Elsevier

Environmental Science & Policy

Volume 36, February 2014, Pages 8-10
Environmental Science & Policy

The role of the state in governing the commons

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2013.07.006Get rights and content

Highlights

  • For Ostrom, the state often helps solve complex common-pool resource problems.

  • In a polycentric system the state can provide at least four crucial goods.

  • States provide: (1) an arena for negotiating; (2) a public-interest penalty default.

  • States provide: (3) relatively neutral information; (4) monitoring and sanctioning.

  • With no international state, other institutions must provide these four goods.

Abstract

Elinor Ostrom did not argue that state action is antithetical to local knowledge and effective organization. She argued, to the contrary, that higher levels of state action are often necessary to solve complex common-pool resource problems. In Ostrom's central concept of polycentrism, local decision making groups must often be “nested” within state structures at a higher level, so that the higher structures can provide the coercion and other resources that make local negotiation efficient. The state has four potentially crucial roles in a polycentric system. The first is to threaten to impose a solution (a “public-interest penalty default”) if local parties cannot come to a negotiated agreement. The second is to provide a source of relatively neutral information to mitigate the problem of self-serving bias regarding the relevant facts. The third is to provide an arena for negotiating that facilitates low-cost, enforceable agreements. The fourth is to help monitor compliance and sanction defection in the implementation phase. All four arise in Governing the Commons. Today we must also consider the international level, which has no state. Issues such as global warming therefore require that we build overarching institutions to perform these state functions while at the same time preserving the flexible, grounded, local knowledge and participant commitment that facilitate legitimate and efficient systems of cooperation.

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  • Climate-smart cocoa governance risks entrenching old hegemonies in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana: a multiple environmentality analysis

    2022, Geoforum
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    Their national strategy for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD + ) aims to embed rule-making power in regional multi-stakeholder governing boards, including local government and community leaders, and to use the pre-existing CREMA (Community Resource Management Area) mechanism to implement local CSC interventions (GCFRP, 2013). Inspired by Elinor Ostrom’s work on the effectiveness of collective governance by “users themselves” (Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 2009) who she theorised hold the strongest incentive to get the solution right (Mansbridge, 2014; Ostrom, 1990), Ghana’s CREMA mechanism aims to devolve a degree of authority to communities to manage natural resources (Agrawal, 2005; 1999). Yet similarly to certification and the C&FI, over-arching Ghana’s REDD + strategy is an externally defined disciplinary environmentality that aims to harness local participation to meet the global goal of reduced forest carbon emissions.

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The argument in this paper is expanded from that in Mansbridge (2010).

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