Ostrom’s and Habraken’s Contrasting Views on Environmental Governance

Abstract

"Habraken’s Structure of the Ordinary (SOTO) and Ostrom’s Social Ecological Systems (SES) frameworks focus on key elements and relationships essential for effective governing of the commons and the environment. However, they have different perspectives about what is necessary for successful governance. This article compares and contrasts the SES and SOTO frameworks. Both frameworks discuss the difficulty of excluding people from public spaces. However, in SOTO, a space can be private relative to a larger territory and public relative to an included territory. SES views common-pool resources as goods whose use causes less to be available to others. Implicitly, SOTO views common-pool resources as space and/or physical elements that create a built environment where weak governance of the commons enables excessive resource extraction (invasion). For both, the transformation of the physical environment reflects agents’ common values constrained by material, technical, and economic conditions."