The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom: Essential Lessons for Collective Action

By Erik Nordman

In the 1970s, the accepted environmental thinking was that overpopulation was destroying the earth. Prominent economists and environmentalists agreed that the only way to stem the tide was to impose restrictions on how we used resources, such as land, water, and fish, from either the free market or the government. This notion was upended by Elinor Ostrom, whose work to show that regular people could sustainably manage their community resources eventually won her the Nobel Prize. Ostrom’s revolutionary proposition fundamentally changed the way we think about environmental governance. 
 
In The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom, author Erik Nordman brings to life Ostrom’s brilliant mind. Half a century ago, she was rejected from doctoral programs because she was a woman; in 2009, she became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. Her research challenged the long-held dogma championed by Garrett Hardin in his famous 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which argued that only market forces or government regulation can prevent the degradation of common pool resources. The concept of the “Tragedy of the Commons” was built on scarcity and the assumption that individuals only act out of self-interest. Ostrom’s research proved that people can and do act in collective interest, coming from a place of shared abundance. Ostrom’s ideas about common resources have played out around the world, from Maine lobster fisheries, to ancient waterways in Spain, to taxicabs in Nairobi. In writing The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom, Nordman traveled extensively to interview community leaders and stakeholders who have spearheaded innovative resource-sharing systems, some new, some centuries old. Through expressing Ostrom’s ideas and research, he also reveals the remarkable story of her life.
 
Ostrom broke barriers at a time when women were regularly excluded from academia and her research challenged conventional thinking. Elinor Ostrom proved that regular people can come together to act sustainably—if we let them. This message of shared collective action is more relevant than ever for solving today’s most pressing environmental problems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Jul 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781642831566

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About Island Press

Since 1984, the nonprofit organization Island Press has been stimulating, shaping, and communicating ideas that are essential for solving environmental problems worldwide. With more than 1,000 titles in print and some 30 new releases each year, we are the nation’s leading publisher on environmental issues. We identify innovative thinkers and emerging trends in the environmental field. We work with world-renowned experts and authors to develop cross-disciplinary solutions to environmental challenges.

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The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom

ESSENTIAL LESSONS FOR COLLECTIVE ACTION

Erik Nordman

with

Photographs by Jason Reblando

Washington | Covelo

© 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

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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

ISBN-13: 978-1-64283-156-6 (electronic)

To Linnea and Garrett

Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: What’s So Tragic about the Commons?

Chapter 2: Los Angeles Groundwater

Chapter 3: Maine’s Lobster Gangs

Chapter 4: Spain’s Ancient Water Court

Chapter 5: Institutions for Collaborative Forest Management

Chapter 6: The Climate Commons

Chapter 7: Voluntary Environmental Programs

Chapter 8: Commons in Space

Chapter 9: Commons in the Digital World

Chapter 10: A Nobel Prize for Institutions and a Pathbreaking Life

Notes

About the Author

Index

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 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.

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.

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 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.¹

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 common-pool 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.

Image: Figure 1.1 The Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University. (Credit: Jason Reblando.)

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 Ostrom was starting her career. Ostrom’s work is inseparable from that of another scholar, Garrett Hardin.

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 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.

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 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 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