Foundational Papers in Complexity Science pp. 2835–2866
DOI: 10.37911/9781947864559.89
Collective Action & the Dynamics of Institutions
Author: John M. Anderies, Arizona State University
Excerpt
In a series of books and papers spanning the 1980s and 1990s, Elinor Ostrom challenged dominant notions of how groups of people could solve problems related to common-pool resources. Her work was motivated by debates spurred in part by Garrett Hardin’s essay “Tragedy of the Commons” (which should be titled “Tragedy of Open Access,” as “the commons” was historically an effective property regime for the use of shared land resources) regarding environmental policy responses to commons problems in the decades preceding the publication of Governing the Commons in 1990. Specifically, policy recommendations occupied two ends of the institutional spectrum: totally centralized, top-down regulation by a benevolent social planner and fully decentralized, market-based solutions founded on secure, clearly defined property rights—the preferred solution in economics. In the context of evolutionary theories of cooperation, these two ends of the spectrum represent a case where coordination is forced by a benevolent dictator or coordination is generated endogenously via the market mechanism, conditioned by institutional arrangements that define and enforce property rights in such a way that generates the correct prices so that perfectly rational agents acting in their self-interest will converge to a market equilibrium that maximizes the social value (prevents over-exploitation) of a shared resource. Ostrom’s work in the field suggested there were many alternatives to these two extremes (Ostrom 1990).
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