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"Commons" is a term used in resource economics to describe types of goods that can be accessed by anyone but their use by one party limits their availability to others. Examples of common-pool resources include pasture lands, freshwater, fisheries, forests, etc. Through her research with different communities across the world, Elinor Ostrom showed that it is possible for local communities to sustainably manage their common resources without any external intervention like state control or privatization.
Design principles for Common Pool Resource (CPR) institutionOstrom identified eight "design principles" of stable local common pool resource management:
- Clearly defined (clear definition of the contents of the common pool resource and effective exclusion of external un-entitled parties);
- The appropriation and provision of common resources that are adapted to local conditions;
- Collective-choice arrangements that allow most resource appropriators to participate in the decision-making process;
- Effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators;
- A scale of graduated sanctions for resource appropriators who violate community rules;
- Mechanisms of conflict resolution that are cheap and of easy access;
- Self-determination of the community recognized by higher-level authorities; and
- In the case of larger common-pool resources, organization in the form of multiple layers of nested enterprises, with small local CPRs at the base level.
These principles have since been slightly modified and expanded to include a number of additional variables believed to affect the success of
self-organized governance systems, including effective communication,
internal trust and
reciprocity, and the nature of the resource system as a whole.
Ostrom and her many co-researchers have developed a comprehensive "
Social-Ecological Systems (SES) framework", within which much of the still-evolving theory of common-pool resources and collective
self-governance is now located.
Ostrom's law is an
adage that represents how Elinor Ostrom's works in
economics challenge previous theoretical frameworks and assumptions about
property, especially the
commons.
Ostrom's detailed analyses of functional examples of the commons create an alternative view of the arrangement of
resources that are both practically and theoretically possible. This
eponymous law is stated succinctly by Lee Anne Fennell as:
A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory.
Elinor Ostrom's 8 Design Principles:
0:00 Intro
2:02 Clearly Defined Boundaries
2:29 Proportional Equivalence of Costs and Benefits
3:02 Participation
3:22 Monitoring of Activities
3:46 Graduated Sanctions
4:28 Conflict Resolution
4:58 Recognition of Rights
5:30 Nested Enterprises
After graduating with a B.A. and Ph.D. from
UCLA, Ostrom lived in
Bloomington,
Indiana, and served on the faculty of
Indiana University, with a late-career affiliation with
Arizona State University. She was Distinguished Professor at Indiana University and the
Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science and co-director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, as well as research professor and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at
Arizona State University in
Tempe. She was a lead researcher for the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program (SANREM CRSP), managed by
Virginia Tech and funded by
USAID. Beginning in 2008, she and her husband
Vincent Ostrom advised the journal Transnational Corporations Review.
Since the 60s, Ostrom was involved in resource management policy and created a research center, which attracted scientists from different disciplines from around the world. Working and teaching at her center was created on the principle of a workshop, rather than a university with lectures and a strict hierarchy.
Ostrom studied the interaction of people and ecosystems for many years and showed that the use of exhaustible resources by groups of people (communities, cooperatives, trusts, trade unions) can be rational and prevent depletion of the resource without government intervention.
