Working Together—A Q&A with Elinor Ostrom

http://www.research.indiana.edu/magazine/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=89&catid=44&Itemid=78

In October 2009, Elinor Ostrom received The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

Ostrom is the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of political science in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington and a founding director of the IU Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis.

She shares the award with Oliver Williamson, Edgar F. Kaiser Professor Emeritus of business and of economics and law at University of California Berkeley. Ostrom received her award “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons,” according to the Nobel Prize Foundation. She is the first woman to receive the economics prize.

Ostrom began her career at IU Bloomington in 1965 and co-founded the Workshop in 1973 with her husband, Vincent Ostrom, the Arthur F. Bentley Professor Emeritus of political science. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and a recipient of many other awards. Her books include Governing the Commons, Understanding Institutional Diversity, and the forthcoming Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice (with Amy Poteete and Marco Janssen).

In early 2010, Ostrom shared some thoughts with Research & Creative Activity about climate change, trust, and how to solve the “refrigerator problem.”

R&CA: You have a strong belief in ability of the average person to figure things out, but the political and economic questions of our day seem hopelessly complex. How is it possible for an average person to figure out or understand enough to take on such tough issues?

Ostrom: I don’t expect that the average person is going to be able to figure out how to get global leaders to agree on an issue such as climate change. But let’s take the example of the ‘refrigerator problem’ in an office where a refrigerator must be shared. Here at the Workshop, we have a kitchen, and we have had refrigerator problems. There’s a sign in our kitchen now that says, ‘Help us with our commons.’ We ask everyone to pitch in. We talk about it from time to time in staff meetings. We have a number of little routine ways that we all share, and it works pretty well.

Now, apply that to a neighborhood. If you’ve got a problem of, say, a neighborhood park not being well taken care of, and you have a way of meeting in the neighborhood face-to-face, people can figure things out. You might say, ‘OK, let’s go to the City Hall and discuss this. If they’ll help us out, then we’ll create a pickup crew. If we split it, and each of us does a pickup once a week or so, then we can make it work.’

We should not just ask the city to do everything. There are things they can do, and things we can do. For those problems that we can see and interact with, I’m arguing that public policy has frequently taken away the presumption of respect.

Then, broaden it out to watching what farmers do with irrigation systems. Sometimes they’ve got really difficult problems. I’ve seen farmers who have dug through a hill. That’s a pretty substantial engineering task, and the farmers have done it themselves.

When we get to the global level, what I argue is, if we wait around for global leaders and that’s all we do, we’re sunk. I’m currently trying to write several things about that. There’s a lot we can do. For example, here at the Workshop, we’re looking at different ways we can reduce overuse of our heating system.

There is a sense that what we do as individuals has one big cost to the globe. But my argument is, there are externalities (or, consequences) at multiple scales. If you bike to work, you are healthier. You’re not making a huge difference to the atmosphere, but you may be making a huge difference in your health. We need to be thinking about the positive externalities. ‘Think globally, act locally’ is not just a slogan. We can, and we must! Because up at the global level, they’re not doing anything!

Look at all that time spent [at the U.N. Climate Change Convention] in Copenhagen, and they still didn’t agree. I was disappointed. I think everyone was. I wasn’t surprised, but I was disappointed. I had hope.

What other things can we do to have an impact on climate change? What difference do our small-scale actions really make?

I don’t want to say to others, ‘You should do it,’ when I’m not willing to do anything. You get benefits from things like composting, because you can have a better garden. Find a neighbor and figure out how to expand things, get the whole neighborhood to recycle. Then maybe you can get the city to do a little bit more, and instead of putting things in the dump, help the city by recycling.
The important question is, How do we get these positive externalities recognized and taken into account?

What should have happened at Copenhagen? What is the role of large-scale governance in this case?

For any approach taken to the global climate, there will be arguments. I don’t know if the best thing is a cap, but it might be. The problem is, if you cap, then those who’ve been big emitters can continue being big emitters for a while, and that isn’t fair to some who haven’t done anything. Getting efficiency, fairness, enforceability—all those things—into one agreement is very, very hard. This is one of the toughest problems we’ve ever faced. I’m very anxious, however, about just sitting around.

Let’s go back to the average citizen. What about competition and self-interest? How does cooperation around common resources win out over ‘not in my backyard’?

It doesn’t, automatically. It takes people recognizing, ‘OK, folks, we really do have a joint problem. We can just let a mess be a mess, but it’s unhealthy for all of us.’ It takes communication. That’s where our experiments [at the Workshop] have given us a strong foundation. If we have an experiment that involves a common-pool resource or public good but there is no communication, then people do not cooperate. There must be some way of people communicating. Face-to-face is better than electronic, but sometimes chat rooms work. There has to be some recognition of ‘we’re in this together.’ This is now sustained by a large number of experiments. Developing a sense of togetherness, norms, responsibilities — humans can do that.

