89-ostrom-2000

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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