biologist Garrett Hardin’s classic essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” (TC). Ostrom herself used the word “challenging” to describe TC, a contribution that both encapsulates and expands on Hardin’s then long-standing concern with […]

1. Polycentric Governance Much of Ostrom’s work refutes the notion that there is “a single solution to a single problem.”8 She argues instead that “many solutions exist to cope with many different problems.”9 Specifically, much of her work has explored the conditions under which local resource users can develop bottom-up, self-governing institutional arrangements to manage resources—but a […]

1. The Polycentric Governance System of the Pacific Salmon Regime As Elinor Ostrom and her coauthors illustrated, common-pool resource management faces at least two broad types of collective action problems: “appropriation” problems and “provision” problems. One of the things that makes the salmon SES so complex is that the various governance functions addressing these types […]

Size (and Scale) Matter: Addressing Ostrom’s Critics In his classic article “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin famously declared that “ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.” Elinor Ostrom disagreed. She argued that, even in […]

1. Self-Governance and Democracy Both Elinor and Vincent Ostrom drew a distinction between governing over others and governing with others. Governing with others is one of the fundamental features of a democratic society. Democracy, in the Ostroms’ view, is not just a system of voting; it is a system of how people relate to, tolerate, […]

Utah State University has had a long-term involvement in water resources management in the Dominican Republic. A few years ago one of us (Randy Simmons) visited the Dominican Republic’s National Institute for Water Resources. Behind a counter on the main floor of their offices, an entire wall was taken up by a map of the […]