The evolution of institutions for collective action ELINOR OSTROM

GOVERNING THE COMMONS : The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

In 1985, the National Academy of Sciences sponsored a conference in Annapolis, Maryland, to discuss common property resource management. This conference was a watershed in the development of the theoretical underpinning of institutional design for successful common pool resource (CPR) management. Since then, an international network of over 2,000 researchers has developed, and the International...

SOCIAL CAPITAL AND THE SECOND-GENERATION THEORIES OF COLLECTIVE ACTION: AN ANALYTICAL APPROACH TO THE FORMS OF SOCIAL CAPITAL by

Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice by Amy R. Poteete, Marco A. Janssen and Elinor Ostrom

Heterogeneous Preferences and Collective Action

In recent years, scholars have turned to alternative representations of utility to capture motivational heterogeneity across individuals. In the research reported here, we examine two models of heterogeneous utility—linear-altruism and inequity-aversion—in the context of two-person, social dilemma games. Empirical tests are conducted drawing on data from experiments and surveys. We find that th...

Analyzing collective action

Collective-action problems pervade all societies as well as ecological systems used by humans. Substantial evidence has accrued during the last several decades that human actors are able to solve some (but definitely not all) collective-action problems on their own without external rules and enforcement imposed from the outside. In this article, I review some of the structural variables that ha...