Research
Adapting to Climate Change through Migration
Methods for Sustainable and Wildlife-Friendly Agriculture: Case Studies from the Western US
NEPA Timelines for Clean Energy Projects: Understanding Delays in Clean Energy Development
Can Private Agricultural Lands Contribute to Carbon Sequestration?
Wildlife Crossing Ahead: Costs and Benefits of Avoided Collisions
Bringing NEPA Back to Basics
The Impact of Wildfires on Internal Migration in the United States
What Policies Promote Abundance?
Estimating the Impact of Critical-Habitat Designation on the Values of Developed and Undeveloped Parcels
Crowdsourcing Conservation: How to use community science to advance public and private conservation
CGO Abundance Poll October 2022
Carbon Taxes without Tears?
Energy Superabundance: How Cheap, Abundant Energy Will Shape Our Future
The Taxonomic Basis of Subspecies Listed as Threatened and Endangered under the Endangered Species Act
Making Private Lands Count for Conservation: Policy Improvements toward 30×30
Public Interest Comment: Interagency Efforts to Develop the American Conservation and Stewardship Atlas
Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants
Chapter 5: Contracting and the Commons: Linking the Insights of Gary Libecap and Elinor Ostrom
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 […]
High West Meets American Prairie
Red Tape That Stops Engines in Their Tracks
Chapter 4: Population Growth and the Governance of Complex Institutions: People Are More Than Mouths to Feed
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 […]
Chapter 1: Resource Governance in the American West: Institutions, Information, and Incentives
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 […]
Chapter 3: Pacific Salmon Fisheries Management: An (Unusual) Example of Polycentric Governance Involving Indigenous Participation at Multiple Scales
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 […]
Chapter 6: The Environmental Benefits of Long-Distance Trade: Insights from the History of By-Product Development
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 […]
Chapter 2: Self-Governance, Polycentricity, and Environmental Policy
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, […]
Introduction
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 […]