Heartwood friend and supporter Elinor Ostrom wins Nobel Prize in Economics
by Sarah Mincey
I have been privileged to work with Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom during my graduate career at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) at Indiana University (IU). I say privileged because Lin is not only an amazing intellectual and researcher, but she is a down-to-earth, kind-hearted, and positive human being (she has been consistently supportive and encouraging of my work, and has repeatedly endowed her academic financial awards—including the Nobel—to student scholarship). My experiences began with Lin in 2006 when, wanting to compliment my doctoral research in forest ecology, management, and policy work, I took a research methodology course with her regarding the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) Program that she devised in the early 1990s.
The IFRI research initiative, spawned by the Food and Agriculture Organization’s request that Lin create a database structure that would record and store forestry resources and institutions data for cross-site and over-time analysis, was created at the Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis at IU and examines how governance arrangements affect forests and the people who depend on them. The IFRI website explains, “The goal of the program is to carry out rigorous research that can help policy makers and forest users design and implement improved evidence-based forest policies. Researchers use a common data collection method to ensure that sites can be compared across space and time. The unique database contains information about forest ecology, livelihood, governance arrangements, and forest user groups for over 250 sites in 15 countries between 1992 and the present.” Five of these sites, which I have studied with Lin, are forested communities in southern Indiana.
IFRI and much of Lin’s work has been focused on studying the governance arrangements that result in sustainable forest management. The oft -cited spur of Lin’s research is Garret Hardin’s 1968 “Tragedy of the Commons,” in which the ecologist argued that common pool resources (resources, including forests and their ecosystem services, that are both non-excludable and subtractable), when unmanaged, will be destroyed by multiple individuals acting independently and rationally in their own self-interest, even though it is not in anyone's long term interest for this to happen. Hardin further argued that sustainable management could only come from government or private entities. The issue taken up by Lin’s lifetime of work is that Hardin's bleak conclusions were an "overstatement" of the case; government and private entities are not the only answer to sustainable management. In fact, Lin’s research has shown that communities can sustainably manage a common-pool resource through effective collective action, and that sometimes top-down or centralized management from government and private entities can actually have the unintended consequence of derailing community-led sustainable management of a resource when community knowledge is discounted in establishing management rules.
Along with this concept, Lin examined whether any broad “principles” existed that appeared to characterize sustainable resource systems. In Governing the Commons (1990), she posited a set of eight general design principles that appeared to characterize the effectiveness of multiple types of rules and sets of rules for sustainable management:
1. Clearly defined boundaries: Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the common pool resource (CPR) must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself.
2. Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions: Appropriation rules restricting time, place, technology, and/or quantity of resource units are related to local conditions and to provision rules requiring labor, material, and/or money.
3. Collective-choice arrangements: Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rules.
4. Monitoring: Monitors, who actively audit CPR conditions and appropriator behavior, are accountable to the appropriators or are the appropriators.
5. Graduated sanctions: Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and the context of the offense) by other appropriators, by officials accountable to these appropriators, or both.
6. Conflict-resolution mechanisms: Appropriators and their officials have rapid access to low-cost local arenas to resolve conflicts among appropriators or between appropriators and officials.
7. Minimal recognition of rights to organize: The rights of appropriators to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external governmental authorities.
8. Nested enterprises: Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.
Lin's lifetime of research, and in particular, the design principles and her work with IFRI, should be of particular interest to members of Heartwood and others interested in sustainable management of our nation’s forests. In my opinion, her work underscores the importance of direct involvement of communities in establishing rules that effect the management of forests, and the importance of nested management arrangements (read: co-management or participation in management of non-governmental and watchdog organizations like Heartwood). Her Design Principles lead us to ask significant questions of the governance arrangements that face National Forests: do these principles characterize the rules and the relationships involved in forest management? Do they offer a picture of sustainable forest systems? If not, how can we begin to use this rigorous research to help policy makers and forest users design and implement improved evidence-based forest policies?
Sarah Mincey is a member of Heartwood and board member for Kentucky Heartwood. She is a PhD student in Environmental Science at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) at Indiana University. Her research focuses on management of social-ecological systems, in particular community and urban forest management. She collaborates with Lin and other researchers at the Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis and the Center for the study of Institutions, Populations, and Environmental Change (CIPEC).