Digital Library of the Commons

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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."
Cultural Norms, Cooperation, and Communication: Taking Experiments to the Field in Indigenous Communities
(2013) Ghate, Rucha; Ghate, Suresh; Ostrom, Elinor
"Extensive experimental research has been devoted to the study of behaviour in laboratory settings related to public goods, common-pool resources, and other social dilemmas. When subjects are anonymous and not allowed to communicate, they tend not to cooperate. To the surprise of game theorists, however, simply allowing subjects to communicate in a laboratory setting enables them to achieve far more cooperative outcomes. This finding has now been replicated in many laboratory experiments in multiple countries and in some initial field experiments. Carefully conducted laboratory experiments do have strong internal validity. External validity, however, requires further research beyond the initial field experiments that have already been conducted. In this paper, we report on a series of common-pool resource field experiments conducted in eight indigenous communities in India that have very long traditions of shared norms and mutual trust. Two experimental designs were used in all eight villages: a 'no-communication' game that was repeated in ten rounds where no one was allowed verbal or written communication and a 'communication game' in which the same five participants were allowed to communicate with each other at the beginning of each round before making their decisions. The findings from these field experiments are substantially different from the findings of similar experiments conducted in experimental laboratories. Subjects tended to cooperate in the first design even in the absence of communication. The shared norms in these indigenous communities are so deeply embedded that communication is not needed to adopt cooperative decisions. Communication does, however, tend to homogenize group and individual outcomes so that communities that are overly cooperative tend to reduce cooperation slightly and those with small deviations in the other direction tend to move toward the optimal solution."
Polycentric Governance of Multifunctional Forested Landscapes
(2012) Nagendra, Harini; Ostrom, Elinor
"Human-induced causes of forest change occur at multiple scales. Yet, most governance mechanisms are designed at a single level--whether international, national, regional or local--and do not provide effective solutions for the overarching challenge of forest governance. Efforts to 'decentralize' governmental arrangements frequently do not recognize the importance of complex, polycentric arrangements and are based on a presumption of a single government at one level taking charge of a policy arena, often ignoring the existence of many vibrant self-governed institutions. Polycentric institutions provide a useful framework for governance, enabling aspects of preferred solutions to be used together in efforts to protect the long-term sustainability of diverse forested social-ecological systems. By considering the interaction between actors at different levels of governance, polycentricity contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the variation in diverse governance outcomes in the management of common-pool resources based on the needs and interests of citizens and the complexity of resources and governance systems at local, regional, national, and global levels. In this paper, we discuss challenges to polycentricity such as the matching of the boundaries of those who benefit, those who contribute with the boundary of the resource. We describe some approaches that have been effectively utilized to address these challenges in forests in various parts of the world. We also provide a brief overview of how the concept of polycentricity helps in the analysis of climate change and the closely related international effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through degradation and deforestation (REDD)."
Guest Introduction
(2011) Ostrom, Elinor
"The current issue of Grassroots Economic Organizing contains a very interesting discussion among researchers and practitioners of diverse types of collective action. What is reassuring is that some common agreement does exist among researchers and practitioners. The group, who has written this special issue, understands human behavior as being complex and based on a variety of values and goals, rather than simple and based on only on the maximization of individual wellbeing. When one models collective action using a narrow set of assumptions that individuals always seek their own private good ahead of all other goals, the prediction about collective action is very clear. One simply predicts that individuals will not engage in collective action unless they are paid in some concrete fashion or are required to do so by well-enforced rules and laws."
Social-Ecological System Framework: Initial Changes and Continuing Challenges
(2014) McGinnis, Michael D.; Ostrom, Elinor
"The social-ecological system (SES) framework investigated in this special issue enables researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds working on different resource sectors in disparate geographic areas, biophysical conditions, and temporal domains to share a common vocabulary for the construction and testing of alternative theories and models that determine which influences on processes and outcomes are especially critical in specific empirical settings. We summarize changes that have been made to this framework and discuss a few remaining ambiguities in its formulation. Specifically, we offer a tentative rearrangement of the list of relevant attributes of governance systems and discuss other ways to make this framework applicable to policy settings beyond natural resource settings. The SES framework will continue to change as more researchers apply it to additional contexts; the main purpose of this article is to delineate the version that served as the basis for the theoretical innovations and empirical analyses detailed in other contributions to this special issue."
