A Focus on Important Substantive Problems

In complex social environments involving thousands of individuals, scores of institutional actors, and pressing problems of resource scarcity, how have institutions evolved to manage scarce shared resources in the absence of a central governing authority? Where the market fails, what solutions have people devised to solve shared-use dilemmas? Why do some communities spiral into mutually destructive patterns of behavior while others evolve norms and widely respected rules that allow life to go on, though the norms may be costly to individuals? Is government the solution or is it the problem? The first thing I noticed about Ostrom's writing was that she was not dealing with trivialities. Rather, she picked perhaps the biggest issue of her day, the relation between states and markets. And she came firmly to a conclusion no one liked: Neither should be trusted alone.

This set of concerns had the consequence of placing her work in the crosshairs of an ideological divide as powerful as any in modern politics. Add to that the disciplinary wars about deduction and induction and it is clear: Not only is she comfortable with the ambiguity and messiness associated with how institutions evolve over time, but she can also handle herself in a fight. She has made herself understood and respected by all sides even in highly conflictual policy and intellectual environments because she takes both theory and observation so seriously.

Observation, Observation, Observation

Since markets and states often fail quite miserably, it posed no problem for Ostrom to observe how people had addressed these issues. Real people solving concrete problems, or failing to do so, has constantly been the focus of her work. Her dissertation was conducted right in her own backyard and on a topic that in lesser hands could simply have been about intergovernmental relations among municipalities in a metropolitan area as they negotiate shared use of the underground aquifer. The flaws in an immediate assumption that some overarching central authority should “take charge” were illustrated most vividly to my knowledge in the film Beverly Hills Cop III, where Eddie Murphy's ally is the DDOJSIOC (Deputy Director of Joint Special Inter-Operational Command). Titles do not make the man, and hierarchical control does not necessarily solve market failures. Rather than assume this or that route toward a solution will be the right one, Ostrom looks at what really happens. Through a complicated history of legal precedence, happenstance, individual entrepreneurs and middlemen, and the development of norms, she explained how competing and mutually independent actors managed to produce what neither central authority nor the market could provide. It was a first step to what became a general theory of governance between states and markets, but it could not have happened without the kind of on-the-ground concern with how deals get struck and how institutional norms develop, uninteresting as many of the details might be on their own.

A commitment to observation also has meant attention to research design and to generalizability. The empirical objects that she has studied over the years have taken her and her collaborators around the world to study common-pool resources of all kinds, not only the urban water tables with which she started. Attempting to construct a general framework, she wanted it based on a broad range of cases in different cultural and institutional contexts and varying in their practical/engineering considerations and policy domains as well. She has looked at shared fisheries inside a country and in international border areas, at the managements of forests, at irrigation systems—many kinds of policies across many continents. In contrast to many of us, she has always understood that generalizations should be in inverse proportion to the limitations of one's assumptions but in positive proportion to the breadth of one's observations.

How many studies start with a list of astounding assumptions that logically limit the applicability of the theory tested to a specific (asymptotically nonexistent) setting but then go on to assert broad generalizations nonetheless? In parallel fashion, but diametrically opposed in the disciplinary wars, how many conduct a thick ethnographic study of a specific place, investing heavily in learning the local context and yet similarly hoping to draw a general lesson? Ostrom provides the same lesson for both camps. Observation matters, and both the care and the breadth of the observations determine the broader interest of any study.

Deduction and Induction, Not Wishful Thinking

Doing field research without a clear understanding of the theoretically important concepts and behaviors of interest is like wandering with no map, no destination, and no purpose except perhaps to get some exercise. Overly deductive approaches, by contrast, may blind the researcher to any but the factors predetermined to be interesting according to the theory. (Of course, this is fine if the theory is so well documented that only certain small bits of it remain to be empirically tested; but we can all agree that this is not typically the case in governance.) Ostrom's work has been a model in showing the value of openness to empirical reality while at the same time pushing theoretical dimensions. She is equally impatient with pointless description as she is with groundless theory.

