Audio transcript
Indiana University
Phone interview with Joe Cone, conducted October 30, 2008.
Joe Cone: Welcome back to the second part of a conversation with Dr. Lin Ostrom of Indiana University. When we broke you were speaking about getting appropriate rules for a flowing or a mobile resource. You’ve alluded to it a couple of times but maybe just describe what’s in the box, so to speak, of your framework and how the multiple tiers work. [She discusses the figure in her publication . . .see blog link to download this publication.]
[Time: :20]
E. Ostrom: In the big box, Figure 1, it has these very large system concepts of a resource system interacting with a governance system containing resource units on the left hand side and users on the right hand side. And, it’s that interaction that is leading to outcomes that may have positive or negative feedback. So the interaction may lead to outcomes that make it worse and worse and worse. Or, there may be interactions that lead people to start to take corrective actions, and a system might be resilient when they have danger signs that come up and lead them to say, ah ha! Now we’d better go in and change some ways that we’re interacting to be resilient. So you can’t…If you do absolutely nothing, you’re likely not to be resilient. But, what you should do to be resilient differs if you’re dealing with coastal or interior resources, if you’re dealing with forests versus lakes. And that’s why I had a variety of people contribute articles to that PNAS special feature on diverse resources. And you can see quite a variety, even though all of the articles in that special feature drew on the framework.
[Time: 1:57]
Joe Cone: Do you have an example of some relatively smaller governmental unit, say something in the United States at the state level or smaller, that has used your framework and has sort of gotten things right with respect to resilience of any system? Not necessarily the climate system.
E. Ostrom: No. I am working with scholars from about eight to ten major research units in Europe, including the Potsdam Climate Change Institute in Pik. P-i-k, in Potsdam. And folks in Switzerland and Norway and the Netherlands and Germany. And we will be developing a twenty year project. T’hey want to apply it to some of the coastal regions in Europe, to forestry, to fisheries and to pastoral systems. And, I think through how the same broad framework would look when you look at it for coastal, fisheries, as compared to deforestation problems in the mountainous parts of Europe.
Joe Cone: What are the key research questions, for instance, that your European group is dealing with?
E. Ostrom: Well, one of them is to identify the scope of the focal SES. So, if we are a coastal community, let’s ll try to get a good sense of the outer boundaries of that for different resource systems. And they might not all be the same.
Then, the next question that is big is, what are the larger systems that impact on that? And that’s this whole problem of global change and globalization. It used to be that we could be managing most resources with relatively small to medium sized units. Those are still going to be very important over the next century. We don’t need to go to big only, but we need to go to nested systems that are thinking about how do small medium and large divide up some aspects of problems that could occur at multiple scales, so they have some autonomy and don’t have to always interact with each other in order to take actions that need to be taken now… [chuckles]…or even shortly. But also, you have some backup ways that they’re nested.
And I’m working with a colleague who has done extensive research in the coastal region of Mexico. And, there are three coastal fisheries. They all wanted to self-organize, so two did and one just could never make it. And so we’re going through the theoretical questions of why were two able and one wasn’t.
And then, of the two that were able to self-organize, and both of them created rules of entry and who could fish, and all, and were having quite a bit of success, one failed. And it failed when others found out that they were that successful and traveled 250 kilometers north and started fishing in their reserve, and they didn’t have any backing from higher units in Mexico. And so they had their local system, but it wasn’t nested. With the threat coming, no one took any effort to help them and they lost their self…they lost their fishery, as well as all their achieved self-governance.
The third one had official backing at a national level, so it’s been able to survive for quite some time now and doing quite well. So, that gives you a little example of nesting. It wasn’t that the third one needed the national government to make all its decisions. No, it didn’t need that. But it needed recognition and some backup when people started to say, gee, we want to fish in your fishery and why not? They could say, no, we have exclusive rights. And they then developed their own rights systems, but backed up by a larger scale.
And so part of our problem is, how do we get small, medium and large size units working in a nested fashion over time. And that, I think, is one of our big challenges for the future. Sometimes people think, oh, just turn it over to the nation. Well, that’s what we did with Katrina. The national government was totally unprepared. And we needed for Katrina a response at multiple scales.
And we needed to be thinking earlier than that hurricane about some of the decisions that were made in Congress about the Mississippi River. We were allowing cities and others upstream, all the way up into the…almost to Canada, to put up barges and concrete to keep their shores protected, so they could build, so they could get more taxes and get subsidies from the feds.
Well, that meant that the flow of the river was even worse at a time of a hurricane than it had been twenty years previously. So, we were making decisions that had huge impact on the downstream, without taking into account downstream.
[Time: 8:08]
Joe Cone: If people are beginning to understand at this point ecosystem based management. This is, it seems to me, another step beyond that. And, it seems to me intuitively that the learning that needs to take place is substantial.
I’m just wondering how that’s going to occur, if you have any thoughts about that.
