Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 167
  • Conference Paper
    Social Capital and Cooperation: Communication, Bounded Rationality, and Behavioral Heuristics
    (1992) Gardner, Roy; Ostrom, Elinor; Walker, James M.
    "Common-pool resources are natural or man made resources used in common by multiple users, where yield is subtractable (rival) and exclusion is nontrivial (but not necessarily impossible). The role of face-to-face communication in CPR situations, where individuals must repeatedly decide on the number of resource units to withdraw from a common-pool, is open to considerable theoretical and policy debate. In this paper, we summarize the findings from a series of experiments in which we operationalize face-toface communication (without the presence of external enforcement). In an attempt to understand the high degree of cooperation observed in the laboratory, we turn to a bounded rationality explanation as a starting point for understanding how cooperative behavior can be supponed in decision environments where game theory suggests it will not."
  • Conference Paper
    Discussant's Comments: Governance Stream
    (1998) Ostrom, Elinor
    (From the text): "From the set of governance panels at this conference, we carry away some important insights related both to some of the key questions with which we started the conference and the problems and puzzles addressed within the governance panels. *Fikret Berkes warned us that it was easier to predict failure than success. *Jim Scott stressed that creating uniform languages frequently created substantial benefits while at the same time increasing the capabilities of large- scale governmental and corporate control over all of our lives. *Evelyn Pinkerton urged us all to think about how issues of scale affect the design principles we can use in governing diverse commons. "A question on one of the hallway posters related to the continuum of meanings that individuals in different disciplines bring to the study of common property and asked how can we draw on and relate to these multiple languages and approaches...."
  • 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."
  • Working Paper
    The Power and Limitations of Proportional Cutbacks in Common-Pool Resources
    (1998) Gardner, Roy; Herr, Andrew; Ostrom, Elinor; Walker, James M.
    "This paper examines the success and limitations of proportional cutbacks as an allocation rule for improving the performance of common pool resources (CPRs). Two field cases, one success and one failure, motivate the analysis. For symmetric CPRs, we establish the existence of efficiency-enhancing proportional cutbacks. We then introduce complications that arise in the presence of asymmetries, where there are high value types and low value types. This asymmetry induces a continuum of proportional cutbacks that raise efficiency above Nash equilibrium. Calibrating a linear-quadratic CPR model to global carbon dioxide emissions, the efficiency and distributional consequences of proportional cutbacks like those embodied in the Kyoto Protocol are derived."
  • Working Paper
    In Pursuit of Comparable Concepts and Data about Collective Action
    (2003) Poteete, Amy; Ostrom, Elinor
    Research on collective action confronts two major obstacles. First, inconsistency in the conceptualization and operationalization of collective action, the key factors expected to affect collective action, and the outcomes of collective action hampers the accumulation of knowledge. Inconsistent terminology obscures consistent patterns. Second, the scarcity of comparable data thwarts evaluation of the relative importance of the many variables identified in the literature as likely to influence collective action. The International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) research program addresses both of these problems. Since its founding in 1993, the IFRI network of collaborating research centers has used a common set of methods and concepts to study forests, the people who use forest resources, and their institutions for resource management. The basic social unit of analysis in IFRI is the user group, defined as a set of individuals with the same rights and responsibilities to forest resources. This definition does not require formal organization or collective action, since these features are potential dependent variables. This strategy for data collection allows analysis of relationships between diverse forms of social heterogeneity and collective action within groups with comparable rights to resources. IFRI's relational database also captures the connections among forest systems, sets of resource users, particular forest products, formal and informal rules for resource use, and formal local and supra-local organizations. By the middle of 2001, the IFRI database included data on 141 sites with 231 forests, 233 user groups, 94 forest organizations, and 486 products in 12 countries. Drawing upon these data, IFRI researchers are contributing substantially to our understanding of collective action for institutional development, the mediating role institutions play relative to demographic and market pressures in patterns of resource use, and relationships between particular institutions and forest conditions. The paper describes IFRI's strategy for collecting comparable data based on consistent conceptualization and operationalization, summarizes the contributions of IFRI research to the study of collective action for natural resource management, and identifies continuing challenges.
  • Conference Paper
    The Rudiments of a Theory of the Origins, Survival, and Performance of Common Property Institutions
    (1990) Ostrom, Elinor
    From Page One: "In the first chapter of the forthcoming volume, Essays on the Commons. Dan Bromley reminds us that there is 'no such thing as a common property resource ? there are only resources controlled and managed as common property, or as state property, or as private property' [Bromley, in Bromley forthcoming]. Bromley stresses the confusion created when 'resources over which no property rights have been recognized' are casually referred to as common property resources rather than as open access resources [see Ciracy-Wantrup and Bishop 1975]. A clear prediction can be made in situations where no one has a property right related to the flow of benefits from a resource. If the benefits are greater than the costs of obtaining them, open access resources will be overexploited and potentially destroyed. When property rights exist ? whether private property, state property, or common property ? overexploitation and destruction depend on how well the property rights regime copes with problems of allocating the costs and benefits of managing and governing a particular resource. In other words, property rights defining who has access, how much can be harvested, who can manage, and how rights are transferred are a necessary but not sufficient condition for avoiding overexploitation of a resources [see Schlager and E. Ostrom 1987]. The authors of the empirical chapters in Bromley [forthcoming] have heeded Bromley's advice. They have not presumed that all resources used jointly by multiple individuals are open-access resources. Instead, they have attempted to explore how decision-making arrangements ? to use the general concept of Oakerson's framework ? affect 'who decides what in relation to whom.'"
