Elinor Ostrom: Boundary Rules and Governance
In honor of the Economics *Nobel* award to Elinor Ostrom - the first to a woman - here is an excerpt from her talk at the Resilience 2008 conference (video link):
[W]e must have a better behavioral theory of human behavior in social dilemma. We can’t just go with the assumption that everyone is a saint. They’re not. We have mixed types of individuals. People use norms, but it depends on the situation largely, whether or not they can trust and move to reciprocity. … This whole role of trust and reciprocity is crucial to people getting in and either cooperating in a harvest situation or, more importantly, trying to decide what kind of rules they want to design for themselves. …
Using the data that we have been getting from the field and from case studies and from remotely sensed images, what we have repeatedly found is that none … of the governance systems that are recommended as optimal are uniformly effective. We have found governance systems where everyone is coming in and over-harvesting, and it is just a mess. It’s the same with private, and the same with community ownership. None of them work perfectly, or even effectively, everywhere.
When we look at the rules, the actual rules that people develop to limit how and who can withdraw in very specific ways: paying a fee, owning land, owning a fishing berth, taking a test, do you have a history of use, do you live locally. … We have found over a hundred types of boundary rules. It is just amazing, and in other presentations that some of you have heard, I have referred to rules as a type of gene.
