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The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom
The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom ESSENTIAL LESSONS FOR COLLECTIVE ACTION
Erik Nordman with Photographs by Jason Reblando
© 2021 Erik Nordman All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480b, Washington, DC 20036 Library of congress Control Number 2020945053
All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.
Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Key words: Island Press, Elinor Ostrom, commons, common-pool resource, common property regime, Bloomington School of Political Economy, collaboration, community-based resource management, Nobel Prize, institutional economics, political science, tragedy of the commons, Garrett Hardin, collective action, Vincent Ostrom, Los Angeles groundwater, lobsters, Tribunal de las Aguas, Valencia, forests, 2030 Districts, climate change, Paris Agreement, space, orbital debris, cybersecurity
To Linnea and Garrett
Contents Acknowledgments xi Chapter 1: What’s So Tragic about the “Commons”?
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Chapter 2: Los Angeles Groundwater
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Chapter 3: Maine’s Lobster Gangs
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Chapter 4: Spain’s Ancient Water Court
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Chapter 5: Institutions for Collaborative Forest Management
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Chapter 6: The Climate Commons
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Chapter 7: Voluntary Environmental Programs
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Chapter 8: Commons in Space
149
Chapter 9: Commons in the Digital World
171
Chapter 10: A Nobel Prize for Institutions and a Pathbreaking Life 193 Notes 211 About the Author
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Index 235 ix
Acknowledgments I was able to complete this book only because of the love and support of my wife, Jennifer Headley-Nordman, and my children, Linnea and Garrett. They encouraged this project from the start, read some very rough drafts, and kept me going through thick and thin. Thank you. I am grateful to my home institution of Grand Valley State University (GVSU) for enabling me to take a sabbatical leave during which I wrote this book. The university’s Center for Scholarly and Creative Excellence provided critical funds for research trips to Maine and Spain. I also thank the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University for supporting me as a visiting scholar, both intellectually and financially. Thanks to Jason Reblando for lending his photographic talents to this project and to Christine Fennessy for interviewing folks in Maine. Many thanks to my colleagues in GVSU’s Natural Resources Management Program, Biology Department, and Economics Department for their many years of support and friendship. I also am grateful to all the students whose curiosity helped to inspire this book. I am indebted to everyone at the Ostrom Workshop for welcoming me into their scholarly community. Special thanks go to Burney Fischer xi
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for his mentorship; Workshop directors Lee Alston and Scott Shackelford for the invitation and support; assistant director and librarian Emily Castle for help tracking down sources and images; and staff members Gayle Higgins, Allison Sturgeon, and David Price for facilitating my visits. I truly appreciate the time people gave to participate in the interviews. This book would not have been possible without them. Thanks to Fernando Rosa for sharing his translation and photography skills in València and to Tom Stanton for the early conversations about 2030 Districts. Thanks also to my parents, Bob and Sheila Nordman, for their love and support. I appreciate everyone who reviewed drafts of the chapters and provided valuable feedback, especially Susan Headley, Helen Rosenberg, Patrick Headley, James Kettenhofen, and Jim Freel. Any errors are all mine. Finally, thank you to Erin Johnson and her colleagues at Island Press for believing in me and the story of Elinor Ostrom.
