Elinor Ostrom – Governing the Commons

What Can Shared Resilience Learn From the Commons?

Elinor Ostrom challenged the assumption that resources shared by many users must inevitably be governed either by markets or by a central authority. Drawing on long-lived arrangements around forests, irrigation systems, fisheries and other common-pool resources, she showed that communities can sometimes create durable institutions for self-governance when rules fit local conditions and participants have credible ways to make, monitor and enforce them. Climate resilience is not itself a common-pool resource in the technical sense, but it presents a related institutional problem because many actors depend on outcomes that no single actor can produce or fully own. A flood-resilient city, a functioning watershed or protection from extreme heat may require governments, communities, businesses and infrastructure providers to maintain shared conditions from which all benefit. That makes the institutional question more interesting than simply asking who should pay: who participates in setting the rules, who bears costs, who receives benefits, who monitors behaviour and what makes cooperation durable after an external project leaves? Ostrom’s work also cautions against assuming that either central government or local communities are inherently the right scale of governance; institutional arrangements have to fit the problem they are governing. Shared resilience may therefore depend less on choosing between state, market and community than on designing institutions through which interdependent actors can govern their shared exposure. The deeper question is whether resilience itself sometimes needs to be treated as something collectively maintained rather than individually delivered.

Source: Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press, first published 1990. View the book