Institutions for Solving Commons Problems

The public-choice–inspired research program associated with Elinor Ostrom and her collaborators identified eight design principles, noting that they characterize robust institutions for communities managing common-pool resources such as forests or fisheries. Ostrom’s principles for sustainable community-based natural resource management have emerged as an important contribution to applied research on governance in general. Since then, many studies have explicitly or implicitly assessed these design principles. This chapter reviews the principles, surveys the studies that have revisited and evaluated them, and discusses some of the implications of this line of research, at both the theoretical-methodological level and the applied level.