CHAPTER 1
What’s So Tragic about the “Commons”? I first learned of Dr. Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel-prize-winning research on environmental management when I was a graduate student in upstate New York. However, it took a trip to a Nairobi shopping mall for me to really understand it. My family and I were living in Kenya while I worked as a visiting professor at Kenyatta University. Nairobi is famous for its chaotic traffic so we relied on a taxi driver, James Waithaka, for most of our car trips. While driving me to a lunch meeting at one Nairobi’s many upscale malls, Waithaka said that he’d drop me off at the front entrance, but he would park at the far end of the lot to wait for me. I asked Waithaka why he would not be waiting in the taxi lot right in front of the mall. He explained that that lot was unofficially reserved for drivers who are part of the taxi collective. Customers can request a taxi as they leave the mall. The taxi collective determines who gets to drive the next customer, and the drivers agree to charge the same rates. Many of the Nairobi malls had such an informal arrangement. Waithaka, not being a member of the collective, had to wait elsewhere. He also was not interested in picking up another customer because he was going to wait for me. 1
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As a professor of natural resources management, I immediately recognized this as a “commons.” Commons, or as Ostrom called them, “common-pool resources,” are goods that can be depleted if overused but are also difficult to exclude people from using. The conventional wisdom held that resources like the common pastures of old-time, agrarian villages would be overgrazed if all residents were allowed to bring as many animals to the pasture as they wished. In this case, taxi drivers from all over Nairobi would have clogged the shopping mall’s lots. Too many drivers would have chased too few customers. The drivers would have lowered their rates to unsustainable levels in a competition to lure customers. They would have, in effect, overgrazed and degraded the taxi commons and made all of the drivers worse off. But the taxi drivers did not succumb to this fate. They organized and determined which drivers were “in” the taxi collective and which were “out.” They developed rules to determine who gets the next customer. They set physical boundaries where the rules apply and where drivers like Waithaka, who bring their own customers, can wait quietly. And they doled out punishments to those who broke the rules (not all of which were legal). They did this with the tacit approval of the mall owners and law enforcement. The taxi drivers, through years of trial and error, figured out a way to sustainably manage their flow of customers. Each taxi driver has enough customers to earn a living. And they did it on their own. As Waithaka told me all of this, I recalled the work of Elinor Ostrom. As a professor at Indiana University, Ostrom studied resource-using communities around the world. She found that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, communities can work together to manage their resources without degrading them. These arrangements can be messy and complicated, but they also can be effective. Communities are not relegated to the fate of overusing their “commons.” And these taxi drivers were yet another example.
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The Nairobi taxi drivers piqued my curiosity. Where else do we find these common-pool resources and how are people dealing with them? It turns out that common-pool resources are all around us. Take, for example, our office coffee club. The staff in my university department would bring in a can of coffee to join the club. By doing that, they gained access to the communal coffee pot. Coffee aficionados might want to bring in expensive coffee. They would pay a lot for that premium coffee but would end up sharing it with all the club members. Others might bring in the cheapest, worst coffee they could find knowing that most people will bring in a better grade of coffee. Even the coffee aficionado would soon realize it is more rational to bring in a lower grade of coffee. If everyone in the coffee club followed this line of logic, the department coffee pot would soon be filled with the worst, most bitter coffee on the market. Thankfully, that did not happen. The department administrator set the standard by bringing in the first can of coffee. Then, she wrote the name of staff members on the can as they made their contributions. Nobody wants to be known as the office cheapskate. Simply writing the contributor’s name on the can was an effective way to enforce the standard. Of course, there were those who would just sneak an occasional cup of coffee without contributing their share. They were “free riding” on the donations of their coworkers. When our department moved into a new building, someone donated a single-cup coffee maker, the kind with pods. Now all coffee drinkers are responsible for their own coffee. That eliminated the free rider problem. But we lost, in a small way, a sense of community, something that bound us together. Our department coffee commons is no more. In his essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” biologist Garrett Hardin assumed that there were only two ways to avoid ruining a commons: privatizing the resource by dividing it up or imposing rules through an outside authority. In terms of the coffee club example, this would mean
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either having all coffee drinkers bring in their own coffee pods for personal use (thus negating the idea of a club) or having the department collect money from participants (or perhaps every employee to avoid free riders) and buy one standard brand of coffee. Ostrom’s Nobel-winning insight was that there is a third way: collective action. People can, under certain conditions, create and enforce rules and expectations of behavior. Our department coffee club did that, and it worked well for years. Economists, political scientists, and natural resource managers have studied commons for decades. The consensus was that, if left unregulated, commons would be overused or degraded. Ostrom challenged this consensus. By collaborating with colleagues from diverse academic fields around the world, she showed that people can come together to manage their local commons on their own. Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for her pioneering work in the “economic governance” of commons. Ostrom’s research showed that the taxi drivers’ “bottom-up” solutions were not as unusual as we might first expect. Water managers in Los Angeles had figured this out, as had dryland farmers in both Spain and the Philippines. Lobster harvesters in Maine organized into “harbor gangs” and defended their territory much like Nairobi’s taxi drivers. Ostrom and her colleagues found hundreds of instances around the world in which people effectively managed their commonpool resources. The more I learned about Ostrom’s approach to environmental management, the more intrigued I became. I had the opportunity to spend a year as a visiting scholar at Indiana University’s Ostrom Workshop, the research center she started with her husband, Vincent. While there, I was immersed in the scholarship of common-pool resources and met people who had worked closely with the Ostroms. A new generation of scholars continues to apply her ideas to new challenges, from space commons to cybersecurity.
