Quotes from Elinor Ostrom

What we have ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of real involvement of the people involved - versus just having somebody in Washington make a rule.

What we have ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of real involvement of the people versus just having somebody in Washington make a rule.

The power of a theory is exactly proportional to the diversity of situations it can explain.

The power of a theory is exactly proportional to the diversity of situations it can explain.

One can … get trapped in one's own intellectual web.

Scientific knowledge is as much an understanding of the diversity of situations for which a theory or its models are relevant as an understanding of its limits.

Driven by a concern with institutions, we re-enter the world of the behavioralists. But we do so not in protest against the notion of rational choice, but rather in an effort to understand how rationality on the part of individuals leads to coherence at the level of society. (Bates 1988, p. 399)

In some settings, however, rampant opportunistic behavior severely limits what can be done jointly without major investments in monitoring and sanctioning arrangements.

Organizing is a process; an organization is the result of that process.

As long as a single center has a monopoly on the use of coercion, one has a state rather than a self-governed society.

But until a theoretical explanation -based on human choice – for self-organized and self-governed enterprises is fully developed and accepted, major policy decisions will continue to be undertaken with a presumption that individuals cannot organize themselves and always need to be organized by external authorities.

all good books are bad!

Theoretical inquiry involves a search for regularities. It involves abstraction from the complexity of a field setting, followed by the positing of theoretical variables that underlie observed complexities.

Confusing a model – such as that of a perfectly competitive market – with the theory of which it is one representation can limit applicability still further.

Godwin and Shepard (1979) pointed out a decade ago that policy scientists were doing the equivalent of "Forcing Squares, Triangles and Ellipses into a Circular Paradigm" by using the commons-dilemma model without serious attention to whether or not the variables in the empirical world conformed to the theoretical model.

Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. (Hardin 1968, p. 1,244)

Since Garrett Hardin's challenging article in "Science" (1968), the expression "the tragedy of the commons" has come to symbolize the degradation of the environment to be expected whenever many individuals use a scarce resource in common.

Unfortunately, many analysts – in academia, special-interest groups, governments, and the press – still presume that common-pool problems are all dilemmas in which the participants themselves cannot avoid producing suboptimal results, and in some cases disastrous results.

Die wichtigste Lehre für die Politikanalyse und -gestaltung, die sich aus der hier skizzierten intellektuellen Reise ableiten lässt, lautet, dass Menschen komplexere Motivationsstrukturen und mehr Fähigkeiten zur Lösung sozialer Dilemmas mitbringen als die Theorie der rationalen Wahl annimmt.

Bureaucrats sometimes do not have the correct information, while citizens and users of resources do.

Little by little, bit by bit, family by family, so much good can be done on so many levels