Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Ostrom's central idea




Elinor Ostrom was a very important contributor to the theory of public rationality and the institutions that underlie cooperation, and she was most deserving of the recognition that accompanied her receipt of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009.  Her passing today is a sad loss for the academic world.

Her key contributions were included in Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, a masterful book that presents a new theoretical framework and body of empirical evidence for conceiving of the ways in which human communities can handle common property resources -- forests, fishing grounds, grazing areas, water supplies. Anyone interested in the ways that collective action works in practice will want to read the book. (See also Baden and Noonan, Managing the Commons, Second Edition for an important set of perspectives on "managing the commons" and solving common property resource problems.)

Rational choice theory has been unfriendly to the idea that communities can self-regulate when it comes to public goods and public harms.  Garrett Hardin offered the theory of the "tragedy of the commons", in which he argues that rational egoists will inevitably overuse a common resource. And Mancur Olson offered similar arguments about the feasibility of collective action in an extended group in The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Against these views, Ostrom and her research collaborators demonstrated that human communities have actually created a number of informal institutional complexes for regulating access to common resources that succeed in creating a stable balance between use and resource renewal.

Here is how Ostrom casts the problem in Governing the Commons:

The term “common-pool resource” refers to a natural or man-made resource system that is sufficiently large as to make it costly (but not impossible) to exclude potential beneficiaries from obtaining benefits from its use. (30)
Instead of presuming that the individuals sharing a commons are inevitably caught in a trap from which they cannot escape, I argue that the capacity of individuals to extricate themselves from various types of dilemma situations varies from situation to situation. The cases to be discussed in this book illustrate both successful and unsuccessful efforts to escape tragic outcomes. (14; kl 306)
Institutions are rarely either private or public -- "the market" or "the state." Many successful CPR intitutions are rich mixtures of "private-like" and "public-like" institutions defying classification in a sterile dichotomy. By "successful," I mean institutions that enable individuals to achieve productive outcomes in situations where temptations to free-ride and shirk are ever present. A competitive market -- the epitome of private institutions -- is itself a public good. (14; kl 311)
Ostrom demonstrated, both theoretically and empirically, that legal regulation is not the only possible solution to public goods problems. Instead she documents community-based solutions to common property resource problems that have proved successful over multiple generations. These are quasi-voluntary arrangements through which a community of users (fishers, grazers, irrigators) are able to manage the resource collectively and control violators, in such a way as to preserve the resource over time. And she points out that these institutions can be self-maintaining, in that participants have an incentive to watch out for cheaters and shirkers.  In describing the Alanya inshore fishing system in detail she writes, "The process of monitoring and enforcing the system is, however, accomplished by the fishers themselves as a by-product of the incentive created by the rotation system" (19-20; kl 378).

Given that common property resource problems are ubiquitous, her policy recommendation are sensible ones:

An important challenge facing policy scientists is to develop theories of human organization based on realistic assessment of human capabilities and limitations in dealing with a variety of situations that initially share some or all aspects of a tragedy of the commons. (23; kl 436)
What is missing from the policy analyst's tool kit -- and from the set of accepted, well-developed theories of human organization -- is an adequately specified theory of collective action whereby a group of principals can organize themselves voluntarily to retain the residuals of their own efforts. Examples of self-organized enterprises abound. (24; kl 449)
Essentially her research comes down to this point: There are multiple possible property systems through which access to natural resources can be mediated. A simple Lockean theory of private property holds that all goods have individual private owners. It is possible, however, to conceive of forms of “social property” or community property through which at least some assets are held in common, and for which there are fair and well-defined procedures for providing rights of access to the use and enjoyment of the social property.

As Ostrom demonstrated in depth, there are socially feasible arrangements in which a “common property resource” such as a fish stock is exploited by a number of independent producers within the context of a stable community.  In this instance we have a combination of private property (nets and boats) and social property (the waterway and fish stock), and Ostrom documents several different sets of social rules that establish the terms of access and use that individuals will have to the common property resource.

There is extensive debate over the economic efficiency or viability of social property arrangements such as these. Concerning fisheries and traditional practices of forestry, for example, there is the familiar argument that rationally induced free-riding will eventually undermine the community-based rules of use. The point here not that social property regimes are superior, but rather that they are possible. And Ostrom's research illustrates a great variety of common-property resource regimes that appear to be efficient and stable.  It is therefore a matter of public debate which particular rules and institutions ought to govern the use of property. And there may be something in this finding that provides new ways of thinking about economic arrangements in the twenty-first century as well.

(I had an interesting exchange with Ostrom on the occasion of her receiving an honorary degree from the University of Michigan in 2006. I raised the topic of agriculture and food within the world economy and referred to a continuing debate I'd been having with my daughter about traditional farming versus largescale industrial agriculture.  My argument was that traditional farming was not productive enough to feed the world's population, and my daughter's view was that industrial agriculture is unsustainable and destructive of existing rural communities.  I asked Ostrom about her opinion.  Her response was: "you are both right." In hindsight, after rereading Governing the Commons, I'm inclined to interpret her response as expressing the idea that solutions to our large global problems need to be mixed solutions. Her work on self-governing community-based systems for making use of resources suggests that she would have some sympathy for the continuing significance of traditional farming systems within the larger context of the world agriculture system. But at the same time, she was always insistent that we need to be realistic about the assumptions about behavior that underly the solutions we recommend.)

