Governing the Commons

Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics for the work this book presents. Her subject is common pool resources, meaning resources from which it is difficult to exclude users and where one person's use reduces what is available to others, including fisheries, irrigation systems, forests, pastures and groundwater basins.

The existing theory offered two solutions. Hardin's tragedy of the commons argued that shared resources are inevitably depleted, and the standard responses were state control or privatisation. Ostrom's contribution is empirical: she documented communities that had managed common resources sustainably for centuries without either, including Swiss alpine pastures, Japanese village forests, Spanish irrigation communities and Philippine water systems, some operating for over five hundred years. She also documented failures, and the comparison is what produces the findings.

From the cases she derives eight design principles present in the successful systems: clearly defined boundaries of the resource and of who may use it; rules matched to local conditions; collective choice arrangements allowing users to modify the rules; monitoring by people accountable to the users; graduated sanctions escalating with repeated violation; cheap and accessible conflict resolution; recognition by higher authorities of the community's right to organise; and nested governance for larger systems.

The work is empirical and theoretically careful. Its limits are that the successful cases involve relatively small groups with long time horizons and repeated interaction, and whether the principles scale to global commons such as the atmosphere remains genuinely uncertain. Ostrom worked on that question afterwards without resolving it.