Preventing the Tragedy of the Commons

Elinor Ostrom is a key player in the academic exploration of institutions for managing common pool resources (i.e., the ways that people cooperate to prevent the tragedy of the commons). She's also terrifyingly prolific. Here are two of her newest papers:

Polycentric Systems as One Approach for Solving Collective-Action Problems
Providing and producing public goods and common-pool resources at local, regional, national and international levels require different institutions than open, competitive markets or highly centralized governmental institutions. If we are to solve collective-action problems effectively we must rethink the way we approach market and governmental institutions. We need analytical approaches that are consistent with a public sector that encourages human development at multiple levels (Opschoor 2004). This chapter reviews studies of polycentric governance systems in metropolitan areas and for managing common-pool resources.

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After an introduction to the problem, this chapter will review the extensive research that demonstrated the capabilities of many citizens to design imaginative and productive ways of producing public goods and common-pool resources. Successful systems tend to be polycentric with small units nested in larger systems. Not all such systems are successful, and we need to understand factors associated with failure as well as success. The last section of the chapter will discuss design principles that can help guide the design, adaptation and reform of governance systems to achieve robust and effective systems over time.

Private and Common Property Rights
The relative advantages of private property and common property for the efficiency, equity, and sustainability of natural resource use patterns have long been debated in the legal and economics literatures. The debate has been clouded by a troika of confusions that relate to the difference between (1) common-property and open-access regimes, (2) common-pool resources and common-property regimes, and (3) a resource system and the flow of resource units.

A property right is an enforceable authority to undertake particular actions in specific domains. The rights of access, withdrawal, management, exclusion, and alienation can be separately assigned to different individuals as well as being viewed as a cumulative scale moving from the minimal right of access through possessing full ownership rights. Some attributes of common-pool resources are conducive to the use of communal proprietorship or ownership and others are conducive to individual rights to withdrawal, management, exclusion and alienation. There are, however, no panaceas! No institutions generate better outcomes for the resource and for the users under all conditions. Many of the lessons learned from the operation of communal property regimes related to natural resource systems are theoretically relevant to understanding of a wide diversity of property regimes that are extensively used in modern societies.

Bottom Line: Economists using methodological individualism failed to explain how groups could manage their common pool resources (e.g., groundwater, fisheries, etc.) Political scientists like Ostrom have shown the way.