Digital Library of the Commons

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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.
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."
What Do People Bring Into the Game? Experiments in the Field about Cooperation in the Commons
(2004) Cárdenas, Juan-Camilo; Ostrom, Elinor
The study of collective action requires an understanding of the individual incentives and of the institutional constraints that guide people in making choices about cooperating or defecting on the group facing the dilemma. The use of local ecosystems by groups of individuals is just one example where individual extraction increases well-being, but aggregate extraction decreases it. The use of economic experiments has enhanced the already diverse knowledge from theoretical and field sources of when and how groups can solve the problem through self-governing mechanisms. These studies have identified several factors that promote and limit collective action, associated with the nature of the production system that allows groups to benefit from a joint-access local ecosystem, and associated with the institutional incentives and constraints from both self-governed and externally imposed rules. In general, there is widespread agreement that cooperation can happen and be chosen by individuals as a rational strategy, beyond the Â"tragedy of the commonsÂ" prediction. A first step in this paper is to propose a set of layers of information that the individuals might be using to decide over their level of cooperation. The layers range from the material incentives that the specific production function imposes, to the dynamics of the game, to the composition of the group and the individual characteristics of the player. We next expand the experimental literature by analyzing data from a set of experiments conducted in the field with actual ecosystem users in three rural villages of Colombia using this framework. We find that repetition brings reciprocity motives into the decision making. Further, prior experience of the participants, their perception of external regulation, or the composition of the group in terms of their wealth and social position in the village, influence decisions to cooperate or defect in the experiment. The results suggest that understanding the multiple levels of the game, in terms of the incentives, the group and individual characteristics or the context, can help understand and therefore explore the potentials for solving the collective-action dilemma.
Engaging Impossibilities and Possibilities
(2007) Ostrom, Elinor
"In this chapter, I wish to honor Amartya Sen by illustrating how his advice to engage impossibility results, rather than dismissing or accepting them without any question, has been an important inspiration related to another widely acclaimed impossibility result-that of Garrett Hardin in his influential article in Science on 'The Tragedy of the Commons.' While Hardin was an ecologist rather than an economist, his assumptions regarding individual preferences and behavior are closely aligned with those of many economists-focused on immediate material returns to self. His logic was broadly similar to that of the distinguished economist, H. Scott Gordon, who had earlier argued that: 'The fish in the sea are valueless to the fisherman, because there is no assurance that they will be there for him tomorrow if they are left behind today.'"
What Do People Bring Into the Game? How Norms Help Overcome the Tragedy of the Commons
(2001) Cárdenas, Juan-Camilo; Ostrom, Elinor
"Contemporary economic theory is one of the more successful, empirically verified, social science theories to explain human behavior. It does best, however, in the settings for which it was developed the exchange of goods and services in an open, competitive market. The theory is based on a theory of goods, an institutional mechanism, and a model of human behavior. When the goods involved are not easily excludable and rivalrous, individuals tend to use nonmarket institutions. In these settings, the model of the individual (homo economicus) no longer generates empirically verifiable predictions. Governing and managing renewable, common-pool resources (CPRs) in an economically and ecologically sustainable manner is a problem where economic theory does not generate clear predictions supported by empirical evidence in experimental or field settings. In public good experiments, for example, instead of contributing nothing to the provision of a public good, as is predicted by neoclassical theory, individuals tend to contribute between 40 to 60 percent of their assets in a one-shot game."
Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic System
(2009) Ostrom, Elinor
"In this article, I will describe the intellectual journey that I have taken the last half century from when I began graduate studies in the late 1950s. The early efforts to understand the polycentric water industry in California were formative for me. In addition to working with Vincent Ostrom and Charles Tiebout as they formulated the concept of polycentric systems for governing metropolitan areas, I studied the efforts of a large group of private and public water producers facing the problem of an overdrafted groundwater basin on the coast and watching saltwater intrusion threaten the possibility of long-term use. Then, in the 1970s, I participated with colleagues in the study of polycentric police industries serving US metropolitan areas to find that the dominant theory underlying massive reform proposals was incorrect. Metropolitan areas served by a combination of large and small producers could achieve economies of scale in the production of some police services and avoid diseconomies of scale in the production of others."