Humans can also be very selfish, and in a competitive market where the good is absolutely private, cooperation means creating a cartel. And that’s not good.

You used the word ‘trust’ repeatedly in your Nobel Memorial Prize lecture. Are you hopeful about the persistence of trust in our world?

Yes! Yes. In small to medium-size groups, it’s really important. In the lab, the face-to-face communication builds trust, agreements, coordination. Without it, you don’t go anywhere.

How much trust is sufficient?

It depends on the scale. If you’re asking me for a dime because other people are putting in a dime, that does not take a lot of trust. But if you ask me to put in half my annual income? It’s a question of scale.

You ended your Nobel Memorial Prize presentation with a reference to ‘a lot of work yet to be done.’ You and the Workshop have been active recently in the International Forestry Resources and Institutions program. Tell us more about that.

The IFRI study started in 1992. We’re now working in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Guatemala, Mexico, Bolivia, Colombia, Nepal, India, and Thailand. We also have a new center in Ethiopia and a new one in China.

The effort is to cross disciplines so that we are doing careful research on both the social and the ecological aspects of how governance affects forests. We had an ecologist design how to take a random sample of the plots, so we go in and measure the trees and all the rest. And then we talk with people to try to find out the ways they are relating. We are studying some government forests, some private, some community forests, and some that appear to have no kind of governance.

What does forest governance mean?

Forest governance means people have made some decisions about who can use the forest, when they can use it, how they can use it, etc. It may be a government who decides, but it might be a local group or an NGO (nongovernmental organization). All of those may involve some kind of governance.

All of them succeed, and all of them fail. There is no one kind of governance that is always successful. What we are finding is that one of the really big factors affecting long-term performance is when the users themselves take on some responsibility for monitoring.

This is totally unexpected in light of the ‘tragedy of commons’ theory of earlier times, but we have very strong evidence now, and we’re talking about large studies.

I don’t refute the ‘tragedy of the commons’ in all cases, though. There are places where the tragedy occurs, such as when the locals don’t monitor things, and the government has hardly any staff.

Again, it goes back to trust.

In your view, are there resources today that should properly be held in common that are not?

Well, not resources, but I’m very concerned that metropolitan areas have moved to metro-wide or very large-scale, especially in education. That is not a common pool resource but it is a public good, and I am very concerned about it. In an awful lot of cases now, the wealthy pull their kids out of schools, and those kids get private education in small classrooms, so we’re getting segregated by wealth. That’s not good. When you see some kid who’s attacked others, look at the size of the high school or school they’re talking about.

It’s not that smaller scale is good for everything. In some cases, schools can go together as a network and order and organize more efficiently. The point is, there are all sorts of ways of organizing at multiple scales, not only big or only small. It goes back to polycentricity. [The title of Ostrom’s Nobel Lecture was “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance in Complex Economic Systems”.]

You have a new book coming out in 2010 called Working Together. What’s that about?

Yes, yes! It’s about working together! One of the real problems in working across disciplines is that we are really speaking multiple languages. Right now in the social sciences, unfortunately, we have this ‘my method is better than yours, my discipline is better than yours’ mentality, which is destructive.

The book’s subtitle is Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice. The other authors have been here as post-docs, so it’s an IU product, even though Amy (Poteete) is in Montreal now and Marco (Janssen) is in Arizona. We worked together, but we brought different skills. The book is about how you can look at theory using lots of different methods such as in-depth case studies, meta-analysis, large-N field studies like IFRI, experiments and modeling, and agent-based modeling.

We start off with where theory was in the 1970s and end with a look at where we are now. We’re trying to illustrate the ability to go back and forth, people working together and multiple methods working together. We learn X from fieldwork, then we go back to the lab where we design a new instrument for the field.

We don’t have a perfect final theory, but we have moved along quite a bit.

Do you think your receipt of a Nobel award in economic sciences makes a statement about cross-disciplinary work?

Well, I don’t know the logic of the selection committee. You can never know what arguments they had. But the award is in economic sciences. They didn’t choose the typical mathematical modeler. It’s not that I’m against mathematical models, I do game theory! But it’s the working together with other things.

Back to the average person one more time. You seem to have an endless faith in ability of people to do the right thing. Do you ever get depressed about the future?

No, I don’t have an endless faith! No! People make bad errors. But it also depends on what you mean by people. People are one thing, institutions are something else. I get very depressed about politicians, and their interest in finding ways of getting big business and others to contribute to campaigns. We can have some very, very, very perverse things happening. In the wrong kind of institutional setting, people can be very selfish. They can harm us all. Just think about warfare, think about what has gone on in places like Darfur.

What are your thoughts about governance in Haiti in the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake there?

It’s a terrible tragedy, but I understand there is a lot of self-
organizing on the streets, just like in New Orleans after Katrina. There is a lot of collective action going on, which made a huge difference in New Orleans. We cannot criticize Haiti at all after the disastrous job we did in New Orleans.