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Figure 1.1 The Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University. (Credit: Jason Reblando.)
This book is about Ostrom’s collaborative approach to safeguarding our environment. It argues that Ostrom’s “third way” is, in many cases but not all, a critical tool for managing a wide range of resource challenges. Ostrom herself developed a set of eight “design principles” that provides a template for sustainable stewardship of the common-pool resources. The next few chapters show how Ostrom, through more than four decades of research, came to develop these design principles and apply them in settings around the world. The last third of the book illustrates how Ostrom’s design principles and theories for managing the commons continue to influence researchers and policy makers. Her ideas are being applied to managing satellites and orbital debris, cybersecurity, and digital information. Ostrom’s groundbreaking work is as relevant as ever. In order to appreciate the importance of Ostrom’s ideas, let’s take a closer look at how scholars and policy makers viewed the world when
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Box 1.1 A Campus Commons It is a sunny September afternoon on the campus of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) in Syracuse, New York. Hackberry trees, just starting to take on their fall colors, line the path around the grassy quad at the center of campus. The quad is not just the geographic center of ESF’s campus; it is also the social center. Students spread out across the lush grass to study, toss a Frisbee, play guitar, or just lounge in between classes. The low chatter and laughter of friends is broken by a shout. “Get off the quad!” Students look up to see someone—a new student? a visitor?—cutting across the diagonal of the quad. This person has made a grave error. The ESF students, known around here as “Stumpies,” treasure this common space and defend its integrity. The quad is a perfectly green rectangle, unmarred by “desire lines” worn across the turf by students who wish to cut across it. New students quickly learn not to cut across the quad. Those who violate this tradition will hear shouts from students firmly reminding them to stick to the path around the perimeter. Cutting across the quad is not formally forbidden by the college. The only penalty is a brief moment of social stigma. It’s a tradition, an informal expectation of behavior, that has been passed down through generations of students. Although ESF’s quad has endured for more than a century, the conventional wisdom on resource management says it should not be so. After all, most students are late once in a while and cutting across the quad would shorten the distance to class. Why take the long way around the quad and be late if everyone else is going to cut across? And if I am going to take the short cut, who am I to judge others who do the same? The conventional wisdom therefore is that rational students will keep cutting across the quad and creating desire lines. And yet, the quad remains unmarred. Why? The campus quad at ESF is an example of a commons. Originally a commons (or, sometimes, common) was a plot of land, such as a pasture, that was available for community members to graze their animals. For example, Boston Common was established in 1634 as a place for people to graze cattle, assemble militias, and conduct public executions. Today a commons refers to any resource that can be used up but from which it is difficult to continued on next page
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exclude people. The quad at ESF is a commons in the sense that it will be degraded by an unsightly and muddy crisscross of desire paths if too many students cut across it. However, the quad is just a grassy lawn in the middle of campus. No fence surrounds the quad, no locked gate prevents students from walking across it. Although difficult, the students have shown it is not impossible, to stop people from taking a short cut across the quad. It takes a commitment from the students themselves to transmit and enforce this expectation to incoming students.
