Ostrom's Answer: Why a Commons Is Not Doomed

In one line

Eight things that are true of the commons which have lasted for centuries, and false of the ones that collapsed.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Elinor Ostrom, whose Nobel lecture of 8 December 2009 records that Hardin's portrayal of the users of a common-pool resource, a pasture open to all, being trapped in an inexorable tragedy of overuse was widely accepted because it matched the prediction of no cooperation in a Prisoner's Dilemma, showed by field study of irrigation systems, forests, pastures and fisheries that users often do make and enforce their own rules, and identified the features that the long-surviving systems share and the failed ones lack.

The eight design principles

Ostrom's own caution first, because it is worth a mark. She says in the lecture that the term "design principle" has confused readers and that she should perhaps have said "best practices"; the users of these systems did not have the principles in their minds. They are a description of what survived, not a blueprint.

1A, user boundaries. Clear and locally understood boundaries between legitimate users and non-users.

1B, resource boundaries. Clear boundaries separating the resource itself from the larger system around it.

2A, congruence with local conditions. The rules about taking from the resource and about maintaining it are congruent with local social and environmental conditions.

2B, appropriation and provision. The rules about taking are congruent with the rules about maintaining, so that the distribution of costs is proportional to the distribution of benefits.

3, collective-choice arrangements. Most of the individuals affected are authorised to participate in making and modifying the rules.

4A, monitoring users, and 4B, monitoring the resource. The monitors are accountable to the users, or are the users themselves.

5, graduated sanctions. Sanctions for breaking a rule start very low and become stronger if the user repeats the breach.

6, conflict-resolution mechanisms. Rapid, low-cost, local arenas for resolving disputes among users or with officials.

7, minimal recognition of rights. The government recognises the right of the local users to make their own rules.

8, nested enterprises. Where the resource is part of a larger system, governance is organised in multiple nested layers.

The lecture also records the evidence. Cox, Arnold and Villamayor-Tomas analysed over a hundred studies and two-thirds confirmed that robust systems display most of the principles and that failures do not.

Reading Indian law against the eight

This is where the chapter earns its place in an LL.M. paper, because each principle names something an Indian statute either does or conspicuously fails to do.

Boundaries, 1A and 1B. The Forest Rights Act's community forest resource is a boundary drawn by the Gram Sabha around the forest a village has traditionally used; the reserved forest boundary under the 1927 Act is drawn by the settlement officer. The first is a user boundary and the second is an exclusion boundary, and the difference is the whole history of Indian forest conflict.