Hardly a week goes by without a major news story about the threatened destruction of a valuable natural resource,

Elinor Ostrom wrote more than thirty years ago¹:

The issues of how best to govern natural resources used by many individuals in common are no more settled in academia than in the world of politics. Some scholarly articles about the “tragedy of the commons” recommend that “the state” control most natural resources to prevent their destruction (Leviathan as the “only” way); others recommend that privatizing those resources will resolve the problem (Privatization as the “only” way). What one can observe in the world, however, is that neither the state nor the market is uniformly successful in enabling individuals to sustain long-term, productive use of natural resource systems.

We do not yet have the necessary inlellectual tools or models to understand the array of problems that are associated with governing and managing natural resource systems and the reasons why some institutions seem to work in some setrings and nol olhers.

Around 65% of Earth’s land and vast tracts of the ocean are common-pool resources (CPR) — forests, fisheries, and irrigation systems to which many people have access. And we are today in a renewed battle to close information goods (put them behind a wall), when the only way to move forward with a true information society (and to build “artificial intelligence”) is to share information and knowledge⁵.

Information that used to be “free” is now increasingly being privatized, monitored, encrypted, and restricted. The enclosure is caused by the conflicts and contradictions between intellectual property laws and the expanded capacities of new technologies.

How can collective property rights evolve to manage otherwise open-access resources?

Elinor Ostrom provided a fundamental insight with the eight design principles described in her seminal “Governing the Commons.” Over the past three decades, her design principles have been subject to extensive debate and elaboration, and many studies have explicitly or implicitly evaluated them. In her Nobel Lecture², December 8, 2009, Ostrom presented an updated list, drawing from commonalities found in those studies³.

• 1A. User Boundaries: Clear and locally understood boundaries between legitimate users and nonusers are present.
• 1B. Resource Boundaries: Clear boundaries that separate a specific commonpool resource from a larger social-ecological system are present.
• 2A. Congruence with Local Conditions: Appropriation and provision rules are congruent with local social and environmental conditions.
• 2B. Appropriation and Provision: Appropriation rules are congruent with provision rules; the distribution of costs is proportional to the distribution of benefits.Collective-Choice Arrangements: Most individuals affected by a resource regime are authorized to participate in making and modifying its rules.
• 4A. Monitoring Users: Individuals who are accountable to or are the users monitor the appropriation and provision levels of the users.
• 4B. Monitoring the Resource: Individuals who are accountable to or are the users monitor the condition of the resource.
• 5. Graduated Sanctions: Sanctions for rule violations start very low but become stronger if a user repeatedly violates a rule.
• 6. Conflict-Resolution Mechanisms: Rapid, low-cost, local arenas exist for resolving conflicts among users or with officials.
• 7. Minimal Recognition of Rights: The rights of local users to make their own rules are recognized by the government.
• 8. Nested Enterprises: When a common-pool resource is closely connected to a larger social-ecological system, governance activities are organized in multiple nested layers.

However, so far little direct attention has been paid to the processes whereby human groups establish and stabilize exclusive access over previously open-access resources and how this group ownership affects the evolution of sustainable use rights.

A new study⁴ in Nature Sustainability lays out a simulation model to examine the emergence, stability, and temporal dynamics of collective property rights. Building on recent work in cultural evolution, the paper presents a set of models (agent-based and difference equation models) of how collective property rights over natural resources can emerge, the challenges groups face in establishing them and the precise role these rights play in sustainable governance:

We introduce a generic evolutionary multigroup modelling framework that examines the emergence, stability and temporal dynamics of collective property rights. Our research reveals a fundamental insight: when intergroup conflicts over resources exist, establishing and enforcing ‘access rights’ becomes an essential prerequisite for evolving sustainable ‘use rights’. These access rights, in turn, enable cultural group selection and facilitate the evolution of sustainable use rights through the imitation of successful groups.

Moreover, we identify four crucial aspects within these systems:
(1) seizures in CPR systems create individual-level incentives to enforce use and access rights;
(2) support for collective property rights is frequency dependent and prone to oscillations;
(3) the maximum sustainable yield (MSY) is a tipping point that alters the interplay between individual and group-level selection pressures;
(4) success-biased social learning (imitation) of out-group members plays a vital role in spreading sustainable institutions and preventing the tragedy of the commons.

Coming back to Elinor Ostrom.

The economic and social sciences have significantly moved ahead over the past five decades since scholars posited two optimal organizational forms (market and state), two types of goods (private and public), and one model of the individual (rational).

15 years have passed since Ostrom received the Nobel Prize, and we are on the way of another two lost decades on practical progress.

Unfortunately, policy analysts, public officials, and scholars who still apply simple mathematical models to the analysis of field settings have not yet absorbed the central lessons articulated here.

Not to mention those other public officials who govern us not particularly interested in the common good.

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(1) Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge university press, 1990.

(2) Elinor Ostrom, Prize Lecture, 2009: ‘Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems’. American Economic Review 100, no. 3 (June 2010): 641–72. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.100.3.641.

(3) Cox12, Michael, Gwen Arnold123, and Sergio Villamayor Tomás123. ‘A Review and Reassessment of Design Principles for Community-Based Natural Resource Management’. Politics 32 (2010): 234–62.

(4) Andrews, Jeffrey, Matthew Clark, Vicken Hillis, and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder. ‘The Cultural Evolution of Collective Property Rights for Sustainable Resource Governance’. Nature Sustainability, 19 February 2024, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01290-1.

(5) Hess, Charlotte, and Elinor Ostrom. 2003. ‘Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource’. Law and Contemporary Problems 66 (1/2): 111–45. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20059174.

Featured Image: Lexica Art