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Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom

Vlad Tarko

(2016)

Abstract

Elinor Ostrom was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics. She has been at the forefront of New Institutional Economics and Public Choice revolutions, discovering surprising ways in which communities around the world have succeed in solving difficult collective problems. She first rose to prominence by studying the police in metropolitan areas in the United States, and showing that, contrary to the prevailing view at the time, community policing and smaller departments worked better than centralized and large police departments. Together with her husband, Vincent, they have set up the Bloomington Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, which has grown into a global network of scholars and practitioners. Throughout her career, she was interested in studying ecological problems, and understanding how people manage communal properties. Her most famous discovery is that communities often find ingenious ways of escaping the “tragedy of the commons”. Analysing a wide-variety of successes and failures, and working together with many other scholars, she was able to uncover a series of institutional “design principles”: a set of criteria which, if followed, societies are more likely to be productive and resilient to shocks. Some of her most important theoretical insights, about polycentricity and institutional evolution, arose from this synthesizing effort. Furthermore, this led her to develop a framework for the study of the relationship between societies and their natural environment which brought institutional insights into the field of environmental studies.

Tarko’s concise intellectual biography of Elinor Ostrom provides readers with an authoritative account of the Bloomington School and is a masterful work of political economy in its own right. The fields of economics, political science, and philosophy would be far better off if Ostrom’s insights were more widely understood, and this book should help to make that happen.
Jason Brennan, Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Chair and Associate Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy, the McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University
[T]he book presents, in a systematic way, an excellent and easy-to-read exposition of the Ostroms’ approach to social science.
Vald Tarko has provided a brilliant overview of what Lin Ostrom often referred to as her and Vincent's "polycentric journey". Along the way she studied local public economies, the wrestling with common-pool resources throughout the world, and the complexity of economic development. Her enduring research legacy is to be found in both her multiple methodologies approach to studying institutional diversity, and the conclusions she drew on the possibility and sustainability of self-governing democratic societies. Tarko's book is a must read not only to those who want to learn about Elinor Ostrom and her contributions, but to all students of political economy.
Peter J. Boettke, Professor, George Mason University
This is a masterful account of Ostrom's work. An inspiring synthesis, of an inspiring intellectual life.
Mark Pennington, Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy, King's College London
Vlad Tarko's book adds a valuable perspective on the ideas and work of Elinor Ostrom plus that of Vincent Ostrom and the Bloomington Workshop they established. The extent of their influence, and the reasons for it, come through clearly in these pages. It will be useful for readers looking for an introduction to Elinor's work, and enjoyable for readers who are already familiar with it.
William Blomquist, Professor, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
Vlad Tarko is Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics, Dickinson College, USA.

Tarko does an outstanding job capturing the breadth and depth of Lin’s work to produce a course in the New Institutional Economics, as well as an intellectual history of Lin, Vincent and the many scholars associated with the Workshop in Political theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University.
Robert L. Bish, Professor Emeritus, Economics and Public Administration, University of Virginia
Vlad Tarko has written more than an intellectual biography of one of the most influential social scientists of her generation. His book is at the same time an insightful introduction and a nuanced interpretation of a fascinating research program with significant applied-level implications.
Paul Dragos Aligica, George Mason University

Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Cover Cover 1
Half Title i
Title Page iii
Copyright Page iv
Table of Contents v
List of Figures vii
List of Tables ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Overcoming Prejudice 3
Basic Principles of Institutional Economics 5
What Are Institutions? 5
Transaction Costs 7
The Limits of Institutional Design 11
The Role of the Expert 14
Vincent Ostrom’s Contribution to the Alaskan Constitution 14
The Expert as a Catalyst of Self-Governance 15
Notes 17
Chapter One Against Gargantua 19
From Ucla To Indiana 21
The Complexity of Public Services 26
The Rise and Fall of Community Policing 32
How Reliable Are Citizens’ Surveys? 34
The Failure of “Community Policing” 35
The Impossibility of Efficient Hierarchical Public Economies 40
Control Over the Cause of the Problem 42
Accurately Measuring the Demand for Public Goods and the Opportunity Cost of Providing Them 44
Fiscal Equivalence and Redistribution 46
The Separation of Production and Provision 49
Notes 50
Chapter Two Polycentricity 53
A Few Examples of Large-Scale Polycentric Systems 58
The Scientific Community 58
Common Law 61
Federalism 62
Polycentricity as a Framework for the Analysis of Emergent Orders 64
Complex Adaptive Systems 65
Vincent Ostrom’s Polycentricity Conjecture 67
Notes 68
Chapter Three Escaping the Tragedy of the Commons 69
Beyond Markets and Governments 76
Civil Society Is a Real Thing 77
The Hard Case: Common-Pool Resources 78
What are Property Rights? 82
Property Is a Bundle of Rights 83
Self-Governance Depends on Mechanisms for Monitoring and Enforcing Rules 86
Why State Solutions Often Fail 87
The Complexity and Limits of Private Property 89
Summary 92
Bottom-Up Solutions to Social Dilemmas 93
From Prisoners’ Dilemma to the Stag Hunt 96
Beyond the Prisoners’ Dilemma Model 99
Note 101
Chapter Four Resilience 103
Conceptualizing Resilience 105
An Equilibrium Perspective 105
Highly Optimized Tolerance 106
The Problem of Self-Interested Actors Evading Rules 107
Polycentricity as a Method to Design Resilient Systems 108
Avoiding Slippery Slopes 110
Entrepreneurship, Creative Destruction, and the Red Queen Race 113
Summary 117
Elinor Ostrom’s “Design Principles” for Resilient Systems 119
The Operational Level 121
The Collective Choice Level 125
The Constitutional Level 130
How General Are These Principles? 132
Notes 135
Chapter Five Hamilton’s Dilemma 137
The Institutional Analysis and Development (Iad) Framework 143
Action Arenas and Institutional Roles 146
Evaluation of Outcomes 150
Example: Socioecological Resilience 152
Institutional Factors 152
The Action Arena 154
Patterns of Interactions and the Evaluation of Outcomes 155
Institutional Evolution and Public Entrepreneurship 156
Rules as the Basic Unit of Institutional Evolution 157
Public Entrepreneurship 158
Coproduction 161
Building a Science Of Association 165
References 173
Index 189