Preface

In October 2009 the Nobel committee announced that political scientist Elinor Ostrom would receive the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, together with economist Oliver Williamson, “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.” Ostrom’s work showed that a traditional approach in economics to the study of the management of shared resources (e.g., public infrastructure, common-pool resources) was incomplete. The conventional approach assumed that when people share a resource, such as groundwater, fish or a forest, everyone acts in their own self-interest leading to overharvesting of the shared resource. The only way to avoid this so-called “tragedy of the commons” is to privatize or nationalize the resource.

In a series of studies over several decades with many colleagues around the world, Ostrom showed that people are able to self-organize and successfully govern their shared resources. Her analysis provides insights into the conditions under which self-governance is possible. These findings have major implications for policy and can help explain the ineffectiveness of many policies and governance regimes.

The theoretical framework she developed over her career is applicable to the study of the governance of shared resources in many different contexts. We worked with “Lin,” as she preferred to be called, from 2000 until her death in 2012. We collaborated on various projects focused on the governance of the commons, especially on questions related to robustness. Lin Ostrom had been a professor at Indiana University for her entire career starting in 1965, and beginning in 2006 she held a part-time appointment as a research professor at Arizona State University in order to collaborate in what is now called the Center for Behavior, Institutions and the Environment, which we direct.

The book is also reflecting the increasing understanding of what makes systems resilient. The world we live in is experiencing many changes, with climate change as the main challenges. The concept of resilience helps us to understand how we may manage resilience. We had the pleasure to work with “Buzz” Holling as part of the Resilience Alliance. The framework we present in this book connects the understanding of governing shared resources with the understanding of resilience of complex systems.

This book extends our previous book Sustaining the Commons, to governance of shared infrastructure. Building on the work of Ostrom, we see the governance of shared infrastructure as a natural extension of governance of shared resources. With shared infrastructure we emphasize the importance of creation, design, and maintenance of the infrastructure as well as the distribution of the outcomes of the infrastructure. With infrastructure, we not only focus on traditional hard infrastructure like bridges and roads, but also environmental, human, social and soft infrastructure, who together create the societal dynamics we observe.

While “Sustaining the Commons” book focuses on extraction from natural resources, we now extend the governance discussion to physical infrastructure, social relations, educational systems, etc. It enables us to address questions that are prominent in current sustainability debates, such as a just transition to a  sustainable future. We need to know from case study analysis what worked well in the past, but we also need to be able to extend our insights to the big challenges of today.

Another reason for this book is that the COVID-19 pandemic revealed many vulnerabilities of existing coupled infrastructure systems. We were surprised about the inability of many countries to have an effective response to a disease that disrupted society, and the reluctance of many people to comply with governmental guidelines to avoid getting infected by a disease that could handicap or kill them. It is especially surprising since the outbreak of a pandemic was expected and governments could have been prepared. If it is so difficult for individuals and governments to change behavior if a disease is spreading, how do we expect a societal transformation to a sustainable future is possible?

There are no simple solutions to the big challenges we are facing, but we hope that this book provides insights on how to analyze interdisciplinary governance questions. We also provide some suggestions on how to apply insights from the book to practical solutions. As Lin would say, “there are no panaceas”. But we can improve your human infrastructure to address sustainability questions from an infrastructure perspective.

We would like to thank our students and teaching assistants who participated in classes where we used earlier versions of this manuscript for providing helpful feedback.