Conservation is largely about institutions, the ‘rules of the game’ that formally and informally mediate interactions between human beings, and between people and the natural resources that we live amidst. Institutions structure people’s economic choices and behavior, and the incentives people in different places possess to use natural resources in different ways. Local institutions governing resources such as rangelands or forests are often the key in determining whether or not such commons are used sustainably or are subject to the ‘tragedy’ of open access depletion. Today, an enormous environmental challenge facing humanity is devising new formal institutions that will limit greenhouse gas emissions into the commons of the global atmosphere. The search for sustainable ways of living on the earth is inherently tied to our ability to devise and enforce such local and global governance institutions.
No individual has contributed more to our contemporary understanding of the role that institutions play in natural resource governance than Elinor Ostrom, the American political scientist who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for her body of work on institutional evolution and collective action. During the past twenty years, Ostrom and her colleagues, many of whom were once among her numerous graduate students, have transformed our understanding of the ways people cooperate to manage resources such as forests, water, fisheries, wildlife, and livestock pasture. Scholastically and analytically, this body of work represents perhaps the single most important contribution to the conservation field during the past two decades.
Ostrom’s work came to the fore in a transformative way with the 1990 publication by Cambridge University Press of her landmark study, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Governing the Commons drew from studies that had been carried out in various parts of the world by other scholars of communal property regimes, where local groups of people cooperated together to collectively manage shared natural resources. The book’s aim was to identify the key ingredients in such sustained collective governance regimes, to describe how they had evolved and how they had endured, and to situate this within a theoretical framework on cooperative human behavior that drew on game theory models such as the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Governing the Commons presented a fundamental challenge to core existing assumptions about natural resource governance and management paradigms of the times. Ostrom took explicit aim at Garret Hardin’s 1968 article on ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, which some surveys have ranked as the most influential scientific article ever published. Hardin’s ‘tragedy’ was based on the premise that when resources are shared by a group of people, each individual possesses incentives to maximize their own consumption (of, say, a communal forest or livestock pasture). The result, as Hardin described it, is the inevitable tragedy of resource depletion, as each user of such commons competes to individually appropriate a greater share to themselves. The implication from Hardin’s paradigm was that sustaining resources required measures that either individualized property rights over resources or that placed those resources squarely in the public realm, where the state could regulate local patterns of use so as to restrictively prevent over-exploitation.
The basis for Ostrom’s challenge to Hardin’s influential paradigm, as presented in Governing the Commons, was both empirical and theoretical. On a practical level, it was apparent that the ‘tragedy’ of over-exploiting shared resources was not, in fact, inevitable, as the work of various commons scholars was revealing. Local communities were, at least in certain contexts, able to sustainably manage common property resources through locally-devised institutions regulating use. On a theoretical level, as game theory modeling by scholars such as Robert Axelrod showed, human cooperation is in fact instrumentally rational in an economic sense.
Governing the Commons laid out a set of basic principles for ‘long-enduring common property regimes’ drawing from a relatively small set of case studies. These factors in sustainable local governance regimes included the ability to make and enforce local rules governing use, the use of sanctions for violators, and linkages to institutions at higher scales. While to many anthropologists and, of course, local communities themselves, many of the arguments of Governing the Commons may seem obvious or intuitive, Ostrom’s work provided legitimacy to local communal management as a sustainable form of resource governance, and an analytic framework to examine the conditions that enable local groups of people to cooperate together in managing natural resources.
Since this initial landmark study, Ostrom’s work has continued to effectively ask this same question: what are the variables that enable people to form sustainable natural resource governance regimes? A range of large-scale research programs has sprung up from this basic line of enquiry, the most notable of which is the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) program, which was initiated in 1992.
IFRI now includes 14 countries and a database of more than 250 forests from these highly variable social, political, and ecological contexts, and as the research program accumulates more and more data, including repeat surveys of the same forests over time, it is producing critical insights on the links between forest condition, institutional arrangements across different scales, and local communities’ abilities to capture economic benefits from forest products. These studies are transforming our understanding of foundational conservation questions such as the relative effectiveness of state protected areas and local management regimes, as well as synergies and trade-offs between local socioeconomic benefits and forests’ ecological values. Recent studies analysing IFRI data also apply these lessons to efforts to combat climate change through payments designed to finance tropical forest conservation as envisioned under the new REDD regime (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), highlighting the importance of local forest stewardship, tenure, monitoring, and rule-making if REDD is to work effectively.
Although Elinor Ostrom’s work on institutional resource governance arrangements has contributed enormously to the integration of social science and biological sciences, as seen for instance in her contributions to the Resilience Alliance, and the influence that resilience thinking has had on, among other things, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, much of the body of common property scholarship has yet to fully penetrate the conservation field. For the 20th anniversary edition of the journal Conservation Biology, Ostrom and Arun Agrawal of the University of Michigan authored a piece lamenting the fact that political science’s role within conservation biology remains largely a ‘dialogue of the deaf ’.
For conservationists and environmental professionals and activists, Ostrom’s Nobel Prize in Economics is perhaps the scholastic equivalent of Wangari Maathai’s 2004 Noble Peace Prize. Maathai’s award, given for her leadership of Kenya’s Greenbelt Movement in making forest conservation a major human rights and political issue in East Africa over the past twenty years, reaffirmed environmental conservation as being a mainstream contemporary security and justice issue of the highest global importance. In recognizing Ostrom’s work, the Nobel committee has highlighted the growing importance of scholarship on the environment and natural resources in the wider context of humanity; it was perhaps not a coincidence that Ostrom’s award occurred the year of the Copenhagen climate summit, including its prominent focus on the links between forest governance and climate change.
This edition of Current Conservation commemorates Ostrom’s Nobel Prize, just over a year later, through several articles on the cutting edge research that has emerged from her work and efforts, and its application to natural resource management efforts around the world. Three of the articles discuss the application of Ostrom’s work for forest conservation in different parts of the developing world, drawing on IFRI research and other studies. While the authors of these pieces are all drawn from Ostrom’s wide network of colleagues and collaborators in the IFRI program and related research initiatives, Brian Jones provides an example from Namibia where Ostrom’s ‘design principles’ were applied in the development of the country’s heralded Communal Conservancies programme without Ostrom herself having any direct involvement with that process. The edition also features a brief interview with Elinor Ostrom herself and a concluding note by a long-time colleague, and Current Conservation advisory board member, Harini Nagendra.