Ostrom was starting her career. Ostrom’s work is inseparable from that of another scholar, Garrett Hardin. As a newly fledged political scientist, Elinor (Lin) Ostrom probably would not have been familiar with most of Garrett Hardin’s academic work. He was, after all, a biologist. But Hardin was not merely an academic scientist. During the mid-1960s, Hardin emerged as an outspoken advocate for population control. An essay he wrote about “the population problem” would come to influence generations of environmental managers. And that essay would put Ostrom on the path to the Nobel Prize. In 1968, Hardin served as the president of the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At that summer’s annual meeting, he delivered a rather lengthy address about what he perceived to be the problem of overpopulation.2 Hardin revised the lecture into a much shorter essay published in December 1968 as “The Tragedy of the Commons.”3 It would quickly go on to become one of the most requested and downloaded articles Science magazine has ever published. Hardin wrote it just as the modern environmental movement was taking off. Earlier that year, fellow ecologist Paul Ehrlich wrote a bestseller, The Population Bomb. A year later, Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River would famously catch fire, although not for the first time and not the only river to do so. In many ways, it was the
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perfect time to offer a simple, easy to understand reason why our planet was in rough shape. In his essay, Hardin borrowed the parable of a village commons from an 1833 pamphlet by William Foster Lloyd.4 “Picture a pasture open to all,” Hardin begins. Villagers bring their animals to this common pasture to graze. Because the pasture is “open to all,” none can be excluded. Any villager earns more profit from the meat and milk produced by each additional animal in the herd. However, the costs of grazing on the commons are shared by everyone. The villager gets all the benefits from enlarging the herd but only pays a fraction of the costs. Each villager then has a rational incentive to maximize income by bringing more animals to graze. But when each villager follows that same rational plan, the animals overgraze and degrade the common pasture. All of the villagers then suffer from the barren commons. Hardin, like Lloyd before him, assumed that the incentives to overgraze the commons are so hardwired into the system that they are virtually impossible to overcome. Hardin acknowledged that common pastures did exist and, in some cases, were used for centuries. For example, Boston Common, now a metropolitan park, was once a common pasture.5 But Hardin claimed, without evidence, that “tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land.” A long-enduring commons, in other words, was the product of some other form of misery and not of successful management. This was a parable, a story meant to teach a lesson. Hardin wasn’t really interested in cattle or pastures. The cattle were a metaphor for the human population, and the pasture was Earth’s resources. The story, then, was of humans’ destiny to ruin the planet through an ever- increasing population. We often think of a “tragedy” as a sad story. However, Hardin chose the word “tragedy” for its particular connection to the dramatic tragedies of
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ancient Greece. Hardin quoted a philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, when invoking the Greek meaning of a tragedy: “This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama.”6 Hardin emphasized this notion of the futility of escape, of being trapped. “In all the stories of tragedy, the hero is told in advance what is going to happen, and then he tries to avoid his fate, switching to left and switching to right,” Hardin told an interviewer in 1983. “But, no matter what he does: tragedy eventually hits him anyway.” “Tragedy brings a feeling of the inevitable, a feeling that something is inescapable; and that is the idea of a scientific law. . . . And Whitehead said that this idea of inescapability, which is almost a religious idea, is essential to science.”7 Consider the classic Greek story of Oedipus Rex. Oedipus’s parents take their newborn son to an oracle who told the baby’s future. Little Oedipus, the oracle says, will grow up to kill his father and marry his mother. What an awful fate for everyone! His parents, wanting to avoid this horrible destiny, abandon baby Oedipus on the side of a road. But Oedipus survives and is raised by another family. His adoptive family keeps his origins a secret. Years later, grown-up Oedipus gets into a roadside argument with an older stranger. He kills the man and flees. Oedipus solves the famous riddle of the Sphinx, marries a widow, and becomes a king. Only later does his mother, now also his wife, realize that Oedipus is her son. The man Oedipus killed on the side of the road so long ago was his father. The oracle’s prediction had come true. Tormented by the realization, his mother kills herself and Oedipus gouges out his eyes. There is no spoiler alert in Greek tragedy. What keeps the audiences, both ancient and modern, engaged is how the tragedy unfolds. We know Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother. The oracle said
