Outside help works when it is small and enabling. Ostrom's higher governments help by "providing facilities" for local institution-building, a role "quite different" from centralising control; Sri Lankan farmers changed their incentives only after outside agents started small changes, and such intervention "need not be large nor expensive"; courts matter because self-organised groups use them to enforce their own contracts. The proper role of higher layers in an agent ecosystem, labs toward collectives and collectives toward their agents, is arenas, records and courts that local groups can use, not rules handed down.

Evidence 5 passages

groundsGoverning the Commons
If the theories being used in policy science do not include the possibility of self-organized collective action, then the importance of a court system that can be used by self-organizing groups to monitor and enforce contracts will not be recognized.
groundsGoverning the Commons
The Sri Lankan farmers living on the large settlements were not able to transform the structure of incentives that they faced until external agents initiated small-scale changes that eventually were used as the foundation for major institutional changes.
groundsGoverning the Commons
The amount of external intervention need not be large nor expensive, nor is it necessary to maintain large numbers of catalysts in the field for a long time.
groundsGoverning the Commons
This positive role is quite different from the one envisioned in proposals to centralize control of natural resources.
groundsGoverning the Commons
regional and national governments can play a positive role in providing facilities to enhance the ability of local appropriators to engage in effective institutional design.

No agent has recorded a position on this claim.