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Journal Article Reformulating the Commons(2002) Ostrom, Elinor"Most natural resource systems used by multiple individuals can be classified as common-pool resources. Common-pool resources generate finite quantities of resource units and one person's use subtracts from the quantity of resource units available to others. Most common-pool resources are sufficiently large that multiple actors can simultaneously use the resource system and efforts to exclude potential beneficiaries are costly. Examples of common-pool resources include both natural and human-made systems including: groundwater basins, irrigation systems, forests, grazing lands, mainframe computers, government and corporate treasuries, and the Internet. Examples of the resource units derived from common-pool resources include water, timber, fodder, computer-processing units, information bits, and budget allocations. "When the resource units are highly valued and many actors benefit from appropriating (harvesting) them for consumption, exchange, or as a factor in a production process, the appropriations made by one individual are likely to create negative externalities for others. Nonrenewable resources, such as oil, may be withdrawn in an uncoordinated race that reduces the quantity of the resource units that can be withdrawn and greatly increases the cost of appropriation. Renewable resources, such as fisheries, may suffer from congestion within one time period but may also be so overharvested that the stock generating a flow of resource units is destroyed. An unregulated, open-access common-pool resource generating highly valued resource units is likely to be overused and may even be destroyed if overuse destroys the stock or the facility generating the t1ow of resource units."Journal Article The Quest for Meaning in Public Choice(2004) Ostrom, Elinor; Ostrom, Vincent"The logical foundations of constitutional government are of basic importance if people are to be self-governing. All forms of political order are Faustian bargains subject to numerous risks. If constitutional choice applies to all patterns of human association, the complexity of associated relationships and the potential threats to the viability of associated relationships in the aggregate exceed the limits of human cognition. The development of analytical capabilities depends on using frameworks, theories, and models for formulating hypotheses about conditions and consequences, undertaking diagnostic assessments, and conceptualizing and designing alternative possibilities. The relationship of ideas to deeds in an experimental epistemology is necessary to achieve a warrantable art and science of association."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 Framework to Analyze the Robustness of Social-ecological Systems from an Institutional Perspective(2004) Anderies, John M.; Janssen, Marco A.; Ostrom, Elinor"What makes social-ecological systems (SESs) robust? In this paper, we look at the institutional configurations that affect the interactions among resources, resource users, public infrastructure providers, and public infrastructures. We propose a framework that helps identify potential vulnerabilities of SESs to disturbances. All the links between components of this framework can fail and thereby reduce the robustness of the system. We posit that the link between resource users and public infrastructure providers is a key variable affecting the robustness of SESs that has frequently been ignored in the past. We illustrate the problems caused by a disruption in this link. We then briefly describe the design principles originally developed for robust common-pool resource institutions, because they appear to be a good starting point for the development of design principles for more general SESs and do include the link between resource users and public infrastructure providers."Journal Article 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."Journal Article 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"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 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."Journal Article Applying the Social-Ecological System Framework to the Diagnosis of Urban Lake Commons in Bangalore, India(2014) Nagendra, Harini; Ostrom, Elinor"The south Indian city of Bangalore provides a challenging yet representative context within which to examine issues of governance of urban social-ecological commons. The city was once famous for its numerous large water bodies, which have witnessed tremendous encroachment and pollution in recent years. These water bodies, called tanks or lakes, were typically managed by adjacent village communities but are now administered by a number of government departments involved with aspects of lake management, with multiple overlapping jurisdictions. The publics perceptions of lakes has also changed with urbanization, transitioning from community spaces valued for water and cultural services to urban recreational spaces used largely by joggers and walkers. We focus on a set of seven lakes located in the urbanizing peripheral areas of southeast Bangalore. Some water bodies have been restored and managed effectively by newly forged collaborations between citizens and local government. Others are extremely polluted, and some have completely dried up and have been encroached. We use a social-ecological system (SES) framework to investigate why some locations have been successful in negotiating changes in governance from community-based systems to state management following urbanization, whereas other lakes have deteriorated. We use seven second-tier SES variables that were associated with self-organization in previous research: size of resource system, number of actors, leadership, social capital, importance of resource, existence of operational-choice rules, and existence of informal mechanisms for monitoring. We also include three third-tier variables previously identified as important in urban lake commons in Bangalore: scale and type of pre-existing pollution, exclusion of socioeconomic groups from the planning process, and networking with government organizations. We use this subset of 10 variables to examine social outcomes of the lakes, which we define as the extent of collective action by residents working together for lake restoration and ecological outcomes based on the ecological condition of the lakes. Collective action was low in only one of seven lakes, which challenges the presumption that citizens will not organize efforts to cope with common-pool problems. However, only two of seven lakes were highly successful in regard to both the extent of collective action and the level of ecological performance. While one lake was small and the other moderate in size, these two cases shared similar ranking in all other variables. Both lakes were polluted at a relatively low level compared with the other lakes, and in both cases, the leaders of local groups were able to network with government officials to clean up the lakes. Unfortunately, the challenge of cleaning up urban lakes after many decades of pollution is very difficult without effective interaction with various governmental units. Our analysis illustrates the usefulness of the SES framework in examining the combination of variables that makes a collective difference in affecting the outcomes of collective action and ecological performance. Our findings illustrate the need for polycentric arrangements in urban areas, whereby local residents are able to organize in diverse ways that reflect their own problems and capabilities, but can also work jointly with larger-scale governments to solve technical problems requiring changes in major engineering works as well as acquiring good scientific information. Such arrangements can reduce transaction costs for city governments by actively engaging local communities in processes that include coordination of collective activities, design of inclusive and locally suited ecological and social restoration goals, and planning and enforcement of regulations limiting access and withdrawal. At a time when many city governments are facing financial and administrative challenges that limit their ability to regulate and maintain urban commons, models of public-community partnerships could provide more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable institutional alternatives. This is an aspect that needs significant further consideration because the attention of most urban planners and scholars has remained on privatization while studies of successful instances of cooperative action in the urban context remain few and far between."Journal Article Empirically Based, Agent-based Models(2006) Janssen, Marco A.; Ostrom, Elinor"There is an increasing drive to combine agent-based models with empirical methods. An overview is provided of the various empirical methods that are used for different kinds of questions. Four categories of empirical approaches are identified in which agent-based models have been empirically tested: case studies, stylized facts, role-playing games, and laboratory experiments. We discuss how these different types of empirical studies can be combined. The various ways empirical techniques are used illustrate the main challenges of contemporary social sciences: (1) how to develop models that are generalizable and still applicable in specific cases, and (2) how to scale up the processes of interactions of a few agents to interactions among many agents."