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so at the very beginning of the play. Trying to escape that fate is futile. There may be surprises along the way, but the end is predetermined. Like the tragic heroes of ancient Greece, Hardin posited that our environmental fates are already determined. The oracle has spoken—we will overgraze the common pastures, overfish the seas, overpollute the atmosphere, overpopulate the planet. We are trapped in a system that rewards individuals for overconsuming the planet’s shared resources. “Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush,” according to Hardin. The only ways to avoid this ruinous future, Hardin said, are by privatizing the resource—and thereby negating the commons—or having government impose restrictions on people’s behavior. The resource users, Hardin argued, were incapable of avoiding the “tragedy of the commons” on their own. Hardin shared an early draft of what would become “The Tragedy of the Commons” with his family and friends. In it, Hardin emphasized that some kind of coercion would be necessary to keep people from ruining a commons. But that forced coercion did not sit well with some in his test audience. “Our daughter Hyla, who was 26 years old at that time, objected to my introduction of coercion. In response, I changed it to ‘mutual coercion mutually agreed upon.’ . . . And it wasn’t until several years later, when other people were still objecting to this coercion, that I realized my phrase is merely a definition of any law passed in a democracy. . . . The majority coerces the minority.”8 But Hardin did not always have faith that democratic institutions would save a commons from ruin. “If ruin is to be avoided in a crowded world,” Hardin wrote, “people must be responsive to a coercive force outside their individual psyches, a ‘Leviathan,’ to use Hobbes’ term.”9 Hardin’s perspective influenced environmental managers for more than fifty years—but was he correct? Are we destined to destroy our commons? Hardin’s powerful metaphor is easy to understand. But as H. L. Mencken wrote, “Explanations exist; they have existed for all time;
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there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible and wrong.”10 Ostrom had already finished her doctorate and was a professor at Indiana University when Hardin published “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Hardin’s simple but powerful explanation of environmental degradation, and the solutions he proposed, fit neatly into the era’s dominant mode of thinking. “In the mid-twentieth century,” Ostrom reflected many years later, “the dominant scholarly effort was to try to fit the world into simple models and to criticize institutional arrangements that did not fit.”11 Most scholars, including Hardin, saw “the market” or “the government” as the only two viable options for solving these challenges. Ostrom summarized the midcentury thinking in her 2009 Nobel Prize address. “The market was seen as the optimal institution for the production and exchange of private goods,” she read from the podium in Stockholm. “For nonprivate goods, on the other hand, one needed ‘the’ government to impose rules and taxes to force self-interested individuals to contribute necessary resources and refrain from self-seeking activities. Without a hierarchical government to induce compliance, self-seeking citizens and officials would fail to generate efficient levels of public goods, such as peace and security, at multiple scales.”12 “A lot of people presumed that it was impossible for those who use the fishery—or groundwater basin or a lake or a river—to self-organize,” she told an interviewer after winning the Nobel. “Self-organization was considered to be impossible. That’s why they recommended that either ‘the market’ or ‘the state’—not well defined, not well worked out—but these in an idealized form.”13 But as a graduate student in the early 1960s, Ostrom knew that the dominant model of “the market” and “the government” was insufficient. She studied the communities around Los Angeles, California, as they solved their problems of groundwater overuse on their own. They didn’t
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need the California state government to impose restrictions on them. The communities’ water-sharing arrangement did not fit neatly into the scholars’ simple models. And yet, it worked. So, when Hardin’s essay set the academic world buzzing in the late 1960s, Ostrom knew that his parable of the commons did not reflect the world’s complexity and the ingenuity of resource users. Ostrom had the opportunity to meet Garret Hardin in 1976 when Indiana University invited Hardin to deliver the annual Patten Foundation Lecture. Hardin’s guest lecture revisited many of the themes he covered in “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Resource depletion due to uncontrolled population growth was the problem, according to Hardin, and top-down government policies were the solution. “He indicated that every man and every woman should be sterilized after they have one child. He was very serious about it,” Ostrom recalled decades later. “I was somewhat taken aback: ‘My theory proves that we should do this,’ and people said, ‘Well, don’t you think that that’s a little severe?’ ‘No! That’s what we should do, or we’re sunk.’”14 Ostrom, sitting in the audience, must have been shocked to hear this. The research Lin and her husband Vincent were doing showed that, in fact, government coercion was not the only way. As a married couple who were also research partners, they often sparred over ideas, like competitive athletes pushing each other toward ever faster race times. Sometimes new ideas emerged from these vigorous, but always respectful, debates. Lin even dedicated one of her books, “To Vincent, for his love and contestation.” No one would ever describe Ostrom as a shrinking violet. So, it’s not surprising that Ostrom and Hardin developed a friendly, professional rivalry also based on contestation. They challenged one another about how best to manage a commons. Lin and Vincent even invited Hardin to their home for dinner. According to Barbara Allen, a former student and close friend who was there, Lin served him Hamburger Helper casserole.
