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Journal Article Political Science and Conservation Biology: A Dialog of the Deaf(2006) Agrawal, Arun; Ostrom, Elinor"The reasons political scientists neglect conservation biology and biodiversity may lie even deeper than incentives related to publication and hiring. They may have more to do with what political scientists view as the most important issues and the appropriate scale at which to study them. Electoral systems and practices, democracy, political institutions, international regimes, public opinion, state-society relations, conflict, war, violence, race and ethnicity, policy making, strategic behavior, and policy outcomes are properly the province of their discipline according to most political scientists. Few see biodiversity as central to the concerns of political science. Furthermore, political scientists tend to value research at the nation-state level far more than that conducted on subnational units of analysis. Much of the research in conservation biology, in contrast, takes place at far finer scales than those denoted by national boundaries. Vigorous cross-disciplinary conversations may also be missing because of important differences in corresponding world views. For most political scientists, strategic behavior is central to human interactions. For most conservation biologists, one might argue, the imperative to protect the environment, specifically biodiversity, is beyond strategic calculation."Journal Article Traditions and Trends in the Study of the Commons(2007) van Laerhoven, Frank; Ostrom, Elinor"Prior to the publication of Hardin's article on the tragedy of the commons (1968), titles containing the words 'the commons,' 'common pool resources,' or 'common property' were very rare in the academic literature. However, between 1968 and 1985, when the Annapolis conference was held, this number seemed to be on the rise (Dietz et al. 2002, pp. 6-7). With an admittedly more powerful search capacity at our disposal, we will first explore in this article how the research community with an interest in 'the commons' has increased and diversified since 1985. Then we will explain the rational underlying the selection criteria we applied when editing this issue. We think it is important to take stock and look ahead, regularly. Also, we think it is essential to explore diverse methodological and theoretical approaches. Regarding the future, we think that scholars must embrace the challenge of finding ways to deal more explicitly with complexity, uncertainty, and institutional dynamics. We will subsequently provide an overview of the featured articles. We will then wrap up with a short concluding section."Journal Article Linking Forests, Trees, and People: From the Air, on the Ground, and in the Lab(2008) Ostrom, Elinor; Nagendra, Harini"Governing natural resources sustainably is a continuing struggle. Major debates occur over what types of policy interventions best protect forests, with the types of property and land tenure systems being central issues. Evaluating the impacts of different tenure regimes in a systematic manner is not an easy task. Ecological systems rarely exist isolated from human use. The challenge of good scientific observation of linked socialecological systems is made even more difficult because relevant variables operate at different scales and their impacts differ radically. We provide an overview of findings from a long-term interdisciplinary, multiscale, international research program that studies factors affecting forest cover. We describe insights obtained from a series of explorations from the air (landscape scale), on the ground (forest-patch scale), and in the lab."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 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."Journal Article Some Comments(2004) Ostrom, Elinor"Let me first indicate that it was very exciting, almost intoxicating, to be in Oaxaca for the 2004 meeting of the IASCP. As someone who participated in the Annapolis meeting in 1985 and has participated pretty steadily in IASCP events through the years, it is great to see the number of members rising, the number of countries represented increasing, and the number of disciplines involved also growing. It was wonderful to see all the young scholars in Oaxaca. No academic approach can succeed if they do not recruitable, young scholars. It looks to me like the IASCP has a vigorous future, and I am looking forward to our next meeting in 2006."Journal Article Effect of Rule Choice in Dynamic Interactive Spatial Commons(2008) Janssen, Marco A.; Goldstone, Robert L.; Menczer, Filippo; Ostrom, Elinor"This paper uses laboratory experiments to examine the effect of an endogenous rule change from open access to private property as a potential solution to overharvesting in commons dilemmas. A novel, spatial, real-time renewable resource environment was used to investigate whether participants were willing to invest in changing the rules from an open access situation to a private property system. We found that half of the participants invested in creating private property arrangements. Groups who had experienced private property in the second round of the experiment, made different decisions in the third round when open access was reinstituted in contrast to groups who experienced three rounds of open access. At the group level, earnings increased in Round 3, but this was at a cost of more inequality. No significant differences in outcomes occurred between experiments where rules were imposed by the experimental design or chosen by participants."Journal Article Coevolving Relationships between Political Science and Economics(2012) Ostrom, Elinor"During the last 50 years, at least four interdisciplinary developments have occurred at the boundaries of political science and economics that have affected the central questions that both political scientists and economists ask, the empirical evidence amassed as a new foundation for understanding political economies, and new questions for future research. These include: (1) the Public Choice Approach, (2) the Governance of the Commons debate, (3) New Institutional Economics, and (4) Behavioral Approaches to Explaining Human Actions. In this short essay, I briefly review the challenges that these approaches have brought to political science and some of the general findings stimulated by these approaches before identifying some of the major issues on the contemporary agenda.During the last 50 years, at least four interdisciplinary developments have occurred at the boundaries of political science and economics that have affected the central questions that both political scientists and economists ask, the empirical evidence amassed as a new foundation for understanding political economies, and new questions for future research. These include: (1) the Public Choice Approach, (2) the Governance of the Commons debate, (3) New Institutional Economics, and (4) Behavioral Approaches to Explaining Human Actions. In this short essay, I briefly review the challenges that these approaches have brought to political science and some of the general findings stimulated by these approaches before identifying some of the major issues on the contemporary agenda."