In the kind of qualitative research that her in-depth case studies necessarily involve, it is truly remarkable that she was able to avoid always finding “what she was looking for”—some positive elements of the development of norms. This is because of another element of her work that sets her apart from so many of us: She did not set out to celebrate the ability of local communities to establish positive norms. Rather, she defined her projects in terms of understanding why some did so successfully and others failed miserably. Variance is the key. So many students of the development of cooperative norms would have been tempted to study only the cases that make us hopeful about the possibilities of human cooperation. Not Ostrom. She highlights the pathologies as much as the successes because she is driven by theory, not wishful thinking.

Cooperation among public officials is fundamental to success in many cases, but Ostrom is quick to point out the problems of corruption and venality that often cause public bureaucracies to inhibit, rather than promote, positive outcomes. This too is a striking element about her evenhanded approach. Looking neither for devils nor angels, she finds some of each. Looking to understand the causes of successful and unsuccessful outcomes, she finds that the culprits in one case are sometimes similar to the heroes in another. This is particularly refreshing and important because the nature of her studies puts her in between the intellectual fault lines of those believing any state intervention would necessarily fail and those who think that top-down bureaucratic control (often from a distant capital) is the obvious solution to any market failure.

Ostrom's findings about institutional structures allowing positive results relate to the ways in which these institutions evolve and develop over time in response to pressing problems and in the context of their social and cultural surroundings. This puts her in sharp contrast with more commonplace ideas that institutions might be “designed,” once and for all time. Institutional accretion might be a better phrase than institutional design, but this is an unwelcome idea to some because it downplays human agency, especially that of consultants or analysts coming in from the outside to “solve” a problem of inefficient use of common-pool resources. Single institutional fixes rarely work; norms cannot develop according to constitutional niceties but only on the basis of observed reciprocal behavior. But this is messy, difficult to control, time-consuming, and in some situations probably impossible. This is not what policymakers or funding agencies want to hear, especially when others propose ideologically or theoretically pure approaches that seem so simple.

Observing how people across many continents and facing scores of different practical problems actually have solved or failed to address their collective action issues has led Ostrom and her collaborators to identify a number of important correlates of success, which might be summarized in this way: There is no single route, and implementation matters. Should one be disappointed by that conclusion, dismissing the work as insufficiently parsimonious to be the basis of theoretical advance? Shooting the messenger is always one option. Ideologues of the free market or of central state authority, those who value theoretical parsimony at all costs, and those for whom thick description is all that matters, can all find equal grounds for opposition to her work.

Irony and Play

Ostrom can skewer with a velvet rod. One has a sense of exasperation, or perhaps simple amazement, as she describes “the typical assumptions of complete information, independent action, perfect symmetry of interests, no human error, no norms of reciprocity, zero monitoring and enforcement costs, and no capacity to transform the situation itself” (p. 214). If generalization were in inverse proportion to assumptions, the concluding sections of many analytically tight essays could be eliminated. Similarly, she evinces either wonder or frustration (one cannot entirely be sure) at the common assertion on much of the literature that “the” government should do something. In one passage she writes: “[An author] puzzles that ‘if the government had foreseen a future shortage of the resources, it might have laid claim to it in “the beginning,” before any users had made investments’” (p. 215). One is led to wonder just how this not-yet-existing government would force on the not-yet-established population a solution to the not-yet-serious problem. But just as quickly as Ostrom raises such questions, she moves to treat previous scholars with respect, making useful suggestions about how to move forward. So her critiques are not gratuitous; rather they are for the purpose of illustrating problems that all can see. But you are aware that she is operating on a higher level than many, and her reviews of previous work are a joy to read.

The Contributions of Political Science

Maybe this tells more about the economics prize than about political science, but it is remarkable to consider the similarities in the work of Herbert Simon and Ostrom. Both studied the limits of comprehensive rationality models. Both emphasized how human decision makers behave in actual settings in and around government. Both share a background in public administration at the local level, with extensive experience studying how individuals struggle with complex problems in equally complex organizational settings. Both are comfortable with ambiguity and messiness, but do not allow this to infect their own thinking, which remains clear. Both share Einstein's insight that a theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Both received extensive funding from government agencies interested in solving practical, real problems of public administration and policy implementation, as well as general support for purely theoretical advances. Their feet-on-the-ground observations were somehow able to meet the heads-in-the-clouds theorizing halfway, with a transforming effect on both practical communities seeking answers to complicated problems and on intellectual communities with their own serious fault lines. If we learn nothing else, perhaps we should take pride in being a discipline where the observational and the deductive both have such great pride of place.