Elinor Ostrom

“What makes these models so dangerous, when they are used metaphorically as the foundation for policy, is that the constraints that are assumed to be fixed for the purpose of analysis are taken on faith as being fixed in empirical settings, unless external authorities change them.”

“The prisoners in the famous dilemma cannot change the constraints imposed on them by the district attorney, they are in jail. Not all users of natural resources are similarly incapable of changing their constraints.”

“The equilibrium of the regulated game has a lower value than that of the unregulated game.”

“Given the carrying capacity and profit possibilities of game one, the central agency must have sufficient information so that it can correctly impose sanctions with a probability greater than 0.75 to avoid punishing the herders.”

“Many successful CDR institutions are rich mixtures of private-like and public-like institutions, defying classification in a sterile dichotomy.”

“The consequence was that nationalization created open-access resources, where limited-access, common-property resources had previously existed.”

“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.”

“Situations in which the users can substantially harm one another, but not situations in which participants can produce major external harm for others.”

“The contingent strategy that has been the object of the most scholarly attention is tit for tat in a two-person game in which an individual adopts a cooperarive action in the first round and then mimics the action of the opponent in future rounds (Axelrod 1981, 1984).”

Open at the passage

“Further, the fines assessed in these settings are surprisingly low.”

“As far as the summer grazing grounds were concerned, regulations written in 1517 stated that no citizen could send more cows to the Alp than he could feed during the winter.”

“Given the length of ti:ne that they have had for trial-and-error learning about operational rule\$., the harshness of these environments as a stimulus toward improvement, and the low transformation costs in changing their own operational rules, one can, however, expect that these appropriators have "discovered" some underlying principles of good institutional design in a CPR environment.”

Open at the passage

“The members of the Federation perceive the allocation of water to conform to legitimate formulas that they themselves have devised, rather than to formulas devised by external experts.”

“As we shall see in Chapter 5, when external experts, working without the participation of the irrigators, have designed systems with the primary aim of achieving technical efficiency, they frequently have failed to achieve either the hoped-for technical efficiency or the level of organized action required to allocate water in a regular fashion or to maintain the physical system itself.”

“The specific operational rules in these cases differ markedly from one another.”

“Instead of turning to the specific rules, I turn to a set of seven design principles that characterize all of these robust CPR institutions, plus an eighth principle used in the larger, more complex cases.”

“I am not yet willing to argue that these design principles are necessary conditions for achieving institutional robustness in CPR settings.”

“Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself.”

“Appropriation rules restricting time, place, technology, and or quantity of resource units are related to local conditions and to provision rules requiring labor, materials, and or money.”

“Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rules.”

“It is obvious from our case studies, however, that even in repeated settings where reputation is important and where individuals share the norm of keeping agreements, reputation and shared norms are insufficient by themselves to produce stable, cooperative behavior over the long run.”

“Monitors who actively audit CPR conditions and appropriator behavior are accountable to the appropriators or are the appropriators.”

“Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions, depending on the seriousness and context of the offense, by other appropriators, by officials accountable to these appropriators, or by both.”

“Monitoring is a byproduct of their own strong motivations to use their water rotation turns to the fullest extent.”

“Because the appropriators tend to continue monitoring the guards, as well as each other, some redundancy is built into the monitoring and sanctioning system.”

“Thus, a previously unrecognized private benefit of monitoring in settings in which information is costly is that one obtains the information necessary to adopt a contingent strategy.”

“A large monetary fine imposed on a person facing an unusual problem may produce resentment and unwillingness to conform to the rules in the future.”

“In other situations, the harm that a single infraction can inflict on others may be so substantial, and the potential for private gains so great, that 100% compliance is essential.”

“The temptation to break the dikes in order to obtain water illegally was so great for those serving as guards, as well as for the remaining farmers, that all adult males patrolled the dikes every night in mutual surveillance until the emergency was over.”

“I commit myself to follow the set of rules we have devised in all instances, except dire emergencies, if the rest of those affected make a similar commitment and act accordingly.”

“Six, appropriators and their officials have rapid access to low-cost local arenas to resolve conflicts among appropriators or between appropriators and officials.”

“Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.”

“The parties then shared a single, authoritative image of the problem they faced.”

“Given the accuracy of the information, and its ease of access, each pumper knows what everyone else is doing, and each knows that his or her own groundwater extractions will be known by all others.”

