A new Nature article by Joshua E. Cinner and many coauthors entitled “Bright spots among the world’s coral reefs” is getting a lot of play in mass media. The authors find that, despite grievous damage to coral reefs around the world, some reefs are doing much better than predicted. Among the causes of their success are local institutions and norms:

Our initial exploration revealed that bright spots were more likely to have high levels of local engagement in the management process, high dependence on coastal resources, and the presence of sociocultural governance institutions such as customary tenure or taboos. … For example, in one bright spot, Karkar Island, Papua New Guinea, resource use is restricted through an adaptive rotational harvest system based on ecological feedbacks, marine tenure that allows for the exclusion of fishers from outside the local village, and initiation rights that limit individuals’ entry into certain fisheries

According to economics before Elinor Ostrom, an unowned and unregulated resource is doomed because individuals will exploit it. A coral reef is a perfect example of an unowned resource; thus it must be enclosed and controlled by a private owner or a state to save it from the Tragedy of the Commons. But Ostrom found that communities around the world have developed durable means of protecting such resources for their own use. They apply tacit design principles for the successful management of what she called common pool resources, including clearly defined boundaries, rules for appropriating resources that are congruent with the local biological and cultural circumstances, practical means of monitoring the resource, and procedures that most people in the community have some capacity to influence.* Although the above description of Karkar Island is brief, it seems to manifest these principles.

Ostrom’s findings are profoundly significant, because all over the world, local institutions for protecting common pool resources have been bulldozed (metaphorically or literally) by states and markets. That form of modernization is one cause of our global ecological crisis. If more people were permitted–or even supported–to manage local resources as the Karkar Islanders do, the world would be in better condition.

It is also true–as the Nature authors emphasize–that deadly external threats beset local resources (in this case, coral reefs). As long as we heat the earth at a global scale, it’s virtually inevitable that many or most reefs will be destroyed, regardless of how local people manage them. But it’s a mistake to read Elinor Ostrom as a “Small-is-Beautiful” romantic. Her insight is that collective action problems are omnipresent, but they are not inexorable tragedies. They are “dramas” that can turn out either tragically or happily, depending on how we organize ourselves. The moral of her work is not that indigenous people can save the earth if left alone, but that institutions at all scales must learn to manage resources using the principles that happen to be traditional in places like Karkar Island.

*Ostrom et al., “Covenants, Collective Action, and Common-Pool Resources,” in The Constitution of  the Good Society, ed. Karol Edward Soltan and Stephen L. Elkin, 1996, pp. 23–38.

See also: Peter Levine, “Seeing Like a Citizen: The Contributions of Elinor Ostrom to ‘Civic Studies’” (The Good Society, 2011); Elinor Ostrom, 1933-2012; on the contributions of Vincent and Elinor Ostrom; and the cultural change we would need for climate justice.