Search Results

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Journal Article
    Disturbance, Response, and Persistence in Self-Organized Forested Communities: Analysis of Robustness and Resilience in Five Communities in Southern Indiana
    (2010) Fleischman, Forrest; Boenning, Kinga; Garcia-Lopez, Gustavo A.; Mincey, Sarah; Schmitt-Harsh, Mikaela; Daedlow, Katrin; López, Maria Claudia; Basurto, Xavier; Fischer, Burnell C.; Ostrom, Elinor
    "We develop an analytic framework for the analysis of robustness in social-ecological systems (SESs) over time. We argue that social robustness is affected by the disturbances that communities face and the way they respond to them. Using Ostrom's ontological framework for SESs, we classify the major factors influencing the disturbances and responses faced by five Indiana intentional communities over a 15-year time frame. Our empirical results indicate that operational and collective-choice rules, leadership and entrepreneurship, monitoring and sanctioning, economic values, number of users, and norms/social capital are key variables that need to be at the core of future theoretical work on robustness of self-organized systems."
  • Journal Article
    The Core Challenges of Moving Beyond Garrett Hardin
    (2009) Basurto, Xavier; Ostrom, Elinor
    "Hardins theory depicting a set of pastoralists inexorably trapped in the overuse of their common pasturewas thought for many years to be typical for common-pool resources (CPRs) not owned privately or by a government. Since Hardin thought the users would be trapped in their tragic overuse of a resource, he advocated two solutions to prevent future tragedies: state control or individual ownership. We need to move beyond this simplistic approach, but face challenges in doing so."
  • Journal Article
    Crafting Analytical Tools to Study Institutional Change
    (2011) Ostrom, Elinor; Basurto, Xavier
    "Most powerful analytical tools used in the social sciences are well suited for studying static situations. Static and mechanistic analysis, however, is not adequate to understand the changing world in which we live. In order to adequately address the most pressing social and environmental challenges looming ahead, we need to develop analytical tools for analyzing dynamic situations -- particularly institutional change. In this paper, we develop an analytical tool to study institutional change, more specifically, the evolution of rules and norms. We believe that in order for such an analytical tool to be useful to develop a general theory of institutional change, it needs to enable the analyst to concisely record the processes of change in multiple specific settings so that lessons from such settings can eventually be integrated into a more general predictive theory of change."