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Box 1.2 Hardin’s Tragedy Although his metaphor of a degraded pasture has been used to describe countless resources, from the Atlantic bluefin tuna harvest to cybersecurity, Hardin’s essay had one particular commons in mind: human population. “The Tragedy of the Commons” describes global population as a commons that, just like any other commons, can be overexploited. Hardin argues that “freedom to breed is intolerable.” He says we cannot count on conscientious people to have fewer children because “conscience is self-eliminating.” People, left to their own whims, will overwhelm Earth’s resources and rush to ruin. For Hardin, the only alternative is for the government to impose restrictions on reproduction. Such regulations would not be necessary “if the children of improvident parents starved to death; if, thus, overbreeding brought its own punishment to the germ line” (emphasis in the original). This is a grim outlook. It has not aged well, neither factually nor morally. Hardin was no oracle. Contrary to his predictions, global population growth has been steadily slowing since 1971. When Hardin published his essay, global population was increasing at 2.03 percent annually. In 2018, the rate was 1.11 percent. Hardin wrote, “There is no prosperous population in the world today that has, and has had for some time, a growth rate of zero.” Today, twenty-five countries have zero or negative growth rates, including Japan, Cuba, Italy, and Poland. Some countries’ populations are declining because of civil war or economic crises, such as Syria and Venezuela. But population growth is slowing in all parts of the world. In 2070, the global fertility rate is expected to dip to replacement level of 2.1 births per woman, which corresponds with zero population growth. Global population is expected to stabilize at 10.9 billion by 2100. That is a substantial increase over the current population, but an end to population growth is in sight. Children born today will likely live to see a world with a stable population size. How did Hardin get it wrong? A clue may be in the essay itself. The word “breed” appears twelve times in the essay. “Woman” or “female” appears not once. It turns out that empowering women to make their own decisions about children is strongly associated with smaller families. According to demographers K. C. Samir and Wolfgang Lutz, the “empirical data show that, in virtually all populations—and in particular those that are still in the process of demographic transition—more educated women have lower fertility.” For example, Ethiopian women with a secondary education continued on next page
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have an average of two children whereas those without any formal education have six. The idea that people, in particular women, can and should be able to choose the number of children to bear was, to Hardin, absurd. He rejected the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which stated “any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else.” To this, Hardin responded, “If we love the truth we must openly deny the validity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” He rejected, out of hand, the very solution that successfully slowed population growth. More pointedly, he rejected the role of women. Political scientist Matto Mildenberger critiqued Hardin’s legacy as one of “a racist, eugenicist, nativist, and Islamophobe.” Hardin was just one of many scholars in the late 1960s to call for extreme, sometimes racist, actions in the name of environmental sustainability. William and Paul Paddock, in a book called Famine—1975!, recommended cutting off food aid to India, Haiti, and other countries because they “can’t be saved” from catastrophe. Better, they claimed, to send scarce American food aid to countries such as Pakistan and Tunisia that could put it to better use. Paul Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb, doubled down on the Paddock brothers’ advice. Ehrlich suggested mandatory mass sterilization for men as the price for food aid. These were not scholars on the fringe. For example, Hardin published a book with the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Ehrlich was a frequent guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Mildenberger calls for modern environmental scholars to move beyond the flawed ideas and ideologies from the 1960s. Democratic governance and cooperation can be an effective, if messy, approach to managing the commons. Janet Yellen, former chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, said, “Women and men have significantly different approaches and views on public policy issues which means that women’s voices and those of minorities need to be heard.” If Hardin, Ehrlich, and their peers had listened to women’s voices, we might have stabilized population and empowered women sooner.
Allen recalled that dinner and the many letters Ostrom and Hardin exchanged. “Lin and Garrett Hardin had a long correspondence that was a no-holds barred conversation,” Allen said in a 2014 interview.15
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Allen produced the documentary film, Actual World, Possible Future, about the Ostroms.16 The Nobel Prize committee recognized Ostrom for her decades-long effort to show that regular people—farmers, fishers, taxi drivers—can and do figure out ways to manage their commons sustainably. However, fifty years after its publication, “The Tragedy of the Commons” still exerts considerable influence over the environmental professions. A recent survey showed that one-third to one-half of college instructors, depending on the discipline, consider Hardin’s article as “representing the foremost thinking on the commons; if students learn one thing about commons governance it should be this concept.”17 Ostrom, on the other hand, objected to “the metaphor of ‘the tragedy of the commons’ after years of empirical research in both the lab and the field that has called their universal applicability into question.”18 “People say I disproved him, and I come back and say, ‘No, that’s not right. I’ve not disproved him. I’ve shown that his assertion that common property will always be degraded is wrong,’” Ostrom told an interviewer. “He was addressing a problem of considerable significance that we need to take seriously. It’s just that he went too far. He said people could never manage the commons well.”19 Hardin begrudgingly agreed. “If I were doing it over again, I would summarize the idea more carefully, along somewhat the following lines: that in a crowded world, an unmanaged commons cannot possibly work. In the original, I did not refer to a ‘crowded world,’ but that’s an essential part of it. Also, the term, ‘unmanaged,’ I didn’t put that in initially. That was the implication, but I didn’t put it in.”20 Ostrom and her colleague Michael McGinnis later wrote, “What Hardin did not capture was the capacity of the individuals involved in such tragedies to have sufficient insight into the problems that they faced to restructure their own rules and change the incentives they faced.”21 Ostrom’s work suggested that Hardin’s idea is at best incomplete.
