The Challenge of Self-Governance in Complex Contemporary Environments
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The ideas used to view the world by academics, officials, and citizens affect what they see, the improvements they think are feasible, and the means they presume can be used to reform the world. Ideas seem to be ephemeral, but their results are the artifacts of the world: the cities, the monuments, the wars, the suffering, and all the activities of human beings as they go about their everyday world. Human conceptions can be emancipatory. They may include vistas of untapped capabilities and enable individuals to improve their own and others' welfare. Or they may be conservative—closely guarding the achievements of the past and protecting the storehouse of acquired social knowledge from wanton destruction. Or worse, ideas may be restrictive or even retrogressive—limiting the horizon of what is possible, leading to a destruction of social infrastructure, and reducing the possibilities for human development.
At the current time, the presumptions underlying most modes of policy analysis restrict, far more than is necessary, our view of human capabilities for self-governance (Ostrom 2008b). In an era when human rationality is thought of in terms that involve almost superhuman capabilities in some domains, it is paradoxical that the human capacity for self-reflective thought and social artisanship is almost entirely ignored. In the [End Page 316] policy sciences evolving from economics, game theory, political science, and decision theory, the individual is frequently modeled as possessing complete information about his or her environment, a clearly ordered set of goals, and the internal computational skills to find global optima in complex and difficult worlds. These sophisticated calculators are, however, presumed to have the foresight of the proverbial ostrich. Individuals are modeled as focusing exclusively on the choices available to them in a proximate situation without any capability to change the constraints of that situation. It is obviously the case that individuals do face many situations over which they have little or no control, at least in the short run. It is also obvious that human beings, faced with perverse situations, try either to avoid them or to change them. In the models used by many policy analysts, only an external actor—the government or the social planner—is perceived as having the capabilities of changing the structure of situations that lead to undesirable outcomes. Upon finding such situations, the contemporary analyst rarely asks what the individuals could do. Rather, the analyst asks what the government should do.1
In this article, I will first present a short review of the origins of contemporary theories of individual choice in contrast to the earlier theories of organic society. Next, I will address the application of these approaches to the analysis of nonprivate goods. The "tragedy of the commons" was until recently broadly accepted by scholars and policy analysts. Many common-pool resources represent highly complex environments for anyone—either government officials or local users—to understand. Many local communities have, however, developed institutions for self-governance of these resources. In the final section, I will address what we have learned from research on self-governance of complex common-pool resources.
The Development of Theories of Individual Choice
In contrast with earlier organic conceptions of human order, the individualistic perspective of modern choice theory is a liberating force. The presumption that there exists a social organism above the individual whose benefit must be served by all has led to much violence, bloodshed, and suffering. If the choice of perspectives were simply between the current, dominant conception of individual choice theories and an organic conception of society, no question exists in my mind which view is theoretically more [End Page 317] powerful for explaining empirical phenomena as well as philosophically more liberating. My feet are firmly planted in the terrain inhabited by theories that view the individual as a basic valuing entity.
Once oriented in terms of that broad epistemological and metaphysical divide, however, we should recognize that the current analytical tools used in many individualistic theories were formed and adapted in the effort to explain human behavior in one particular arena—the competitive market related to strictly private goods. Here, the driving intellectual questions during...
