Reflections on Fifty Papers from the Ostrom Workshop: a View from the Turn of the Millennium*

Reflections on Fifty Papers from the Ostrom Workshop: A View from the Turn of the Millennium* Michael D. McGinnis Professor, Department of Political Science, and Senior Research Fellow, Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis Indiana University, Bloomington [email protected] *Integrated version of introductions to three edited volumes published in 1999-2000 Prepared August 17, 2014 In 1999-2000 the University of Michigan Press published three edited volumes of papers written by scholars associated with the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, Bloomington. This document collects together the introductions I wrote for these volumes, slightly rearranged to read as a single narrative thread weaving together the contexts of the fifty chapters included in all three volumes. In 2012 this interdisciplinary research and teaching center was named in honor of its co- founders, Vincent and Elinor Ostrom. I had the great pleasure of working with them both throughout my professional career. I was serving as Director of the Ostrom Workshop when they both passed away in 2012, and as Co-Director (with James Walker) when Lin was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009. Looking back on this project from a distance of 15 years, I have to say that organizing these volumes helped me appreciate the breadth and depth of the research projects they had themselves conducted or inspired in others. Since a lot has happened around the Ostrom Workshop since the publication of these volumes, I have decided to not update this material. Instead, it stands as a summary of my perspective at that time on what is now known as the Bloomington School of political economy. The only changes I have made are integrating references into one list, combining the suggested readings sections from each volume, inserting at the appropriate points in the text a list of titles for chapters in each part, and adding an appendix listing the full citations for each of the 50 papers in their original form. Our initial plan was for these three volumes to serve as the kick-off for a book series with the University of Michigan Press entitled Institutional Analysis, which was intended to publish books by scholars associated with the Ostrom Workshop. For reasons too complicated to explain here, only these three volumes were published in that series. Although the editors at the time of publication insisted that we not number the individual volumes, I have found it useful to add volume numbers for the purposes of this document, with the volumes arranged in the order of their publication in 1999 and 2000. Readers seeking further information about the research projects which might have appeared in this planned book series are encouraged to check for updates at the Ostrom Workshop website http://www.indiana.edu/~workshop/. 1 Michael D. McGinnis, editor. • Polycentric Governance and Development: Readings from the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Univ. of Michigan Press, 1999. o Translated into Chinese by Wang Wenzhang and Mao Shoulong. Shanghai, China: Shanghai Joint Publishing Corporation. • Polycentricity and Local Public Economies: Readings from the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1999. o Translated into Chinese by Mao Shoulong and Li Mei. Shanghai, China: Shanghai Joint Publishing Corporation. • Polycentric Games and Institutions: Readings from the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Univ. of Michigan Press, 2000. Series Foreword: Self-Governance, Institutional Analysis, and the Workshop From its current location in a few scattered office buildings on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University, the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis lies at the heart of a worldwide network of scholars who use institutional analysis to understand and to strengthen the foundations of self-governance. Over the past twenty-five years, the political scientists, policy analysts, economists, lawyers, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, biologists, ecologists, and policymakers associated with the Workshop have investigated diverse research topics. Results of these research programs have been published in books and journals from several disciplines. A portion of this work has been gathered in this volume; two related volumes are scheduled to be published at approximately the same time. Each of these edited volumes exemplifies what is special and distinctive about institutional analysis as it has been developed and practiced by Workshop scholars. Institutions are ubiquitous in contemporary society, and the fields of political science and economics have experienced a recent renaissance in the study of institutions. The Workshop approach is uniquely multidisciplinary, drawing on the complementary strengths of a wide range of social science methodologies: laboratory experiments, formal models, comparative case studies, opinion surveys, archival research, philosophical investigations, physical measurements, computer simulations, and, most recently, satellite imagery. Institutions affect all aspects of social life. Major Workshop research programs have focused on (1) police services in metropolitan centers in the United States; (2) the management of fisheries, irrigation systems, forests, and other common-pool resources from California to Nepal (and many places in between); and (3) the macro-structure of constitutional order from Imperial China to the contemporary international system, with particular emphasis given to the nature of American democracy. Beneath this bewildering variety lies a core message, buttressed by reinforcing methodological and political foundations. Politically, the goal is to establish and sustain capacities for self- governance, by which is meant the structured ways communities organize themselves to solve collective problems, achieve common aspirations, and resolve conflicts. Methodologically, the goal is to understand the institutional foundations of self-governance, that is, to determine which 2 conditions strengthen and which conditions undermine community capacities for self- governance. In practice, these goals have inspired a series of careful, detailed studies of narrow ranges of empirical phenomena. However, since each study draws on a single framework of analysis, the overall product has import far beyond the confines of these particular settings. The aggregate lesson of these empirical analyses is clear: many, many self-governing communities thrive, in all parts of the world. By focusing on community efforts to resolve local problems, the writings of Workshop scholars are sometimes misinterpreted as lending credence to the "small is beautiful" slogan. For many public purposes, local community action will be effective, but other circumstances require coordinated policies at the regional, national, or international levels. It is important to remember that public officials at all levels of aggregation have important roles to play in helping communities provide for their own needs. Shouting slogans about the desirability of decentralization or civil society contributes little towards the crucially important task of sustaining capacities for self-governance. The challenge of institutional analysis lies in producing solid research findings, based on rigorous empirical tests of hypotheses grounded in carefully articulated theories and models. Institutional analysts have a responsibility to combine policy relevance and scientific rigor. A basic tenet of institutional analysis is that multiple arenas, or centers, of interaction and participation need to be considered simultaneously. Self-governance works best if the overall governance structure is polycentric. The word itself may be awkward, but it encapsulates a way of approaching the study of politics and policy analysis that stands in sharp contrast to standard modes of thought. Governance does not require a single center of power, and governments should not claim an exclusive responsibility for resolving political issues. Instead, politics should be envisioned as an activity that goes on in many arenas simultaneously, at many scales of aggregation. Implications of polycentric governance for particular empirical and theoretical contexts are detailed in the readings included in these volumes. To illustrate the coherence of the theoretical approach that underlies applications to a wide array of empirical domains, a selection of previously published articles and book chapters have been collected into three books with similar titles: Polycentric Governance and Development, Polycentric Games and Institutions, and Polycentricity and Local Public Economies. Each book addresses a separate audience of scholars and policy analysts, but each should also be of interest to anyone seeking to understand the institutional foundations of self-governance. Papers in Polycentric Governance and Development demonstrate that empirical analyses of the management of irrigation systems, fisheries, groundwater basins, and other common-pool resources have important implications for development policy. Long before sustainable development became an over-used slogan, scholars associated with the Workshop were trying to understand the myriad ways self-governing communities had already achieved that goal in practice. After an initial section on the general conceptual framework that has influenced research on the full array of Workshop research topics, Polycentricity

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