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the uncommon knowledge of elinor ostrom
Box 1.3 Olson and the Logic of Collective Action Garrett Hardin wasn’t the first, or only, person to conclude that people could not work together for the common good. In 1965, a young midwestern economist named Mancur Olson wrote a provocative book titled The Logic of Collective Action. Political scientists were particularly drawn to Olson’s ideas. The book would also have an enduring influence on Ostrom’s work. Prior to Olson’s book, the conventional wisdom was that people organize into groups to gain some kind of benefits that they are unable to attain as individuals. That is, people benefit from acting collectively. But Olson showed that it might not be rational for individuals to organize even if the total benefits from organizing are substantial. It takes effort for someone to join a group. But the benefits are benefits shared by everyone. If someone can enjoy the benefits without actually joining the group—that is, be a free rider— then it is logical not to join. And, as in “The Tragedy of the Commons,” if everyone follows that logic, nobody will join and nobody will receive any benefits. Take, for example, a labor union. The labor union bargains with the factory owner for better wages and working conditions. If successful, all the workers enjoy the fruits of the union’s work. But what if some workers don’t join the union? They would presumably enjoy these benefits without paying dues to the union. It’s entirely logical, even rational, to just “free ride” on the union’s work. If enough workers opt out of the union, then the union itself doesn’t have the resources to operate. It can’t bargain for better wages and working conditions. All the workers lose. Olson concluded that if the benefits are diffuse, but the costs are concentrated, then people don’t have a sufficient incentive to organize. Even though the total benefits exceed the total costs, a better world is out of reach. The solution, according to Olson, is to make the benefits exclusive. Joining the union, in this example, isn’t optional. If every worker enjoys the benefits for which the union advocates, then every worker has to pay dues to the union whether they want to or not. Otherwise the whole system breaks down. That’s why unions treat strikebreakers harshly. Conversely, it’s why some factory owners advocate for “right to work” laws that allow workers the “freedom” not to join the union. The “right to work” law enables workers to decline joining the union but still enjoy its benefits. Over time, it undermines the union’s bargaining power. continued on next page
wh at ’ s
so tragic about the
“commons”?
According to The Logic of Collective Action, benefits that are not exclusive should not exist, at least in meaningful numbers. Logical people would not spend their own time and money making something or organizing a group if people could then get it for free. But, as Star Trek’s Mr. Spock said, “Logic is the beginning of wisdom . . . not the end.” Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites on the internet. Millions of people rely on it for information. But by Olson’s logic, it should not exist. The entries into Wikipedia are not made by professional scholars but rather by hundreds of thousands of amateur enthusiasts. Each Wikipedia editor volunteers time and expertise to update the database. They don’t get paid. They are, for the most part, anonymous. Wikipedia doesn’t sell advertisements. Why give away such troves of knowledge for free when it can be locked behind a paywall and available to only paid subscribers? Elinor Ostrom would go on to show that communities—whether physical villages or online groups—can establish and enforce rules that can limit the benefits of a project to those who contributed to it. And the benefit to one’s reputation can be more valuable than cash. The contributors to Wikipedia or firms that reduce pollution may be acting quite logically. But it took the wisdom of Elinor Ostrom to bring that rational process to light.
People can work together to manage their shared resources sustainably without restrictions being imposed on them from outside or privatizing the commons. Doing so takes time to develop a set of rules and effort in enforcing them. Collective action is messy, complex, and not always successful. However, Ostrom identified a set of “design principles” that make success more likely. “Humans are neither all angels nor all devils,” Ostrom said in a 2009 interview. “It is the context, and the institutional context, in which they find themselves that enables them to have . . . more willingness to use reciprocity, to trust one another, and to be in a situation that I trust you and you trust me and I won’t be a sucker.”22 Like the audience watching an ancient Greek tragedy, we know how this story ends. Elinor Ostrom wins the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics.
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the uncommon knowledge of elinor ostrom
What makes it interesting is the journey she took in reaching that destination. Unlike the stories of Oedipus, Ostrom was not destined to win the Nobel Prize. But now that we know how it ends, let’s show how she got there.