Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

Citation

Ostrom, E. (2015). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Canto Classics). Cambridge University Press. Originally published 1990.

Chapter Summary

The book has six chapters, a preface, notes and a bibliography, in about 290 pages. It asks how groups of people who depend on a shared natural resource can organize themselves to use it over the long term, when state control and privatization have both been advocated and neither has been uniformly successful. The first two chapters set out the problem and the analytic approach; Chapters 3 to 5 present field cases of success, institutional change and failure; Chapter 6 draws the findings together into a framework.

Chapter 1: Reflections on the Commons

The opening chapter begins with a news story about overfishing on the Georges Bank, where legislators call for new national legislation and fishers blame earlier federal regulation, to show that the problem is the same at scales from a neighborhood to the planet. It reviews the three models usually used to justify external solutions to common-pool resource problems, Hardin's tragedy of the commons, the prisoner's dilemma game and Mancur Olson's logic of collective action, all of which predict that users will not cooperate. Ostrom argues that neither the state nor the market has been uniformly successful and that communities have relied on arrangements resembling neither, so new analytic tools are needed.

Chapter 2: An Institutional Approach to the Study of Self-Organization and Self-Governance in CPR Situations

Ostrom presents herself as a "new institutionalist" who studies small-scale common-pool resources because self-organization is easier to observe there. The central question is how a group in an interdependent situation can organize and govern itself to obtain continuing joint benefits despite temptations to free-ride or shirk. The chapter defines common-pool resources, describes how individuals behave in complex and uncertain situations, and explains that the theories of the firm and of the state solve the problems of institutional supply, commitment and monitoring by relying on an external agent. How a community of users can solve those problems for itself is the puzzle the rest of the book addresses.

Chapter 3: Analyzing Long-Enduring, Self-Organized, and Self-Governed CPRs

The chapter examines cases in which users devised, applied and monitored their own rules and in which both the resource and the institutions have survived for long periods, from just over a century to more than a thousand years. The cases are mountain grazing and forest commons in Switzerland and Japan and irrigation systems in Spain and the Philippines. The rules in these cases have changed over time, and the institutions are called robust because the users have been able to modify them. The chapter uses the cases to see how groups solve the problems of commitment and mutual monitoring.

Chapter 4: Analyzing Institutional Change

The cases in Chapter 3 have origins lost in time, so this chapter asks how institutions come into being. It examines the creation of institutions to manage groundwater basins under the Los Angeles area, drawing on fieldwork by Ostrom and Louis Weschler in the late 1950s and early 1960s: voluntary associations, litigation, special districts and a complex public-private system of governance. The chapter thus addresses the problem of institutional supply raised in Chapter 2.

Chapter 5: Analyzing Institutional Failures and Fragilities

After the success stories, Ostrom turns to failures and to institutions in a fragile condition. The cases include inshore fisheries at Bodrum and in the Bay of Izmir in Turkey, groundwater pumpers in San Bernardino County in California, an inshore fishery and large irrigation systems in Sri Lanka, and a project that organized farmers from the ground up in one Sri Lankan system.

Chapter 6: A Framework for Analysis of Self-Organizing and Self-Governing CPRs

The last chapter returns to the three models from Chapter 1 and considers what the cases show. The institutions in the success stories were mixtures of public and private arrangements, and none involved direct regulation by a central government. Ostrom does not claim that user-designed institutions are always optimal, and she offers a framework for further analysis.

Key Concepts

Chapter 1: Reflections on the Commons

• Common-pool resource (CPR): a natural resource system used by many individuals in common.
• Tragedy of the commons, prisoner's dilemma, logic of collective action: the three models that predict non-cooperation among resource users and are used to justify imposed solutions.

Chapters 2–3: Institutions for Self-Governance

• Institutional supply, commitment and mutual monitoring: the three problems that a group must solve to govern itself without an external enforcer.
• Robust institutions: arrangements that survive over long periods because users can adapt their rules to changing conditions.

Chapters 4–6: Change, Failure and Framework

• Institutional change: the process by which users create and revise rules, studied in the Los Angeles groundwater basins.
• Fragility and failure: the conditions under which self-organized institutions fail to form or erode.
• Mixed public and private arrangements: the pattern of the successful cases, which depended on neither pure privatization nor central regulation.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Combines theory with cases. A Contemporary Sociology review quoted by Cambridge praises the combination of a lucid theoretical framework with diverse, richly detailed case studies. Bruno Frey, writing in Kyklos, found the book well written and convincing about the viable mixtures between public and private.
• Includes failures as well as successes. Chapter 5 devotes a full chapter to institutions that failed or are fragile, so the argument is not limited to favorable cases.
• Suited to several audiences. Gordon Brady, in the Southern Economic Journal, judged the book useful to undergraduate and graduate students and to field practitioners, and Barry Field in Land Economics noted its interest for students of common-property regimes.
• Clear logic. The six chapters move from the problem, to the approach, to cases, to a synthesis, which makes the argument easy to follow.

Limitations

• Scope of the cases. The cases are small-scale resources within single countries, the largest involving about 15,000 users, and the users depend heavily on the resource. Readers cannot assume that the findings apply directly to global commons such as the atmosphere.
• Successful institutions are not necessarily optimal. Ostrom herself says that her findings do not show that user-designed arrangements reach optimal outcomes, and the chapter on failures shows that self-organization does not always succeed.
• Dated cases. The empirical material was gathered before the book's 1990 publication, and the Canto Classics reissue reprints that book. Later work on the commons should be read alongside it.

Where It Fits in the Course

The other environmental politics books are mostly textbooks and survey texts. Chasek, Downie and Allan's Global Environmental Politics and Kate O'Neill's The Environment and International Relations treat international regimes and actors; Neil Carter's The Politics of the Environment links green thought, activism and policy; and Robyn Eckersley's Environmentalism and Political Theory is an introduction to environmental political theory. Ostrom stands apart as a work of institutional analysis: it asks how rules and communities, not states or treaties, protect shared resources.

Read it after a general textbook, when the question of collective action needs a closer look, and before a book such as Paterson's In Search of Climate Politics, which approaches a global problem through a city case and the politics of power and conflict. The pairing contrasts a study of cooperative solutions to local commons problems with a study of why climate action is contested.

How to Use This Book

The book suits advanced undergraduates and graduate students in political science, public policy, economics and development studies who know the prisoner's dilemma and the basic idea of a collective action problem.

A practical plan:

• Core: Read Chapters 1 and 2 first to understand the critique and the questions, then Chapter 3 for the long-enduring cases.
• Selective: Read Chapters 4 and 5 to see how institutions are created and why they fail; they are the best place to see the method applied to change and to counter-examples.
• Synthesis: Read Chapter 6 last and compare its conclusions with your own notes on the cases. Then apply the questions to a resource you know, such as a local fishery or irrigation system, asking who sets the rules, how compliance is monitored and how rules can be changed.