écologie et économie : robuste sociale des réformes

Design Principles for Robustness

We do not wish to argue that the only robust SESs are small-scale common-pool resources in remote locations serving a homogeneous community without market opportunities or access to a commonly used medium of exchange (see Dietz et al. 2003). We started with the example of how operational and collective-choice situations may be robustly linked as the “simplest” possible example of a relatively robust system. In such a simple SES, it is easy to understand why the system can be robust over very long periods: the resource users and the public infrastructure providers are the same individuals who observe on a daily basis each other’s behavior and the impact of their actions on the resource. They solve their internal problems through reciprocity and trust based on reputation and repeated interactions over an indefinite time horizon (Ostrom 1998). Such systems may collapse rather rapidly, however, when large biophysical or socioeconomic disturbances occur.

The design principles of Ostrom (1990) were developed with robustness in mind. However, Ostrom used the definition of Shepsle (1989), and studied whether the institutions were robust or in institutional equilibrium. To enhance the robustness of SESs, it might be desirable to have institutions that are not persistent but may change as social and ecological variables change. Ostrom (1990) mentioned that “appropriators designed basic operational rules, created organizations to undertake the operational management of their CPRs, and modified their rules over time in light of past experience accoding to their own collective-choice and constitutional-choice rules.” This statement illustrates a situation in which a social system adapts to an ecological system whose dynamics do not change over time. Ecological dynamics may change, and institutions may need to adapt to this change in order to sustain the robustness of the SES. We do not yet know in detail what the design principles for robustness of SESs are. However, we will briefly discuss aspects of the original design principles that suggest they are a good starting point.

We now return to the principles listed in Table 3. Why would these design principles enhance robustness in SESs? Clearly defined boundaries (Principle 1) help identify who should receive benefits and pay costs. If boundaries are not well defined, resource users are less willing to trust one another and the public infrastructure providers. Assigning a rough proportionality between the benefits a resource user obtains and his or her contributions to the public infrastructure (Principle 2) is considered a fair procedure in most social systems (Isaac et al. 1991). Decisions that are considered fair reduce the chance that the resource users will try to challenge, avoid, or disrupt the policies of the public infrastructure providers. Decisions by local users to establish harvesting and protection rules (Principle 3) enable those with the most information and highest stakes in a system to have a major voice in regulating use. This principle emphasizes the importance of Link 2 in Fig. 1. Furthermore, rules that are established by most of the resource users themselves are better known, understood, and perceived as being legitimate.

The first three principles together help solve core problems associated with freeriding and subtractability of use. They do not by themselves necessarily improve the robustness of a SES because rules made to solve these problems are not self-enforcing. Thus, incorporating monitoring (Principle 4), graduated sanctioning (Principle 5), and conflict-resolution mechanisms (Principle 6) as part of the public infrastructure provides continuous mechanisms for invoking and interpreting rules and finding ways of imposing sanctions that increase common knowledge and agreement. These principles, taken together, can be thought of as a feedback control for resource use. They transform information about the state of the system into actions that influence the system. However, the constraints imposed by rules are not like the constraints imposed by the physical infrastructure. Whether resource users follow the rules depends on their perception of legitimacy and whether the rules are monitored and enforced. Thus, given that agents do not possess perfect information about the state of the system and actions of other agents, the SES can become fragile from within due to conflicts over the interpretation of rules, whether certain agents have indeed broken a rule, and the nature of the appropriate punishment. Without regular access to low-cost and rapid conflict-resolution mechanisms to mediate this internal noise, the common understanding about what rules mean can be lost. Graduated sanctions preserve a sense of fairness by allowing flexible punishment when there is disagreement about rule infractions. Without these mechanisms, the incentives to overharvest and freeride may again dominate strategic behavior.

Recognizing the formal rights of users to do the above (Principle 7) prevents those who want to evade local systems from claiming a lack of legitimacy. In addition, nesting a set of local institutions into a broader network of medium- to larger-scale institutions helps ensure that larger-scale problems are addressed as well as those that are smaller. Institutions that have failed to sustain resources tend to be characterized by very few of these design principles, and those that are characterized by a few of the principles are fragile.

We expect that more systematic analyses of the robustness of SESs will provide design principles concerning how communities deal with ecological dynamics at various scales. Such principles will include, for example, sustaining memory, adapting rules when ecological conditions change, maintaining institutional diversity, or experimenting systematically with alternative institutional configurations.