Cooperating for the Public Good: Self Governance, Polyentricity

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Cooperating for the Public Good Self Governance,
Polyentricity Development

• Elinor Ostrom
• Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis
• Indiana University
• Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity
• Arizona State University

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Collective Action Theory at the Core of the
Social Sciences Policy

• Mancur Olson and Garrett Hardin published key
  work on social dilemmas in 1960s
• Their work led to the prediction that
  self-organization was impossible
• No one will cooperate because they fear others
  will free ride!
• Citizens are thus presumed to be trapped in a
  social dilemma
• Other humans public officials are supposed to
  impose optimal policies based on models that
  academics devise
• Tend to recommend panaceas

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Consistent with Game Theory

• Game theory models of Prisoners Dilemma and
  other social dilemmas also predicted no
  cooperation
• Extended credence to prediction of impossibility
  for participants to solve collective action
  problems
• Media paid considerable attention to cases of
  resource destruction
• As a result, policy analysts recommended that
  governments own and manage resources or turn them
  over to private owners
• Government-owned protected areas established all
  over the world to protect
• biodiversity and the extent of forests

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Extensive Field Studies

• On the other hand, many studies described
  individual cases where pastoralists, inshore
  fishers, farmers needing irrigation water had
  overcome social dilemmas some for centuries
• Written by sociologists, historians, engineers,
  political scientists, anthropologists
• Focused on particular resources
• Studied in one continent
• Literature strongly divided

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Lack of Cumulation

• Led to establishment of a National Research
  Council Committee in 1980s to assess knowledge
• Located very large number of cases
• Authors tended to identify diverse variables in
  their studies
• Identified a substantial need for developing
  better theories and frameworks to enable
  knowledge to cumulate
• Fortunately, the IAD framework was under
  development at the same time

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A Multi-Disciplinary Framework

• At IU we were developing a meta-theoretical
  framework for analyzing human interactions in
  diverse settings
• The Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD)
  framework
• Contains a nested set of building blocks that
  social scientists can use in efforts to
  understand human interactions and outcomes across
  diverse settings.
• Exogenous variables affect the internal working
  parts of an action situation that in
• turn affect interactions and outcomes.

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A framework for institutional analysis
Source Adapted from E. Ostrom (200515).
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Internal Parts of Action Situations

• Similar to the working parts of a game so that
  IAD can be used as a foundation for game
  theoretical analysis, agent-based models,
  laboratory experiments, individual case studies,
  and for collecting, coding, and analyzing
  extensive data from field research.

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The internal structure of an action situation
Source Adapted from E. Ostrom (200533).
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Meta-Analysis of Case Studies

• IAD framework used to develop coding manual
• Difficult due to lack of agreement of earlier
  scholars about what should be reported
• Had to screen over 450 cases to code 47
  irrigation systems and 44 in-shore fisheries
• Three-quarters of farmer-managed systems had high
  performance crops grown, benefit-cost ratio
• Only 42 of governmental irrigation systems had
  high performance even with fancy engineering
• Informal fishery groups allocated space, time,
  and technology to try to reduce overharvesting
• many successful

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Clarified Concepts

• Common-property resource widely used
• Confused the concept of property and that of
  resource
• Need to switch to common-pool resources and
  common-property regimes
• Identified five types of property rights used in
  the field rather than the one posited in theory
• Access, withdrawal, management, exclusion, and
  alienation rights were all real rights
• Property rights systems may be mixtures of the
  five, not just alienation rights

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Finding Diversity of Rules

• Resource users had devised immense number of
  different rules fitting their local resource
  system
• Again IAD helped us identify order from this
  initially chaotic morass
• We asked What part of an action situation does
  a rule affect?

