Polycentric Governance

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

By the late 1950s, the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area was governed, if that is the word, by well over a thousand separate public bodies: cities, counties, school districts, water districts, fire districts, each with its own elected or appointed authority, its own budget, its own boundary that rarely matched anyone else's neighboring boundary. To the reform-minded political science of the period, this looked like exactly the kind of mess that consolidation existed to fix. The standard prescription was to merge overlapping jurisdictions into one metropolitan government, on the theory that a single authority would be more efficient, more accountable and less chaotic than a thousand small ones stepping on each other. Vincent Ostrom, Charles Tiebout and Robert Warren looked at the same thousand governments in 1961 and asked a different question: was the multiplicity actually failing? Their answer, published in the American Political Science Review, was that it mostly was not. Overlapping local governments in the Los Angeles basin were found to coordinate, compete and specialize in ways that a single consolidated authority could not easily replicate, producing what the authors named a polycentric system, many centers of decision-making, formally independent, that nonetheless functioned as a coherent whole. The paper did not argue that fragmentation is always good. It argued that the reform movement's own core assumption, that only centralization can produce order, was empirically wrong often enough to need testing rather than assuming. Vincent Ostrom's own wife and research partner, Elinor Ostrom, spent much of the following four decades testing exactly that assumption on a different subject: shared natural resources rather than city services. The polycentricity the 1961 paper found in a Los Angeles water district turned out, in her hands, to describe how a well-run fishery, forest or irrigation system stays well run.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for showing, against a generation of theory that assumed shared resources are doomed to overuse unless privatized or nationalized, that communities repeatedly govern commons successfully on their own, through locally made rules, monitoring and graduated sanctions rather than an outside authority handing down either private property rights or state control. The idea traces back further than her own fieldwork. In 1961, her husband Vincent Ostrom, with Charles Tiebout and Robert Warren, had already argued that a metropolitan region full of overlapping, formally independent local governments was not the chaos it looked like, that such systems, which they called polycentric, could coordinate and function coherently without a single central authority forcing them to. Elinor spent the following decades extending that same structural idea from city government to grazing land, fisheries and irrigation systems, turning a claim about how public agencies happen to behave into a general theory of how self-governance works when it works. In 1973 the two of them founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University together, and ran it together, for nearly forty years, an institutional expression of the same conviction: that governance does not require a single point of command to be governance. Elinor Ostrom died on 12 June 2012. Vincent Ostrom, her husband and collaborator for very close to fifty years, died seventeen days later, on 29 June 2012.