# Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons explained: the eight design principles and polycentric governance

> Governing the Commons (Cambridge University Press, 1990) is Elinor Ostrom's study of how communities manage shared resources such as pastures, forests, fisheries and irrigation water. Against Garrett Hardin's 'tragedy of the commons', she shows that users often create their own rules, monitor each other and punish cheats, sometimes for centuries, as in the Swiss Alps, Japanese villages and the huertas of Valencia, Murcia and Alicante. She distilled eight design principles for institutions that last, and won the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics for this work. For radical centrism, Ostrom breaks the choice between state and market and gives a template for accountable institutions.

- URL: https://www.radicalcentre.eu/en/articles/elinor-ostrom-governing-the-commons-explained
- Language: en
- Publisher: radical centre / centro radical
- Published: 2026-10-26
- Topic: Ideas & history
- Author: radical centre
- Licence: CC BY 4.0

## Key points

- Elinor Ostrom published Governing the Commons with Cambridge University Press in 1990; she shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics with Oliver Williamson.
- She challenged Hardin's tragedy of the commons and the idea that shared resources must be either run by a central authority or privatised.
- Her cases include Swiss alpine meadows, Japanese mountain commons, the Spanish huertas and Philippine irrigation societies, some of them centuries old.
- Her eight design principles: clear boundaries, rules that fit local conditions, collective choice, accountable monitoring, graduated sanctions, cheap conflict resolution, recognised rights to organise and nested enterprises.
- For radical centrism, Ostrom offers a design brief for accountability: monitors answerable to users, quick local justice and many centres of decision.

Elinor Ostrom spent her career asking a question most economists thought was settled. When many people share a resource that nobody owns outright, a fishing ground, a mountain pasture, an aquifer, an irrigation canal, what stops them from using it up? The textbook answer came from Garrett Hardin's 1968 essay on the tragedy of the commons: each user takes a bit more, the resource collapses, and the only way out is to hand it to the state or divide it into private property.

*Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action*, published by Cambridge University Press in 1990, is her answer. The publisher's description puts the starting point plainly: both state control and privatisation have been advocated, and neither the state nor the market has been uniformly successful. Communities, she showed, often solve these problems themselves, through voluntary organisations that write their own rules. In 2009 she shared the Nobel Prize in economics with Oliver Williamson, cited for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons. In Spain the book is published by Fondo de Cultura Económica as *El gobierno de los bienes comunes*.

## Three metaphors and two cures

The first chapter takes on three models that, she argued, had become metaphors used far beyond their reach: Hardin's tragedy, the prisoner's dilemma, where two rational players end up worse off by not cooperating, and the logic of collective action, where individuals free-ride on group efforts. All three assume users can't communicate or change the rules of the game. From that assumption follow two cures, which she called the Leviathan approach and the privatisation approach.

Ostrom's objection was empirical. Real users talk, make agreements, watch each other and punish cheats. The Nobel committee's scientific background summarises her finding that rules imposed by government are often counterproductive, because central authorities lack knowledge about local conditions and have too little legitimacy.

## The cases

The heart of the book is a set of long-lived institutions. Chapter 3 studies mountain grazing and forest commons in Switzerland and Japan and irrigation systems in Spain and the Philippines; the oldest has worked for more than a thousand years. The Spanish cases are the huertas around Valencia, Murcia, Orihuela and Alicante, where farmers have shared water through their own communities of irrigators for centuries. UNESCO added the irrigators' tribunals of Murcia and Valencia to its intangible heritage list in 2009; they date back to al-Andalus and settle disputes orally, quickly and in public.

Chapter 4 looks at how new institutions get built, through the groundwater basins under Los Angeles, where users built a polycentric system of water rights. Ostrom's own doctoral thesis studied saltwater entering one of those basins. Chapter 5 studies failures: inshore fisheries in Turkey, groundwater in California, fisheries and irrigation in Sri Lanka and a Canadian fishery.

