Digital Library of the Commons

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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."
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.
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."
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."
Property Rights Conundrum: Does Common + Property = Nothing in Common and No Property Rights?
(1987) Schlager, Edella; Ostrom, Elinor
"The thesis we develop in this paper is that our theoretical and empirical knowledge of how various types of property rights regimes affect incentives, behavior, and outcomes cannot cumulate as long as we use an ambiguous term--common property resource--to refer to different theoretical and operational situations. We briefly review how resource economists have used the term 'common property resources' to analyze the problem of fisheries. We then analyze the different bundles of rights which are included in various conceptions of property and define four types of legal positions--owners, proprietors, claimants, and squatters--by reference to which bundle of rights is possessed or not. Next we examine whether the set of right holders is defined or not and the individual or group status of the right holders. For rights held by collectivities, we examine whether the groups are organized or not and the type of enterprise structure involved. We then present a classification of property rights and organizational arrangements which enables us to sharpen predictions about particular property rights regimes which are likely to face problems of over-exploitation, extinction of species,and over investment of resources. Finally, we will illustrate how such a conceptual scheme helps bring clarity to disparate research findings related to the lobster industry in Maine."
Strategy and the Structure of Interdependent Decision-Making Mechanisms
(1967) Ostrom, Elinor
From p. 54: The paradigm presented ... begins to sketch in the type of analysis that one could undertake when examining the affect of decision-making structures on individual behavior. It is hoped that the paradigm will be of help in stimulating further theoretical and empirical work on the relation between the structure of decision-making mechanisms and the strategies of individuals employ when attempting to reach solutions to problems through the utilization of different structures."
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.
Self-Governance and Forest Resources
(1999) Ostrom, Elinor
"Forest resources share attributes with many other resource systems that make difficult their governance and management in a sustainable, efficient and equitable manner. Destruction or degradation of forest resources is most likely to occur in open-access forests where those involved, or external authorities, have not established effective governance. Conventional theories applied to forest resources presumed that forest users themselves were incapable of organising to overcome the temptations to overharvest. Extensive empirical research, however, has challenged this theory and illustrated the many ways that forest users themselves have devised rules that regulate harvesting patterns so as to ensure the sustainability of forest resources over time. "There is now a large body of literature analysing common-pool resources such as many fisheries, irrigation systems and rangelands. A growing consensus exists in this literature concerning the attributes of common-pool resources and of resource users that enhance the probability that self-organisation will occur. Many of these attributes seem also to help predict when forest users will self-organise. Forest users are more likely to devise their own rules when they use a forest that is starting to deteriorate but has not substantially disappeared, when some forest products provide early warning concerning forest conditions, when forest products are predictably available, and when the forest is sufficiently small that users can develop accurate knowledge of conditions. Self-organisation is more likely to occur when forest resources are highly salient to users, when users have a common understanding of the problems they face, when users have a low discount rate, when users trust one another, when users have autonomy to make some of their own rules, and when users have prior organisational experience. These attributes of forests and of the user community affect the benefits and costs of organising to protect and enhance forest resources. When users create organisations consistent with a set of design principles, they are likely to be able to sustain their own institutional arrangements over a long period of time. "This growing consensus about the attributes of users and resources has been applied in the design of policies intended to enhance the participation of local users in the governance and management of common-pool resources, including many forests. Supporting further research - especially studies of forests and their users over time is an important foundation for even more effective public policies in the future."
The Need for Civic Education: A Collective Action Perspective
(1998) Ostrom, Elinor
"Why should we teach the theory of collective action as a critical element in courses on American government and political science more generally? My answer to this question is that the theory of collective action is a core explanatory theory related to almost every 'political problem' addressed by citizens, elected officials, political action groups, courts, legislatures, and families. At any time that individuals may gain from the costly actions of others, without themselves contributing time and effort, they face collective action dilemmas for which there are coping methods."
Common Property, Communal Property, and Natural Resources: Some Conceptual Clarifications (DRAFT)
(1987) Schlager, Edella; Ostrom, Elinor
"Conceptualizing and defining property rights is a crucial step in examining natural resources and challenges to their viability. How we understand property rights not only shapes our perception of resource degradation problems but also our prescriptions for the resolution of these problems. When the terms that we use as scientists are ambiguous and refer to substantially different real world situations, we reduce our analytical and prescriptive clarity. The term 'common property resource' is a term that is used to refer to many different property-rights regimes including: (1) The absence of any property rights, (2) The absence of a sole owner, (3) The absence of private property, (4) Ownership of a resource by a small community which regulates use patterns for residents, and (5) ownership of a resource by a large government which allows all residents of that government access to a resource under varying degrees of regulation."

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