“Thus, the information available to the parties closely approximates common knowledge, so frequently a necessary assumption for solutions to iterated dilemma games.”

“Rather, the process of institutional change in all basins involved many small steps that had low initial costs.”

“Each institutional change became the foundation for the next change.”

“What is presumed to be a second-order dilemma, in which institutional change is viewed as one large step, may or may not have the structure of a dilemma when institutional change is viewed as a sequential and incremental process.”

“Given the different technologies in use, any rules that were defined to limit use would tend to benefit one subgroup over another, rather than benefit all in a similar manner.”

“In 1964, for example, the California Department of Water Resources published a report that denied the existence of overdraft conditions in two of the large sub basins included within the region under adjudication.”

“Individuals who do not have similar images of the problems they face, who do not work out mechanisms to disaggregate complex problems into subparts, and who do not recognize the legitimacy of diverse interests, are unlikely to solve their problems, even when the institutional means to do so are available to them.”

“If these participants are able to make an end run around local authorities, rule enforcement can be disrupted, even when most appropriators strongly prefer tight enforcement.”

“External intervention to prevent rule enforcement against political favorites undermines the viability of common property arrangements.”

“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.”

“Further, it is doubtful that any national agency can ever have the extensive time and place information needed to tailor a set of rules to the particulars of local situations.”

“Thus, no more than three of the design principles characterized any of the cases in which CPR appropriators were clearly unable to solve the problems they faced.”

“Until the rights of farmers are clearly recognized and guaranteed and conflict resolution mechanisms are in place, however, I am unwilling to assume that these are robust institutions.”

“The collapse of the Pacific sardine fishery and the collapse of the Antarctic blue whale fishery are tragic testimony to the capacity of these models to predict outcomes in empirical situations approximating the theoretical conditions.”

“Instead of being wrong, these are special models that utilize extreme assumptions rather than general theories.”

“When models that assume no communication and no capacity to change the rules are applied to the smaller-scale CPRs, they are applied out of their range. applying models out of range can produce more harm than good.”

“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.”

“Unless monitoring efforts are increased to reverse this trend, rule compliance will cascade downward.”

“In Mojave, by contrast, the approach was to organize a very large unit and attempt to assign, all at one time, water rights for 15 different basins and an underground river system.”

“Success in starting small-scale initial institutions enables a group of individuals to build on the social capital thus created to solve larger problems with larger and more complex institutional arrangements.”

“Rules specifying the opening and closing dates of seasons, such as those used in Swiss and Japanese mountain commons, are far less costly to monitor than are rules that specify a quota for every appropriator in regard to a quantity of appropriation activities, for example, acre-feet of water pumped or tons of fish caught.”

“Rules that bring together those who would be tempted to cheat and those who would be particularly harmed by such cheating are also easier to monitor than are rules that depend on accidental discovery of a rule-breaker by someone who may be only indirectly harmed by the infraction.”

“What worked as an incremental bottom-up strategy at The basin level did not work when attempted at a regional level.”

“In other words, 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.”

“This positive role is quite different from the one envisioned in proposals to centralize control of natural resources.”

“'Polycentric' connotes many centers of decision making that are formally independent of each other.”

“Whether they actually function independently, or instead constitute an interdependent system of relations, is an empirical question in particular cases.”

“We found that while many police departments served 80 metropolitan areas that we studied, duplication of services by more than one department to the same set of citizens rarely occurred”

“In fact, the "most efficient producers supply more output for given inputs in high multiplicity metropolitan areas than do the efficient producers in metropolitan areas with fewer producers" (E. Ostrom and Parks 1999: 287).”

“Metropolitan areas with large numbers of autonomous direct service producers achieved higher levels of technical efficiency (ibid.: 290).”

“We demonstrated that complexity is not the same as chaos in regard to metropolitan governance.”

“Collective-Choice Arrangements: Most individuals affected by a resource regime are authorized to participate in making and modifying its rules.”

“Graduated Sanctions: Sanctions for rule violations start very low but become stronger if a user repeatedly violates a rule.”

“Cox, Arnold, and Villamayor-Tomás (2009) analyzed over 100 studies by scholars who assessed the relevance of the principles as an explanation of the success or failure of diverse common-pool resources.”

“Perhaps I should have used the term "best practices" to describe the rules and structure of robust institutions. studies confirm that robust resource systems are characterized by most of the design principles and that failures are not.”

“studies confirm that robust resource systems are characterized by most of the design principles and that failures are not.”