Governing the Commons presents several case studies, and a framework for analyzing situations in which people share access to what she calls a "Common Pool Resource", and find or don't find ways to share equitable access to the resource peacefully and over a long time period. One of her goals is to show that Garret Hardin's idea of the tragedy of the commons is not as ubiquitous as many have believed. Ostrom found and discussed cases where fishermen shared productive access to fisheries, farmers found ways to share access to irrigation water, and herders divided up access to unfenced grazing land. She then presents a framework to analyze what factors made it more or less likely that these cooperative arrangements would be stable over the long term.
The case studies include a few incidents where the arrangements failed or were never brought into existence. She analyzes these in order to trace the causes to lack of coordination, insufficient ability of the participants to monitor each other's behavior, or external interference from governmental bodies (either corrupt officials violating the norms that had been established, or a simple failure to provide sufficent facilities for negotiation.)
I like Ostrom's approach and her way of thinking about these situations. She studied cases where the allocation of resources among participants were mostly monitored and policed by the users of the resources themselves. In a few cases, the government facilitatated the creation of the agreements, or endorsed the approach, but mostly it was up to the users to maintain and evolve their institutions as conditions changed.
One of her strong conclusions is that governments are seldom willing to let a local group manage a local resource in an ideosyncratic way, but broad rules that are applied over varying terrain, social situations, and groups with differing abilities to monitor their neighbors' behavior are seldom workable and stable. General rules leave too much leeway for outsiders to exploit loopholes. Once use of a resource isn't limited to people who know each other, agree on the rules, and know that their grandparents followed the same rules, and expect their grandchildren to do the same, then the self-reinforcing incentive structure will often break down.
Ostrom presents detailed studies of shared access to grazing and timber land in Switzerland and Japan, communally maintained aquaducts in Spain and the Philippines, access to aquifers in the L.A. basin, and shared use of fishery resources in Turkey, Sri Lanka, and Nova Scotia. Based on these case studies, her framework proposes that in order to be successful, a multi-party agreement governing shared access to a renewable, but depletable resource must allow for clearly defined boundaries (in time or space), communal monitoring, graduated sanctions, and a transparent conflict resolution mechanism.
She gives examples of both fisheries and water distribution arrangements where participants had assigned timeslots. These don't require centralized monitoring, because at each transition, the following user ensures that the predecessor turns things over on time. Since there are sanctions and either self-enforced or socially-backed enforcement, people nearly always transition promptly, and accept the punishment if they are somewhat late. Since all the users of the resource know each other and share long-standing social bonds, occasional violations due to exigent circumstances can be overlooked or lightly punished. Everyone in the community finds out what happened, so repeat offenders can be punished more harshly and monitored more carefully.
In Nova Scotia, an arrangement that had worked solidly for generations fell due to the national government's insistence on a uniform solution that didn't account for local differences. The end result was that outside fishermen could encroach, and weren't subject to the local sanctions, so the feedback mechanisms that had reduced usage in the past didn't constrain the outsiders, with the result that even the locals stopped respecting the rules. The local fishery collapsed, and it took years to convince the national government to allow some local control, and more years before the fish recovered and could be productively fished again.
I also reviewed 's Understanding Institutional Diversity, which is based on this and much of Ostrom's other work. It presents a general framework for analyzing the kind of institutions investigated in the fieldwork in Governing the Commons.
's Order without Law covers similar ground, but focuses on a situation where the rules about who is responsible for damage to neighbors' property varies from place to place. In that situation, found that when people were part of a community, they could adapt their behavior to local conditions and not be bound by what the law prescribed. It's also a kind of spontaneous order, but the spontaneity is constrained by the governing context. It's also worth comparing 's work to work (Seeing like a State, and The Art of Not Being Governed). Scott's focus is on ways that governments get in the way of local control and organization and how that iterferes with people's natural ability to organize and govern themselves.