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Rules as exogenous variables directly affecting
the elements of an action situation
Source Adapted from E. Ostrom (2005189)
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Found Seven Types of Rules in Use

• The variety of specific rules within each type
  was immense
• Boundary rules for fisheries, irrigation systems,
  and forests differed
• Tended not to allocate quantitative harvesting
  rights frequently based on technology,
  geography, season.
• Scholars frequently rejected these rules and
  proposed imposition of transferable rights to
  quantity
• Many rules evolved over a long time to fit local
  resources

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Long-Surviving Institutions

• Once studies were coded, I had hoped it would be
  feasible to find an optimal set of rules used by
  robust, long-surviving institutions and not used
  in the fragile ones.
• After a long struggle realized this was not
  feasible and turned to the analysis of underlying
  practices of successful systems that survived for
  long periods of time that were not present in
  failures
• Called these design principles

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Now New Finding re Design Principles

• Cox, Arnold Villamajor. 2010 Ecology
  Society
• Reviewed 90 studies from around the world (by
  other scholars) of applicability of design
  principles
• Foundation substantial support for design
  principles
• Have proposed clarification so that ecological
  factors (such as physical boundaries) are not
  combined with social factors (such as group
  membership requirements)

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Clarified Design Principles

• Boundaries now distinguish clear boundaries
  between users non-users and for the resource
  itself.
• Congruence now distinguish rules congruent with
  local social ecological conditions from
  distribution of benefits and costs.
• Monitoring included monitoring resource
  conditions as well as user actions

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Empirical Studies in the Lab

• Laboratory provides the capability to design a
  CPR experiment and slowly change one factor at a
  time to assess the impact on outcomes
• When subjects make decisions anonymously with no
  communication overharvest worse than predicted!
• Face-to-face communication (cheap talk) enables
  them to increase cooperation
• If they design their own sanctioning system
  achieve close to full optimality
• Challenged dominant theory that users were
• helpless

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Irrigation Systems in Nepal

• Compared 226 systems designed by engineers and
  run by government with those built and run by
  farmers
• Farmer-systems were quite primitive in terms of
  construction, but they were able to
• grow more crops
• run their systems more efficiently
• get more water to the tail end
• Again, challenged dominant theory that farmers
  would not be able to self-organize

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Forests Around the World

• International Forestry Resources and Institutions
  (IFRI) research program
• IFRI is unique - the only interdisciplinary,
  long-term research program studying forests owned
  by governments, private organizations, and
  communities in multiple countries
• Collaborating with centers in Africa, Asia, Latin
  America, and the USA
• All use same research protocols to carefully
  measure forests (e.g. species diversity, basal
  area)
• Measure if and how users are organized, their
• activities, and living conditions

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Findings

• In sustainable forests around the world, users
  are active monitors of the level of harvesting
  occurring in their forests
• Users monitoring forests is more important than
  type of forest ownership!!!
• Recent analyses examine tradeoffs and synergies
  between level of carbon storage in forests and
  their contributions to livelihoods
• Larger forests more effective in enhancing carbon
  and livelihoods
• Even stronger when local communities have
  rule-making autonomy and incentives to
• monitor

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Current Developments

• Theory of rational but helpless individuals not
  supported
• We are now working with a behavioral theory of
  individual choice
• Boundedly rational, but learn through experience
• Use heuristics but update over time
• Learn norms and potentially value benefits to
  others
• Trusting others is central to cooperation and
  affected by context

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Microsituational and broader context of social
dilemmas affects levels of trust and cooperation
Source Poteete, Janssen, and Ostrom (2010ch.
9).
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Microsituational Level of Analysis (Lab Field)

• Factors that affect cooperation in CPRs
• Communication among participants
• Reputation of participants known
• High marginal return
• Entry exit capability
• Longer time horizon
• Agreed upon sanctioning mechanism
• All factors that increase likelihood that
  participants gain trust in others and reduce the
  probability of being a sucker

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The Broader ContextSocial-Ecological Systems
(SES)

• A network of colleagues across the USA and
  Europe working on identifying aspects of the
  broader context that affects diverse action
  situations
• Initial organization of resource users
• New infrastructure
• Maintenance of system
• Robustness to external disturbance
• Resource sustainability across water, forests,
  and fishery resources
• Lets take a look at the highest level

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Microaction situations embedded in broader
social-ecological systems
Social, Economic, and Political Settings (S)
Governance System (GS)
Resource System (RS)
Action Situation Interactions (I) Outcomes (O)
Resource Units (RU)
Actors (A)
Direct causal link
Feedback
Related Ecosystems (ECO)
Source Adapted from E. Ostrom (2007, 2009)
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How Does a Diagnostic Framework Help Us
Understand Complex SESs?

