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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 Nonrenewable resources, such as oil, may be withdrawn in an uncoordinated race that reduces the quantity of the resource units that can be withdrawn and greatly increases the cost of appropriation.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 Coping with Asymmetries in the Commons: Self-Governing Irrigation Systems Can Work(1993) Ostrom, Elinor; Gardner, Roy"Common-pool resources are natural or man-made resources where exclusion is difficult, and yield is subtractable (Gardner, E. Ostrom, and Walker, 1990). They share the first attribute with pure public goods; the second attribute, with pure private goods. Millions of common-pool resources exist in disparate natural settings, ranging in scale from small inshore fisheries, irrigation systems, and pastures to the vast domains of the oceans and the biosphere. "The first attribute - difficulty of exclusion - stems from many factors, including the cost of parceling or fencing the resource and the cost of designing and enforcing property rights to exclude access to the resource. If exclusion is not accomplished by the design of appropriate institutional arrangements, free-riding related to the provision of the common-pool resource can be expected. After all, what rational actor would help to provide the maintenance of a resource system, if noncontributors can gain the benefits just as well as contributors? The extent to which a common-pool resource will be provided is a complicated problem, depending on how preferences are articulated, aggregated, and linked to the mobilization of resources. "The second attribute - subtractability - is the key to understanding the dynamics of how the 'tragedy of the commons' can occur. The resource units (like acre-feet of water, tons of fish, or bundles of fodder) that one person appropriates from a common-pool resource are not available to others. Unless institutions change the incentives facing appropriators, one can expect substantial overappropriation. For example, those who fish from a lake derive all the benefit from catching additional fish. However, the depletion of the fishery is a cost shared with other fishermen. The private gain is thus very likely to overbalance any single fisherman's share of the social loss. Or, to put it another way, no single fisherman can prevent depletion of the fishery by restricting his personal catch. The fishery is thus likely to be pushed to the brink of extinction unless institutions counteract these incentives."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 Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource(2003) Hess, Charlotte; Ostrom, Elinor"The goal of this paper is to summarize the lessons learned from a large body of international, interdisciplinary research on common-pool resources (CPRs) in the past 25 years and consider its usefulness in the analysis of scholarly information as a resource. We will suggest ways in which the study of the governance and management of common-pool resources can be applied to the analysis of information and 'the intellectual public domain.' The complexity of the issues is enormous for many reasons: the vast number of players, multiple conflicting interests, rapid changes of technology, the general lack of understanding of digital technologies, local versus global arenas, and a chronic lack of precision about the information resource at hand. We suggest, in the tradition of Hayek, that the combination of time and place analysis with general scientific knowledge is necessary for sufficient understanding of policy and action. In addition, the careful development of an unambiguous language and agreed-upon definitions is imperative. "As one of the framing papers for the Conference on the Public Domain, we focus on the language, the methodology, and outcomes of research on common-pool resources in order to better understand how various types of property regimes affect the provision, production, distribution, appropriation, and consumption of scholarly information. Our analysis will suggest that collective action and new institutional design play as large a part in the shaping of scholarly information as do legal restrictions and market forces."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 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 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."