  • Book Chapter
    Multiorganizational Arrangements and Coordination: An Application of Institutional Analysis
    (Walter de Gruyter, 1986) Ostrom, Elinor; Kaufmann, F. X.; Majone, G.; Ostrom, Vincent
    "Two linked action situations are examined in this chapter using the method of Institutional analysis previously described in Chapter 22. The first arena is the one in which public officials are elected. The most influential model of this arena was developed by Anthony Downs. The second arena is the one in which elected officials bargain with the heads of administrative agencies (sponsors) over the amount of the budget to be allocated and the amount and type of goods or services to be produced. William Niskanen developed an important model of this process. The central question addressed in this chapter is how multiple organizations, competing according to sets of rules, tend to enhance the responsiveness of public officials and bureau chiefs to the preferences of the citizens they serve in both of these arenas. Empirical evidence supporting the proposition that competition among potential producers of a public good will enhance performance is presented related to the provision of solid waste removal services in American cities."
  • Conference Paper
    The Challenge of Crafting Rules to Change Open Access Resources into Managed Resources
    (2007) Ostrom, Elinor
    "Designing rules to govern common-pool resources is presented in many environmental treatises as resting on two core assumptions that: (1) resource users are norm-free maximizers of immediate gains who will not cooperate to overcome the commons dilemmas they face, and (2) government officials, on the other hand, have the information and motivation to design efficient and effective rules to sustain the use of common-pool resources over the long run. In this paper I review evidence related to these assumptions that leads one to doubt their validity when applied to smaller to medium-sized common-pool resources where users have opportunities to communicate with one another and learn how to engage in reciprocal behavior. Findings from carefully controlled laboratory experiments are summarized that challenge the first assumption and leads one to have to assume that humans are fallible and boundedly rational. Depending on the context of the situation, individuals may add normative payoffs (positive and negative) to their preference function. "The complexity of using rules as tools to change the structure of commons dilemmas is then discussed, drawing on extensive research on rules in field settings. Viewing all policies as experiments with a probability of failure, I will explore the size and structure of the rule space that individuals have used in previous efforts to govern commons. The final section discusses the likely performance of a series of completely independent resource governance systems or a fully integrated one -- ending with a discussion of the importance of polycentric governance systems."
  • Working Paper
    SES Framework: Initial Changes and Continuing Challenges
    (2012) McGinnis, Michael D.; Ostrom, Elinor
    "The Social-Ecological Systems (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. After justifying the need for such a general framework, this article summarizes changes that have already been made to this framework and discusses a few remaining ambiguities in its formulation. We expect that the SES framework will continue to change as more researchers apply it to additional contexts, but 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 SES framework was originally designed for application to a relatively well-defined domain of common-pool resource management situations in which resource users extract resource units from a resource system, and provide for the maintenance of that system, according to rules and procedures determined within an overarching governance system, and in the context of related ecological systems and broader social-political-economic settings. Processes of resource extraction and infrastructure maintenance were identified as among the most important forms of interactions and outcomes (or action situations) located in the very center of this framework. Since social-ecological systems also generate public goods and ecosystem services, we introduce incremental revisions to the SES framework in order to generalize its applications to complex multiresource systems. We replace the restrictive term 'user' with a more generic category of 'actor' and incorporate complex patterns of interaction among multiple actors and resource systems in the context of overlapping governance systems. We also develop the impact of evaluative criteria and other sources of dynamic change within this framework. Then we discuss potential directions for later development to incorporate complex technical systems, multiple layers of governance institutions, and diverse forms of learning and adaptation. Each of these suggested modifications is developed in more detail in other contributions to this issue. As a whole, these articles demonstrate that the SES framework as currently constituted has already inspired high-quality research, and that it has the potential to further facilitate communication among scholars from a broad array of disciplines working on diverse resources in many different parts of the world."
  • Working Paper
    Beyond the Tragedy of the Commons
    (2008) Basurto, Xavier; Ostrom, Elinor
    "To move beyond Hardins tragedy of the commons, it is fundamental to avoid falling into either of two analytical and policy traps: (1) deriving and recommending 'panaceas' or (2) asserting 'my case is unique.' We can move beyond both traps by self-consciously building diagnostic theory to help unpack and understand the complex interrelationship between social and biophysical factors at different levels of analysis. We need to look for commonalities and differences across studies. This understanding will be augmented if the rich detail produced from case studies is used together with theory to find patterned structures among cases. In this paper, we briefly illustrate important steps of how we can go about diagnosing the emergence and sustainability of self-organization in the fishing context of the Gulf of California, Mexico. By doing so, we are able to move away from the universality proposed by Hardin and understand how two out of three fisheries were able to successfully self-organize, and why one of them continues to be robust over time."