• Helps to identify variables that may affect
  interactions and outcomes
• Many variables exist within any focal SES (or set
  of SESs) surrounding microsettings of an action
  situation
• Need to unpack the variables within a focal SES
  and identify which ones are relevant for what
  kind of question
• Lets look at the second tier

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Second-Tier Variables of a SES
Social, Economic, and Political Settings (S) S1- Economic development. S2- Demographic trends. S3- Political stability. S4- Government resource policies. S5- Market incentives. S6- Media organization. Social, Economic, and Political Settings (S) S1- Economic development. S2- Demographic trends. S3- Political stability. S4- Government resource policies. S5- Market incentives. S6- Media organization.
Resource Systems (RS) Governance Systems (GS)
RS1- Sector (e.g., water, forests, pasture, fish) RS2- Clarity of system boundaries RS3- Size of resource system RS4- Human-constructed facilities RS5- Productivity of system RS6- Equilibrium properties RS7- Predictability of system dynamics RS8- Storage characteristics RS9- Location GS1- Government organizations GS2- Nongovernment organizations GS3- Network structure GS4- Property-rights systems GS5- Operational rules GS6- Collective-choice rules GS7- Constitutional rules GS8- Monitoring and sanctioning processes
Resource Units (RU) Actors (A)
RU1- Resource unit mobility RU2- Growth or replacement rate RU3- Interaction among resource units RU4- Economic value RU5- Number of units RU6- Distinctive markings RU7- Spatial and temporal distribution A1- Number of users A2- Socioeconomic attributes of users A3- History of use A4- Location A5- Leadership/entrepreneurship A6- Norms/social capital A7- Knowledge of SES/mental models A8- Importance of resource A9- Technology used
Action Situations Interactions (I) ? Outcomes (O) Action Situations Interactions (I) ? Outcomes (O)
I1- Harvesting levels of diverse users I2- Information sharing among users I3- Deliberation processes I4- Conflicts among users I5- Investment activities I6- Lobbying activities I7- Self-organizing activities I8- Networking activities O1- Social performance measures (e.g., efficiency, equity, accountability, sustainability) O2- Ecological performance measures (e.g., overharvested, resilience, biodiversity, sustainability) O3- Externalities to other SESs
Related Ecosystems (ECO) ECO1- Climate patterns. ECO2- Pollution patterns. ECO3- Flows into and out of focal SES. Subset of variables found to be associated with self-organization. Related Ecosystems (ECO) ECO1- Climate patterns. ECO2- Pollution patterns. ECO3- Flows into and out of focal SES. Subset of variables found to be associated with self-organization.
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Different Sets of Second-Tier Variables Are
Relevant for Different Questions

• To analyze the likelihood of users of a resource
  self-organizing, research has now identified 10
  variables that are starred in the second-tier
  variables
• These are NOT the design principles asking what
  variables are associated with initial self
  organization a different question than what
  self-organized systems are robust over time
• Discussed in a recent article in Science
• Starred in previous slide

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Policy Implications

• Resources in good condition have users with
  long-term interests, who invest in monitoring and
  building trust embedded in polycentric systems
• Many policy analysts and public officials have
  not yet absorbed the central lessons
• Government-protected areas or private rights are
  still recommended by some as THE way to solve
  these problems
• Must learn how to deal with complexity rather
  than rejecting it
• Panaceas are not to be recommended!

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Thank you