Towards a Plural and Polycentric World of Self-Organising Actors—Elinor Ostrom's Research Programme

Abstract

The paper analyses the work of Elinor Ostrom along four major lines: the new concepts (1) of the pluralism of goods overcoming the dichotomy of public vs. private goods, (2) of the plurality of institutions in difference to the dichotomy of state vs. markets, (3) of bounded rational human agency combining self-related and other-related motivations in difference to the assumption of omniscient rational egoists, and (4) the vision of polycentric orders. These are cornerstones in the development of a different social science combining strong theory with broad and in-depth empirical research. Limitations within Ostrom's approach are discussed that could stand in the way of expanding her approach into an encompassing paradigm for a heterodoxical social science that could spur a social and ecological transformation of modern societies.

Keywords:

• neo-institutional analysis
• commons
• polycentricity

Acknowledgements

I wrote this article in remembrance of the time I spent at the Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University in June 1997 where I met Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. When I refer to the works of Elinor Ostrom, it must not be forgotten how special a thinker she was. Her work is at once characterised by its impressive and outstanding individualism as well as an unusual capacity for cooperation in solidarity with others. Many of her publications are joined works with other authors. Equally though, she wrote some of her main works entirely by herself. When writing about Elinor Ostrom, it is important not to oversee the network of researchers of which she and her husband constituted the centre. An extensive bibliography can be found in Ostrom (2013). This list also contains numerous links to online publications.

Notes on Contributor

Michael Brie, Professor of philosophy, is a senior fellow at the Institute for Critical Social Analysis of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin, Germany. He specialises in the theory and history of socialism and the research of the socio-ecological transformation of modern societies. His books include Who Is Owner in Socialism (Dietz, 1990, in German), Order Emerging from Anarchy: Regional Transformation in the Russian Region Saratov (Initial, 2004, in German), Futuring: Transformation in Capitalism beyond It (Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2014, in German).

Notes

¹It is interesting that it is Thomas Hobbes who repeatedly appears in Ostrom's work as the representative of authoritarian power and not John Locke, who formulated the classical bourgeois legitimacy of the privatisation of the commons (see Locke 1980, 115–30; critical Brie 2012, 133–43).

²This research was embedded in analyses of the public administration conducted by Elinor Ostrom's future husband Vincent Ostrom together with Charles Tiebout and Robert Warren. This led to the development of a concept of the “polycentric public administration as a system of multiple, formally independent actors that is superior both to purely private as well as the centralised, state provision of public goods. The necessary knowledge and the authority to implement goals directed at common well-being are more likely to develop in such polycentric systems of social governance” (see Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren 1961).

³This article therefore complements the text by Günter Krause on Elinor Ostrom and her contribution to a “different canon” of economic sciences (Krause 2012, 94). Krause systematically presents the basic merits of her approach (see for a short introduction to the work of Ostrom [Aligica and Boettke 2010]; the philosophical background to the Bloomington School is analysed by Aligica and Boettke [2009]).

⁴Among these are the contributions by James G. March (1988), Herbert A. Simon (1983), Amartya Sen (2009) and Jon Elster (1983), to name just a few. These correspond with new developments in the behavioural sciences such as neurobiology, neuropsychology and ontogenesis. Examples include Michael Tomasello (2006), Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia (2008), as well as Thomas Fuchs (2009).

⁵An overview on Elinor Ostrom's different functions on academic boards and her awards clearly shows this connection. See http://www.indiana.edu/~workshop/people/lostromcv.htm.

⁶Please see Charlotte Hess, “The Digital Library of the Commons.” http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/dlforum/ppoint/hess.ppt.

⁷This is the strength of Antonio Gramsci's hegemony approach that sees the hegemony of a social group as a given fact when this group “is actually progressive, that means, it really drives the whole of society forward, not only by supplying society with existential needs but by expanding its cadres through a constant appropriation of new productive and economic fields of action” (Gramsci 1991, 1949).