A defining problem of social science is social order. The puzzle of how to initiate and sustain the kinds of cooperation that produce and reproduce well-functioning societies has long been a preoccupation of political philosophers and empirical scientists. This is a fundamentally political question. Provision of security, well-being, and economic and social development requires some form of governance and the resolution or, at least, suppression of conflict. Brute power, the Hobbesian solution, is one route. But another, the one so richly explored by Elinor Ostrom in her book under review, involves more subtle, decentralized, and often shared forms of power than that offered by a central state or hierarchical authority.

Terry Moe (Reference Moe2005) argues that most work based in rational choice tends to inadequately theorize power, that the emphasis on Pareto optimal bargains and Nash equilibria puts to one side the role of power in determining why the bargain takes a particular distributive form and why only some actors are part of the bargain. However, a close reading of Governing the Commons reveals a textured account of power within communities. It also considers the role of power outside the community. Ostrom builds on and makes the foundational work of Robert Axelrod more political; chosen strategies reflect who has monitoring and enforcement power as much or more than the abstract logic of the game. Axelrod is not hostile to the state, but nor is he engaged with it—at least not in The Evolution of Cooperation (Reference Axelrod1984). Ostrom is also distinct from Michael Taylor (Reference Taylor1982) and others who claim that the central government necessarily erodes community and community-based solutions to common-pool resource (CPR) problems. For Ostrom, this is an empirical question, and the assessment of the effect of the state varies among societies and over time. So, too, does the effect of privatization. While she emphasizes the importance of local knowledge and networks, she is also committed to polycentrism, which is effectively a form of specialization and division of labor in governance.

National and province-level governments have roles to play, but they are not always well suited to devising solutions to common-pool resource problems, particularly not those that are localized. For Ostrom, higher-level governments often are an important background condition, providing a framework of rule of law. Robust institutional arrangements depend more on structures of local power in which “monitoring and sanctioning are undertaken not by external authorities but by the participants themselves” (p. 94). She finds, contra much of the literature, that individuals are willing to use personal power against each other to achieve compliance; in her world, the “appropriators in these CPRs have overcome the presumed problem of the second order problem” (p. 94). They are engaging in quasi-voluntary compliance (pp. 94–95);Footnote ¹ eager to uphold the rules themselves, the actors will do so only as long as they are sure others are also upholding the rules. In the Ostrom cases, this involves reciprocity, trust, and the willingness to pay the costs of sanctioning others in one's community. She is keenly aware of the conflicts of interest among participants and of actual conflicts that can arise in efforts to administer and police the commons. She identifies the local governance solutions to these political problems in the nature of the communities and the ways they are able (or not) to evoke personal resources of power.

Governing the Commons significantly advances the analysis of collective action, institutions, and local power. It is also innovative in its combination of theory and fieldwork. The models matter, but so do the details of the cases. In terms of the theory and operationalization of institutional analysis, Ostrom opened the black box. In this book, she plays her flashlight over, but only partially illuminates, the workings and mechanisms potentially at play. She admits this herself in her APSA presidential addressFootnote ² and in numerous and important subsequent research enterprises.

The author's goal has always been twofold: to advance the field but also to stimulate the work of others.Footnote ³ And she has done this. For example, she has pushed for better research on the role of trust and reciprocity in social order. As an active participant in the Russell Sage Foundation Trust project, she explored these issues collaboratively through workshops and an edited volume on cross-disciplinary experimental findings.Footnote ⁴

The book for Russell Sage is grounded in laboratory experiments. Methodologically, the experimental work that generated behavioral economics and influenced Ostrom has taken new and promising turns for those concerned with how communities create and maintain local institutions of governance. Field experiments now allow us to more systematically assess the conditions for promoting cooperation and the forms and norms of reciprocity that support cooperation in multiple and diverse localities.Footnote ⁵ Most of these studies are more concerned with norms of fairness as measured by dictator games, and they share with much experimental work an inattention to the role that power and authority may play in choices. However, there are now those, most notably James Habyarimana and his colleagues (Reference Habyarimana, Humphreys, Posner and Weinstein2007, Reference Habyarimana, Humphreys, Posner and Weinstein2009), who are beginning to disentangle particularistic norms of reciprocity prevalent within a group and the more universal norms of reciprocity provoked by third party sanctioners, which can include government.

Ostrom does, as I have claimed, incorporate issues of power into her analysis, but it is the power to enforce. Her work could be further enriched with increased attention to the ways in which power is relational and how relations of power are entangled with issues of trust. By largely considering societies in which the power differences are relatively small and where the most important conflicts are often between higher levels of government and local communities, she does not go as far as she might in identifying inequalities of power that inhibit trust and constraints on that power, which might facilitate trust. Although there are elements of social exchange and power dependence theory in her approach,Footnote ⁶ they do not play enough of a role. This is in part because the testable implications of power-dependence theory are most likely to be explored in the lab or in network analysis. However, there are those, such as Michael Hechter (Reference Hechter1987), who have used the theory to generate findings and further develop theory by exploring close-knit local communities of the sort Ostrom often studies.

Even within relatively homogenous societies, inequality of power can foster distrust and undermine cooperation unless mutual interdependence is sufficient for the development of norms and sanctions to inhibit defection from cooperative relationships.Footnote ⁷ Henry Farrell's recent workFootnote ⁸ differentiates among modest and significant power asymmetries. In the first instance, trust is possible and perhaps even facilitated. In the second, it is impossible and likely to be a basis of distrust.

I suspect that Ostrom applauds such advances and incorporates them to the extent that they prove useful in the disentangling of the puzzles that fascinate her. They reveal some of the weaknesses in Governing the Commons, but more importantly, they shed greater light on those processes and mechanisms of cooperation and power that her work first, if only partially, illuminated.