10 comments:

Linca said...

About the last point, but kind of related to the main point - following Marcel Mazoyer, or Scott's Seein like a State, my understanding of agricultural productivity is that whatever the technical level, best productivity is reached with family-manned units of half a dozen workers, not large scale kolkhozes or industrial farms.

For example, (and I believe the picture at the top comes from VietNam ?), the Vietnamese Deltas are the most productive cultivated land around, and despite having the population density of you average Texas city downtown, and little to no mechanisation - no tractors for example - manage to export huge amounts of rice. The export surplus was created the year the land was returned from the collectivised organisations to the peasants families... And of course still require well-functioning, delta-scaled irrigation schemes (that are now being threatened by China keeping the water upstream).

Peter T said...

Joachim Radkau (Nature and Power) makes the point that management of environmental commons is an affair of balancing multiple local interests in the light of specific local knowledge. Only localised management does this well, and it has failed wherever local management has been superceded by a more distant, larger power.

On the issue of productivity - it might not matter if small farms are less economically efficient than large ones if the key issue is restoring and maintaining environmental balance - many of us can eat less, but most of us won't be eating at all if the critical systems collapse.

Anonymous said...

Dan, Can you tell us where the various quotations come form - those that are kl + page are not from Lin's CUP book.

On the debate with your daughter, my understanding, perhaps mistaken, is that economies of scale do not always hold in agriculture. Just don't ask me where I got that notion!

Thanks,
Jim

Dan Little said...

Jim, I've now placed the page numbers into the citations in the post. You should be able to find them in the 1990 paper edition. Thanks for the comment about agriculture as well -- as Linca and Peter T also pointed out. Nonetheless: it's hard to see producing enough rice and grain for 8 billion people with non-mechanized, low-fertilizer, low-pesticide farming techniques -- isn't it?

Dan Little said...

Linca, Thanks. Yes, the photo is from Vietnam. I'm looking at a few rice productivity statistics. Rice yields in traditional methods of cultivation in many parts of the world seem to average about 3600 kg/ha. Annual consumption needs in rice-intensive nutritional systems seem to average about 125 kg/capita milled rice (proportionally more unhusked rice). One estimate of labor input for Indonesian traditional rice farming that I was able to locate indicates about 1,500 hours per hectare -- close to one person-year per hectare (since agricultural labor isn't evenly distributed over the year). This implies the world would need close to 280 million rice farmers to supply rice to the global population. I think these figures also support your point about export rice production too -- each family could market about 80% of its crop. Of course these aren't the kinds of estimates that a real agricultural economist would be comfortable with!

Linca said...

Vietnam agriculture uses quite a lot of fertilizers (quite a few buffalos around, for pulling, not food) and especially pesticides ; rice varieties are also getting agronomical selection treatment.

The main problem about intensive rice cultivation is that there's not that many places in the world where it's a possible option... And the extension of HaNoi and SaiGon is destroying large quantities of that precious land.

One thing to remember is that modern agriculture in the West is optimised for productivity per worker, not per unit of land as in the rice deltas - and the more clearly limited resource is land, not workers...

Anonymous said...

Dan,
Thanks for the citations.

On the substantive point I may have been talking somewhat at cross-purposes. There are two issues scale and intensity. The economies of scale point I made seems correct (See Pranab Barhan Scarcity, Conflict & Cooperation MIT 2005 - page 33).

That does not address your point re: technical improvements. I am no luddite!

Anonymous said...

PS: I am coming to AA Monday 6/18 for a month. It would be great to meet up if you have time. I will email your office. JIm

Anonymous said...

Regarding your last point (productivity from small-scale ag), there is significant debate. In short, it is far from clear we that small-scale agriculture "cannot" be sufficiently productive, for numerous reasons, including: the 20-50% of recoverable food that is wasted worldwide; uneven distribution of food in most societies; seemingly high productivity of small-scale farms; "apples vs. oranges" comparison of small farms vs. large in that small farms with polycultures usually have their yields judged on a "single crop productivity per area" basis to compare to the same crops on large-scale farms even though they are producing a greater biomass of *total food* per unit area.

Robert Netting, among others, showed relatively high productivity from small farms, though Netting was always cautious in interpreting and generalizing this. Miguel Altieri has also consistently documented/claimed this higher productivity.

Highlights in this literature:
Rosset, The Multiple Functions and Benefits of Small Farm Agriculture
www.foodfirst.org/files/pb4.pdf

The International Assessment of Agriculture Knowledge, Science, Technology & Development (IAASTD), an internationally peer-reviewed report with over 200 contributing scientists: http://agassessment.org/ (full disclosure: I have a minor contribution to the report)

UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food:
http://www.srfood.org/images/stories/pdf/officialreports/20110308_a-hrc-16-49_agroecology_en.pdf

Small scale/organic ag in Africa:
unctad.org/en/docs/ditcted200715_en.pdf

It's also far from clear that large-scale agriculture can be maintained or cost-effective as oil becomes more and more scarce! And I've yet to see anyone establish how much of industrial ag's "economies of scale" result from being able to demand lower prices from suppliers (because of scale) as opposed to actually using biophysical resources more efficiently.

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