Embedded Files
Elinor Ostrom demonstrated something that mainstream economics had declared impossible: that communities can manage shared resources sustainably, without privatisation and without state control, provided certain conditions are in place. Her work on common pool resource governance earned her the Nobel Prize in 2009 and permanently changed how the problem is framed.
The patterns in this cluster are grounded in Ostrom's insight but rooted in the specific conditions of water management. Water is the common pool resource par excellence — shared, mobile, boundary-crossing, and vital. The governance arrangements that grow up around it are among the oldest and most consequential that human communities have ever built.
What Ostrom showed is that these arrangements do not emerge automatically. They are constructed, slowly, through repeated interaction, transparent accounting, social pressure, and the gradual accumulation of trust. The boundary of the pool matters. The origin of the money matters. The history of the arrangement matters in ways that no external intervention can shortcut. A well-resourced fund and a community-managed pool that has survived several difficult seasons are not interchangeable, even if the numbers look the same.
The patterns here describe the conditions under which collective management becomes possible, the mechanisms that sustain it, and the ways it can quietly fail. They sit at the heart of the language because they sit at the heart of the problem.
See also:
The Common Pool as Phase Transition — The moment when individual optimization gives way to collective action, and the nature of the problem fundamentally changes.
Trust as Infrastructure — Trust is not a precondition for collective action, it is its product. Built gradually through repeated interaction, transparent accounting, and social persuasion.
Accounting as Signal — the transparency condition. The core tension is that visible accounting is not just a reporting function, it is a governance mechanism. Making contributions legible changes their social meaning and therefore changes the decision each contributor faces.
The History of the Pool — the repeated interaction condition. The core tension is that trust is time-dependent in a way that cannot be shortcut. A well-resourced external fund and a community-managed pool that has survived several cycles are not interchangeable, even if the money is the same.
The Neighbour, Not the Rule — the social persuasion condition. The core tension is that formal enforcement mechanisms and social pressure are not the same thing, and the latter does work the former cannot. The social fabric is not separate from the governance mechanism — it is part of it.
The Boundary of the Pool — Who is inside the governance structure of the common pool and who is outside it. The governance boundary creates its own outside just as the physical boundary does.
The Active Pool — The distinction between a common pool as proactive investment fund and as reactive safety net, and why the difference matters enormously for how resilience is built.
Who Paid for This — A community that raises its own resources to solve a shared problem owns that problem differently than one that receives external funding to solve it for them. The origin of money shapes the governance relationship in ways no amount of good rule-writing can compensate for.
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