Managing the Commons: Elinor Ostrom's Eight Design Principles

Managing the commons is the problem of how to govern a shared resource, an aquifer, a forest, a fishery, a pasture or a city's public space, without the sum of individual uses exhausting it. For decades the academic answer was pessimistic: in 1968 the biologist Garrett Hardin published The Tragedy of the Commons, arguing that every rational user would increase their exploitation until the resource was destroyed, and that only private property or state control could prevent it. Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist at Indiana University, devoted her career to proving with data that a third way exists, and in 2009 she received the Nobel Prize in Economics for it, the first woman to do so.

Cases that refute the tragedy of the commons

Her book Governing the Commons (1990) gathers dozens of cases in which communities have managed shared resources for centuries without exhausting them or needing outside supervision. The alpine pastures of Törbel in Switzerland, regulated by communal rules since 1517. The forests of the Japanese villages of Hirano, Nagaike and Yamanoka. The irrigated huertas of Valencia, Murcia and Alicante, with their water tribunals that allocate irrigation and punish offenders since the Middle Ages. The Philippine zanjeras and the irrigation systems of Sri Lanka. The groundwater basins of southern California, where users created their own institutions to stop overdraft. In all of them, the key was not ownership but rules.

Elinor Ostrom's eight design principles

From comparing successful and failed cases Ostrom drew eight design principles. Clear boundaries defining who may use the resource and how far it extends. Rules of use fitted to local conditions, not imported. Participation of users in making and changing those rules. Monitoring carried out by the users themselves or by people accountable to them. Graduated sanctions, mild for a first offence and rising for repeat ones. Fast, cheap conflict-resolution mechanisms. Recognition by the authorities of the community's right to organise. And, for large resources, organisation in nested levels, from the local group to the regional one.

Commons is not open access: Hardin's error

Hardin's error, Ostrom showed, was to confuse the commons with open access. A resource without rules or community is exhausted, as he predicted; a commons governed by a community with its own rules can last for centuries. What destroys commons is usually not the freedom of users but outside intervention that ignores local institutions: the nationalisation of forests in Nepal or Thailand, which replaced communal monitoring with distant guards, accelerated deforestation instead of slowing it. Ostrom called this the importance of polycentric institutions: many coordinated centres of decision rather than a single one.

Urban commons: from Bologna to the city as a commons

Applied to the city, Ostrom's principles explain the success of community gardens run by neighbours, housing cooperatives, community energy networks and the associations that look after parks and squares. Bologna approved in 2014 a regulation on collaboration for the care of urban commons that lets citizens and the council sign pacts to manage spaces, and dozens of Italian and European cities have copied it. The economist Sheila Foster and the jurist Christian Iaione have since developed the idea of the city as a commons, in which urban government is shared among administration, residents and organisations.

Ostrom neither idealised community nor rejected state and market: she held that every resource needs the combination of institutions that best fits its conditions, and that the combination can only be designed by knowing the concrete case. Her legacy for planning is a rule of method: before privatising or centralising, ask which rules already work, who follows them and why, and build on them. The commons are not a relic of the rural past but a form of government that cities are rediscovering.