## The eight design principles

From the successes and failures she drew what she called design principles; in her Nobel lecture she said she might better have called them best practices. In the form later reproduced by Anderies, Janssen and Ostrom, they are:

1. Clearly defined boundaries: who may use the resource, and what the resource is.
2. Proportional equivalence between benefits and costs, with rules that fit local conditions.
3. Collective-choice arrangements: most people affected by the rules can take part in changing them.
4. Monitoring by people who are accountable to the users, or are the users themselves.
5. Graduated sanctions, starting small for first offences.
6. Conflict-resolution mechanisms: rapid access to low-cost, local arenas.
7. Minimal recognition of the right to organise, without challenge from outside authorities.
8. Nested enterprises, for resources that are part of larger systems.

They aren't laws of nature. The economic historian Samuel Garrido, writing on the eastern Spanish irrigation communities that Ostrom used, notes that some principles were sometimes absent there. They work as a checklist, and that's how she meant them.

## Why radical centrism needs Ostrom

The programme calls this book the one that destroys the false binary of government or market, and that's the reason it sits among our foundations. Each tradition finds itself in it. The left sees that resources can be held and run in common, for the benefit of those who depend on them. The right and the liberal market tradition recognise Hayek's point about local knowledge: central authorities don't know the terrain, and clear rights, clear boundaries and people who pay for their own choices make institutions work.

What fits neither camp is polycentric governance, the theme of her 2009 Nobel lecture: many centres of decision, formally independent of each other, each answerable to the people it serves and nested inside larger ones. Water users run the canal, the municipality the streets, the region the river basin, the European Union the shared rules on water, and each one checks the others. The state's job, in principle 7, is to recognise people's right to organise and then to stay out of the way where they're doing well.

This week we're writing about accountability in Spanish institutions. Ostrom's principles read like a design brief for it. Monitors accountable to the people affected, which is what we asked of [oversight bodies without politicians](/en/articles/oversight-bodies-without-politicians-spain-proposal). Graduated sanctions that are actually applied, instead of rare, enormous ones. Fast, cheap, local conflict resolution, which a farmer in the Valencian huerta gets from the Water Tribunal and a Spanish citizen waiting years for a court ruling doesn't. And rules made by those who live under them, a principle that our [proposal on MPs and their constituencies](/en/articles/mps-who-go-home-lists-districts-accountability) tries to bring a little closer to the Congress.

## FAQ

### What is Governing the Commons about?

It is Elinor Ostrom's 1990 study of how communities manage common-pool resources such as fisheries, pastures, forests and irrigation systems. Using cases from Switzerland, Japan, Spain, the Philippines, the United States, Turkey and Sri Lanka, she shows that users often build their own durable institutions, and identifies the conditions under which they succeed or fail.

### What are Elinor Ostrom's eight design principles?

Clearly defined boundaries; benefits proportional to costs and rules adapted to local conditions; collective-choice arrangements; monitoring by people accountable to the users; graduated sanctions; quick, low-cost conflict resolution; minimal recognition of the right to organise; and, for larger systems, nested enterprises.

### What did Ostrom say about the tragedy of the commons?

She objected to the presumption that common property must end in tragedy. Hardin's model, the prisoner's dilemma and the logic of collective action describe some situations, but people who can talk, set rules and monitor each other often avoid overuse.

### What is polycentric governance?

A system with many centres of decision-making that are formally independent of each other, such as local user groups, municipalities, regional bodies and the state, which can cooperate and check each other. Ostrom made it the theme of her 2009 Nobel lecture.

## Sources

- [Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/governing-the-commons/7AB7AE11BADA84409C34815CC288CD79), Cambridge University Press (1990)
- [Elinor Ostrom – Facts](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2009/ostrom/facts/), NobelPrize.org (2009)
- [Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems (Nobel lecture)](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2009/ostrom/lecture/), NobelPrize.org (2009)
- [A Framework to Analyze the Robustness of Social-ecological Systems from an Institutional Perspective (Table 3)](https://ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss1/art18/table3.html), Ecology and Society (2004)
- [Las instituciones de riego en la España del este. Una reflexión a la luz de la obra de Elinor Ostrom](https://ideas.repec.org/a/seh/journl/y2011i53maprilp13-42.html), Historia Agraria (2011)
- [Irrigators' tribunals of the Spanish Mediterranean coast](https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/irrigators-tribunals-of-the-spanish-mediterranean-coast-the-council-of-wise-men-of-the-plain-of-murcia-and-the-water-tribunal-of-the-plain-of-valencia-00171), UNESCO (2009)