E. Ostrom: No, I’m pretty much a researcher and so I’ve been trying to figure out how to do research. And, that’s a challenge in and of itself. But I think…You know, my first thing is don’t do everything the same at every level for every kind of resource. [Chuckles] Now how do we get…To some extent I’m kind of worried that there are many, many more people who are apart from the Earth in their everyday life. How do we get more kids involved in research on nature earlier? And there are some very exciting programs where they’re getting kids, in terms of bird observation days, training kids how to take measurements of birds and be involved in the counts. How to get them involved in measuring stream flow. There’s just lots of things that kids can do--- all the way up to college kids. I’m not talking about just five years olds.
E. Ostrom: But, five year olds can start. [Clears throat] If we take self-consciously the recognition that if we’re going to understand ecological processes, we have to understand them in a deeper way than the experience the last twenty-five to fifty years has been leading people.
Joe Cone: What you’re asking for, in a sense, is for the preservation or the resuscitation of local ecological knowledge.
E. Ostrom: Yeah. And realizing that local, then you’ve got to learn a little bit more about the ecologies that are larger than smaller than the one you’re in. But if you don’t even understand your own…
[Time 10:10]
Joe Cone: Your university webpage mentioned some of your other current research interests. One was integrating the research findings in cognitive science into a workable set of models for exploring and explaining human choices in various institutional settings. Want to unpack that a bit and tell us what you’re working on?
E. Ostrom: Well, I’m working with both economists and social psychologists. And economists used to use a model of the individual that they didn’t have to learn. They knew everything. So they started with perfect information. They had a very strong preference for individual material payoffs now. And didn’t worry about payoffs to others.
And, we have…we do quite a bit of experimental work here at Indiana in a social experimental lab. It’s a lab that has twenty-nine computers spread out where people can be recruit…We recruit in volunteers, and we pay them, to make decisions that involve returns to them in the way of money, and to others. And, we’ve tested a large number of theories on collective action and the capacity of people to self-organize.
When we put them in a lab and they cannot communicate with anybody, and they don’t know who is involved and it’s minimal, minimal, they behave in the very selfish way that Harden thought of in the “tragedy of the commons.” And they overharvest. But, when we loosen the opportunity to…we allow them to engage in face to face communication and we allow others kinds of institutional changes, the results are quite different.
So one of the things we’re currently doing is building a better theoretical foundation for understanding how people can solve…how can they self-organize. Because if you bought the Harden argument or you bought the real narrow economic argument of thirty years ago, then the only salvation was government. You had to have an external government that came in and told people what to do. Well, somehow the officials in that external government were…had a different… [laughs]…gene set than the rest of us.
Well, now we’re showing that, yes, governments can sometimes make a big positive difference, but they can also lead to very bad outcomes. And humans can self-organize. So we’re trying to understand what are the contextual factors that enable people to self-organize and solve collective action problems related primarily to resources.
Joe Cone: I found that trust and reciprocity are pretty important . . .
Elinor: …I was President of the American Political Science Association. And if you go back to my presidential address, which was published in the American Political Science Review in 1998, in the Spring sometime, it’s called A Behavioral Model of Collective Action. And there I am putting trust and reciprocity right smack dab in the middle.
If we have…Collective action is the name for a lot of social dilemmas where if I’m a good guy and I really contribute, but all the other people that I’m interacting with don’t, I become a sucker. And so the theory earlier said because you’re worried about being a sucker, you won’t do anything. You’ll just be really narrow and selfish. Well, if I trust others to reciprocate any action I make that helps them, then all of us could be much better off. This is the reason that social dilemmas are dilemmas. That if we’re narrow and selfish, we come out much worse than if we are interested in the common good.
But, we’ve got to somehow get over the problems that people will screw one another upon occasion. And we have to find ways of using sanctions and other mechanisms to make sure that the people who are not trusting, or trustworthy and using reciprocity, are discovered and encouraged to change their ways or to not participate. To get out. [Laughs]
Joe Cone: Interesting. Good point.
E. Ostrom: And so trust and reciprocity are right smack dab in the core of the kind of theoretical developments we’ve been taking.
[Time 15:12]
Joe Cone: And so it seems to me that’s the principle of social proof from Cialdini and other people. And I guess the question is, is social proof, is demonstration, more important than trust?
E. Ostrom: They’re linked. So, one of the ways you build trust is monitoring and sanctioning, so that people who are not trustworthy are made aware that they have to pay a price. And you may convince them to be trustworthy because they’ve been monitored. So they’re very closely linked. And if you have absolutely no monitoring and the son-of-a-guns can get away with being son-of-a-guns, then slowly but surely you unravel any level of collective action that others have taken. They just get mad.
Joe: This has been a conversation with Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University, one of a series about Communicating Climate Change. I’m Joe Cone of Oregon Sea Grant, an ocean and coastal research and education program at Oregon State University. This and other climate podcasts, and their complete transcripts, can be found online at seagrant.oregonstate.edu. That’s “s-e-a-grant”: one word, “dot,” “oregonstate” as one word, “dot, edu.” Thank you for listening.
[Music up and out]
[Time: 16:48]
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