Trust in Private and Common Property Experiments
(2007) Cox, James C.; Ostrom, Elinor; Walker, James M.
"We report the results from a series of experiments designed to investigate behavior in two settings that are frequently posited in the policy literature as generating different outcomes: private property and common property. The experimental settings closely parallel earlier experimental studies of the investment or trust game. The primary research question relates to the effect of the initial allocation of property rights on the level of trust that subjects will extend to others with whom they are linked. We find that initial endowments as common property lead to marginally greater cooperation or trust than when the initial endowment is fully owned by the first player as private property. Subjects' decisions are also shown to be correlated with attitudes toward trust and fairness measured in post-experiment questionnaires."
A Polycentric Approach for Coping with Climate Change
(2009) Ostrom, Elinor
"This paper proposes an alternative approach to addressing the complex problems of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions. The author, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, argues that single policies adopted only at a global scale are unlikely to generate sufficient trust among citizens and firms so that collective action can take place in a comprehensive and transparent manner that will effectively reduce global warming. Furthermore, simply recommending a single governmental unit to solve global collective action problems is inherently weak because of free-rider problems. For example, the Carbon Development Mechanism (CDM) can be gamed in ways that hike up prices of natural resources and in some cases can lead to further natural resource exploitation. Some flaws are also noticeable in the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD) program. Both the CDM and REDD are vulnerable to the free-rider problem. As an alternative, the paper proposes a polycentric approach at various levels with active oversight of local, regional, and national stakeholders. Efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions are a classic collective action problem that is best addressed at multiple scales and levels. Given the slowness and conflict involved in achieving a global solution to climate change, recognizing the potential for building a more effective way of reducing green house gas emissions at multiple levels is an important step forward. A polycentric approach has the main advantage of encouraging experimental efforts at multiple levels, leading to the development of methods for assessing the benefits and costs of particular strategies adopted in one type of ecosystem and compared to results obtained in other ecosystems. Building a strong commitment to find ways of reducing individual emissions is an important element for coping with this problem, and having others also take responsibility can be more effectively undertaken in small- to medium-scale governance units that are linked together through information networks and monitoring at all levels."
Design Principles of Robust Property-Rights Institutions: What have We Learned
(2008) Ostrom, Elinor
"The problem of overuse of open-access resources was clearly articulated by Scott Gordon (1954) and Harold Demsetz (1967). Garrett Hardin (1968) speculated about the same problem, but stressed that the resource users themselves were trapped in tragic overuse and that solutions had to be imposed on them from the outside. Gordon, Demsetz, and Hardin ignited a general concern that when property rights did not exist related to a valuable resource, the resources would be overharvested. "Sufficient empirical examples existed where the absence of property rights and the independence of actors captured the essence of problems facing users of land-based commonpool resources that the empirical applicability of the theory was not challenged until the mid-1980s. The massive deforestation in tropical countries and the collapse of many ocean fisheries confirmed the worst predictions to be derived from this theory for many. Since harvesters are viewed as being trapped in these dilemmas, repeated recommendations have been made that external authorities must impose a different set of institutions on such settings. Predictions of overharvesting are also supported in the experimental laboratory when subjects make anonymous decisions and are not allowed to communicate with one another, but not when they are able to engage in face-to-face communication."
Heterogeneous Preferences and Collective Action
(2003) Ahn, Toh-Kyeong; Ostrom, Elinor; Walker, James M.
"In recent years, scholars have turned to alternative representations of utility to capture motivational heterogeneity across individuals. In the research reported here, we examine two models of heterogeneous utility—linear-altruism and inequity-aversion—in the context of two-person, social dilemma games. Empirical tests are conducted drawing on data from experiments and surveys. We find that the model of inequity-aversion accounts for a substantial proportion of the preference types and behavior that are not explained by the standard model of self-interested preferences. In contrast, the altruism model does not provide a significant increase in explanatory power over the inequity aversion model."

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