{"id":17084,"date":"2016-06-20T09:09:36","date_gmt":"2016-06-20T13:09:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=17084"},"modified":"2016-06-20T09:09:36","modified_gmt":"2016-06-20T13:09:36","slug":"communities-saving-coral-reefs-an-illustration-of-elinor-ostroms-findings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=17084","title":{"rendered":"communities saving coral reefs: an illustration of Elinor Ostrom’s findings"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new Nature<\/em> article<\/a> by Joshua E. Cinner and many coauthors entitled “Bright spots among the world\u2019s coral reefs”\u00a0is 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\u00a0local institutions and norms:<\/p>\n

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\u2019 entry into certain fisheries<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

According to economics before Elinor Ostrom, an unowned and unregulated resource\u00a0is doomed because individuals will exploit it. A coral reef is a perfect example of an unowned resource; thus\u00a0it must be enclosed and controlled by a private owner or a state to save it from the Tragedy of the Commons.\u00a0But Ostrom found that communities\u00a0around the world have developed durable means of protecting such resources for their own\u00a0use. They apply tacit design principles for the successful management of what she called common pool resources<\/a>, 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\u00a0that most people in the community have\u00a0some capacity to influence.* Although the above description of Karkar Island is brief, it seems to manifest these principles.<\/p>\n

Ostrom’s findings are profoundly significant, because all over the world, local\u00a0institutions for protecting common pool resources have been bulldozed (metaphorically or literally) by states and markets. That form of modernization is\u00a0one cause of\u00a0our 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.<\/p>\n

It is also true–as the Nature<\/em> authors emphasize–that\u00a0deadly external threats beset local resources (in this case, coral reefs). As long as we\u00a0heat 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\u00a0“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\u00a0must learn to manage resources using the\u00a0principles that happen to be traditional in places like Karkar Island.<\/p>\n

*Ostrom et al., \u201cCovenants, Collective Action, and Common-Pool Resources,” in The Constitution of \u00a0the Good Society,<\/i> ed. Karol Edward Soltan and Stephen L. Elkin, 1996, pp. 23\u201338.<\/p>\n

See also: Peter Levine, “Seeing Like a Citizen:\u00a0The Contributions of Elinor Ostrom to ‘Civic Studies’<\/a>”\u00a0(The Good Society<\/em>, 2011);\u00a0Elinor Ostrom, 1933-2012<\/a>;\u00a0on the contributions of Vincent and Elinor Ostrom<\/a>; and\u00a0the cultural change we would need for climate justice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new Nature article by Joshua E. Cinner and many coauthors entitled “Bright spots among the world\u2019s coral reefs”\u00a0is 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\u00a0local […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civic-theory"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17084"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17088,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17084\/revisions\/17088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}