The Challenge of Forest Diagnostics
(2011) Nagendra, Harini; Ostrom, Elinor
"Ecologists and practitioners have conventionally used forest plots or transects for monitoring changes in attributes of forest condition over time. However, given the difficulty in collecting such data, conservation practitioners frequently rely on the judgment of foresters and forest users for evaluating changes. These methods are rarely compared. We use a dataset of 53 forests in five countries to compare assessments of forest change from forest plots, and forester and user evaluations of changes in forest density. We find that user assessments of changes in tree density are strongly and significantly related to assessments of change derived from statistical analyses of randomly distributed forest plots. User assessments of change in density at the shrub/sapling level also relate to assessments derived from statistical evaluations of vegetation plots, but this relationship is not as strong and only weakly significant. Evaluations of change by professional foresters are much more difficult to acquire, and less reliable, as foresters are often not familiar with changes in specific local areas. Forester evaluations can instead better provide valid singletime comparisons of a forest with other areas in a similar ecological zone. Thus, in forests where local forest users are present, their evaluations can be used to provide reliable assessments of changes in tree density in the areas they access. However, assessments of spatially heterogeneous patterns of human disturbance and regeneration at the shrub/sapling level are likely to require supplemental vegetation analysis."
The Institutional Analysis and Development Framework and the Commons
(2010) Ostrom, Elinor
From p. 807: "We have tried to develop a useful framework for analyzing a wide variety of questions. Their adoption of a modified form of our Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework for this important set of questions re-assures us that we met our goal. Charlotte Hess and I organized a conference and coedited a book that examined some aspects of the knowledge commons using the IAD framework. We have learned that aspects of cultural environments can be thought of as 'cultural commons' because cultural products (e.g., new knowledge or software) are often available to many users who do not have to pay the producer in order to use those products. Many important questions related to the study of cultural commons await a careful institutional analysis."
A Multi-Scale Approach to Coping with Climate Change and Other Collective Action Problems
(2010) Ostrom, Elinor
"Acknowledging the complexity of global warming, as well as the relatively recent agreement among scientists about the human causes of climate change, leads to the recognition that waiting for effective policies to be established at the global level is unreasonable. Instead, it would be better to self-consciously adopt a multi-scale approach to the problem of climate change, starting at the local level. This approach serves to maximize the benefits at varying levels and encourages experimentation and learning from diverse policies adopted at multiple scales. Currently, efforts to address climate change are being orchestrated primarily by global actors, but waiting for international solutions is wasting valuable time. Conventional wisdom tells us that there are only two options to deal with managing resources: either privatization or management by the state. This view is hindering progress. To successfully address climate change in the long run, the day-to-day activities of individuals, families, firms, communities, and governments at multiple levels--particularly those in the more developed world--will need to change substantially. Encouraging simultaneous actions at multiple scales is an important strategy to address this problem"
Inaugural Speech
(2011) Ostrom, Elinor
"Its a great honour to be here. And I want to thank Shri Nitin Desai, and President Ruth Meinzen Dick, and Shri Jairam Ramesh, and Shri Jagdeesh Rao for organising something that is very exciting and very important for me. And it is a joy to see many colleagues that I have known through the years again, and to learn from them, and I am looking forward to questions. I will not be here for the whole meeting, but I will be here for the next two days and know that I will learn a lot. I am going to be focusing largely on collective action theory, which I see as an underlying part of our work, so that there is a foundation to our research."
Aligning Key Concepts for Global Change Policy: Robustness, Resilience, and Sustainability
(2013) Anderies, John M.; Folke, Carl; Walker, Brian; Ostrom, Elinor
"Globalization, the process by which local social-ecological systems (SESs) are becoming linked in a global network, presents policy scientists and practitioners with unique and difficult challenges. Although local SESs can be extremely complex, when they become more tightly linked in the global system, complexity increases very rapidly as multi-scale and multi-level processes become more important. Here, we argue that addressing these multi-scale and multi-level challenges requires a collection of theories and models. We suggest that the conceptual domains of sustainability, resilience, and robustness provide a sufficiently rich collection of theories and models, but overlapping definitions and confusion about how these conceptual domains articulate with one another reduces their utility. We attempt to eliminate this confusion and illustrate how sustainability, resilience, and robustness can be used in tandem to address the multi-scale and multi-level challenges associated with global change."

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