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Journal Article Be Diverse(2009) Ostrom, Elinor; Nagendra, Harini"The loss of biodiversity has alarming implications for the persistence of humankind, indeed for the survival of life on Earth. Protected areas are the cornerstone of most policy proposals to maintain biodiversity, yet their effectiveness is intensely debated. Furthermore, when the variety of biological life is so rich, interconnected, and diverse, it seems peculiarly shortsighted and inflexible to adopt one single approach to conservation."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 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 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 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)."Journal Article 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."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."