Elinor Ostrom (1990), Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press — DOI-10.1017/CBO9780511807763
Key takeaways
Registered, not read. The Nobel lecture (LIT-719) says how the book’s design principles were reached and how they have been revised since:
- After coding many cases of successful and failed systems, Ostrom gave up the hope that specific rules predict success: they “varied extensively across sites”.
- “Moving up a level in generality”, she called the regularities present in the long-surviving systems and absent from the failures “design principles”. She did not mean the users had them in mind, and later wrote that “best practices” might have been the better term (n. 5).
- The lecture lists them in the updated form of Cox, Arnold & Villamayor-Tomás (2009), which splits principles 1, 2 and 4; the book’s own wording was not seen.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-05 at the owner’s request, for an essay’s §8.2. What the essay cites Ostrom for, polycentric governance, is the subject of the lecture rather than of this book, whose topic is self-governed common-pool resources. The account is THEORY-149, sourced on the lecture.