Abstract
7 August 1933 – 12 June 2012
Good fences make good neighbors
To my regret, I never met Elinor Ostrom during her lifetime. My one experience of what it must have been like to be in her presence comes from the video of her talk on the occasion of the Annual Hayek Memorial Lecture of the British Institute of Economic Affairs on March 29, 2012. 1 She died, unexpectedly, in June of this year.
For me, even without direct personal contact, Elinor Ostrom was an important intellectual influence. Her writing about institutions for collective action helped with understanding both of the facts about and of possible solutions for what she called “social dilemmas”–the many temptations to free riding and the manifold barriers to establishing trust even when sorely needed. Her rigorous attention to the everyday realities of communities in which those dilemmas had been solved (or not) created a standard against which much scholarship can be judged.
For many investigators of my generation, she served as a mentor and exemplar. She presented her careful and emphatic arguments in many publications over a long career. In her research, she found insights and information across a broad spectrum of disciplines from the most finely tuned experimental studies of behavior to detailed historical narratives of the rise of specific institutions. The importance of her work was recognized in many honors including, of course, the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.
Economists offer powerful insights into the operation of society by distilling human acts of cooperation into efforts to maximize individual utility. Psychologists highlight the importance of securing personal satisfaction in the structuring of interpersonal relations. Other disciplines have similarly constrained frameworks through which researchers analyze human behavior in isolation and in groups. Anyone who sets out to use one or another of these lenses to study the ways people cooperate for mutual benefit is going to be puzzled. Cooperation for mutual benefit quickly dissolves into the error term. In extremis, a dystopic thread of argument asserts the impossibility–or at least the extraordinary rarity and fragility–of any human institution that might foster pro-social behavior.
Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action 2 is a sturdy bridge across the slough of discouragement created by strongly argued visions of the impossibility of such an achievement. The starting point is a deceptively modest observation: any theory that claims universal application is catastrophically vulnerable to even a single verified counter-example. Strong voices have urged that common-pool resources (CPRs) such as fisheries and open grazing lands are everywhere and always doomed to be destroyed by excessive competitive appropriation. Such a claim is called into question by places where appropriators share such a resource successfully over the long haul. Ostrom identified not one but many such places. She found some by reviewing published work in an unusually broad range of parallel (and frequently self-contained) disciplines. Others she describes after spending time in close observation of existing common-pool resources being managed sustainably by populations dependent on continued productivity.
One of my cousins, an ardent catastrophist, insists that Ostrom’s examples are too small, too scattered, and too fragile to offer any substantial hope that the human race will avoid the inevitable and imminent destruction of our common home. Certainly Ostrom herself is careful to point out the specific characteristics of the successfully managed common-pool resources she describes:
There are limits on the types of CPRs studied here: (1) renewable rather than nonrenewable resources, (2) situations where substantial scarcity exists, rather than abundance, and (3) situations in which the users can substantially harm one another, but not situations in which participants can produce major external harm for others. Thus, all asymmetrical pollution problems are excluded, as is any situation in which a group can form a cartel and control a sufficient part of the market to affect market price.
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Her first (in her professional development) and last (in presentation in the text) examples–the water-districts of the Los Angeles basin–suggest both possible answers to my cousin’s depressing prognostications and an indication of how difficult it can be to cobble together the institutions necessary to manage widely shared public goods. As she makes clear, even with nearby neighbors who have been successful in establishing appropriation standards and governing institutions, the chances are good that the subtle challenges of creating such arrangements in an analogous but not identical situation may be insurmountable, at least for a time.
In addition to her extended and careful study of the management of common-pool resources, Ostrom and her Indiana University colleagues invested much thought in the exploration of research methodologies. The result came to be known as the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. The IAD, and its offshoot the Social-Ecological System (SES) framework, provide broad outlines on which studies of contrasting scale and varying emphasis can be arrayed to highlight both their commonalities and their differences. “For scholars and policymakers interested in issues related to how different governance systems enable individuals to solve problems democratically,” she wrote in 2011, “the IAD framework helps to organize diagnostic, analytical, and prescriptive capabilities. It also aids in the accumulation of knowledge from empirical studies and in the assessment of past efforts at reforms.” 4 Thus ARNOVA members might also value this boundary-spanning approach to research. In fact, her last major work spends more time on the difficulties of working across disciplinary boundaries than on further development of the ideas of Governing the Commons. 5
In addition to opening a door through which scholars intrigued by the investigation of cooperative institutions may approach their subject, Elinor Ostrom’s life work also suggests an important research agenda for members of ARNOVA and their intellectual compatriots. Her careful delimiting of the subject of her extended empirical researches poses the question. She was clear about the bounded character of the resources she studied. In contrast, larger groups with indefinite boundaries who must deal with distant, inattentive or distracted overarching governing structures and have strong incentives to postpone addressing the possibility of depletion have greater difficulty arriving at reliable and enforceable institutions for long-term management. To borrow a phrase from the catastrophists’ lexicon, we know too little about the tipping point at which a human group of larger size and dealing with a less well-bounded resource will (if ever) turn its attention to meeting the challenge of its preservation. We also know too little about the intricate details of the initial steps in this process. What are the necessary preconditions and promising strategies? What may be the intermediate stages that can lead to success (or avoid disaster)? If there is a lesson for us in the example of Elinor Ostrom’s long and productive research project, it is that the answers to such questions are going to be detailed, intricate, and highly contingent. The simple generalization of Robert Frost’s fence-tending farmer cannot carry the research agenda very far. If future scholars follow Elinor Ostrom’s example, though, the results of their work will be simultaneously complicated and humble, on the one hand, and rigorous and tough-minded on the other. With skill, and luck, the reports of their work will approach the standards of both accessibility and influence that characterize her publications, her collegial relations, her management of research projects, and her teaching.
Instead of building fences, Elinor Ostrom might be said to have paved a path. The flagstones she added provide a solid footing as far as they go. But there is still much unknown territory ahead, requiring both care and ingenuity from those who would explore further. Elinor Ostrom’s lifework provides a powerful demonstration of the value of doing just that.