I ought to say something about recent interest in Elinor Ostrom. Her ideas are a special case of the broad thrust of much of what I have argued over the years: it depends, you must consider local reality but local reality can be horrifying as well as satisfying. There are no easy answers.

As one might expect she goes too far in an attempt to say something grand, to offer some comfort and generally make nice. Marcelino Fuentes puts his intellectual finger on the problem:

This year's Nobel Prize in Economics to Elinor Ostrom is well deserved and a good reminder that we can study all of human collective behavior through the lens of economics, i. e., of science. It also seems that the prize has almost everybody happy. Ostrom advocates neither government intervention nor individual property rights as the solution to problems of commons. This allows both pro-market and anti-market spin doctors to celebrate Ostrom as one of theirs.

I squirm at some of Ostrom's ideas.

It's good to face the reality that no approach can be followed to extremes, but worrisome for many that they have spent their whole intellectual lives on the long march away from particulars and the old local tyrannies that inevitably arise when there is not some higher power to squash the bugs that come to local power here and there. It's hard for them to face the fact that they have only kicked the problem upstairs and substituted fewer and larger tyrannies for a greater number of smaller ones. All that they accomplish is to reduce tyrannical diversity, at the price of also eliminating the numerous small pockets of good governance. They still harbor childish Seldonesques illusions of perfectibility.

My claim that Ostrom's work is a special case of the general issue was made in Pathfinders a few years ago, which grappled with the difficulties faced by transdisciplinary teams seeking to apply complex systems thinking to socio-ecological problems, and likened it to the challenges faced by a heuristically diverse group of experts working as an ad hoc problem solving team. They are only barely able to communicate with one another due to epistemological variations, which makes it hard for them achieve at the level that their diversity otherwise enables.

Her work also speaks to the problems of Modelizers, revealing some of the reasons for recent financial woes as well as heaping even more doubt on the policies advanced by those who have fallen in love with their cartoonish climate models, oversimplifying not just the extremely complex natural climate system but also global socio-economic realities.

Consider a particular example - bed nets to reduce malaria in Africa - of this high level hand waving.

Language like “end user compliance” wards off the lived reality of human life like a garlic wards off a vampire. Big plans and sweeping frameworks subcontract out the problem of the local and particular to some yet-to-be-named partner organization who will be charged with dealing with end user compliance in a sensitive, community-engaged, bottom-up, gender-attentive, ethnographically nuanced manner. That way, when the news filters up that end user compliance doesn’t meet expectations, you can just imagine that you haven’t met the right partner organizations yet or that the methodology for securing compliance needs some tweaking. You didn’t get enough medical anthropologists. The medical anthropologists weren’t properly integrated into the plan. Something like that.

The big plan never has to trouble itself with understanding the scene of everyday life or meeting the end users as human beings living in particular places. The big plan doesn’t have to bring what a smart medical anthropologist might tell it about why people use or don’t use bed nets into the language or thinking of the big plan. That’s the subcontractor’s problem. But it’s on these questions that big plans of all kinds stand or fall, and they can only be thought and engaged properly in their own terms, not in bloodlessly technocratic language.

You have to be able think at the top level, in the big plan, about local ideas about illness and local ideas about sleep, local arrangements of household space, local furnishings, local material conditions. And understand that these things vary.

The top planners have to understand that in historic terms, it’s perfectly sensible to mistrust development organizations in many parts of the world. Sometimes they have had actively bad ideas that caused damage to local communities and sometimes even when they have had good ideas, they only pursued them for a short while until they got bored or distracted or there was a new fad or a change in political administrations or the money dried up. Then the people who really bought into the good idea were left holding the sack.

The top planners have to get away from data that shows that bed net usage has a huge impact on malaria transmission to understand that sleeping under a bed net can be uncomfortable and annoying. That many adults who’ve had malaria tend to treat the disease the way we treat the flu: annoying, frustrating, a bit scary, but tolerable. It’s not hard to wash your hands and use hand sanitizer regularly, and those cut transmission of the flu. But for a lot of people, the minor hassle of regular hand sanitizing isn’t quite worth whatever percentage fewer times you’d have a cold or flu.

Every public health campaign that starts from the premise that there’s a simple and rational preventive behavior change that people of course should adopt is setting itself up for failure, because it’s not thinking clearly about how most human beings in general inhabit the landscape of habit and convenience and risk-calculation, let alone local cultural framings of those same things.

I've heard complaints about Ostrom's work, and my own muddled ruminations, that there's no bottom line, no clear action one can take, or advocate, or systematize that flows from due consideration of the ideas presented. This is only true if you are still narrowly focused on the long march to ever greater generality as the antidote for always messy and sometimes oppressive particulars. The action, if any, is to relieve some of the harms that the marchers have done in their zeal, and impede the marchers greatly in their current and future efforts to impose simple minded rules on the world in their unthinking campaign to destroy the local and particular.

Update: And another thing:

To see the world more like Elinor Ostrom is to see each public policy like a real-world experiment. Policies are implemented because they are predicted to have certain beneficial effects. But even experts are fallible. We make mistakes. Multiple, partially redundant jurisdictions make a virtue of inevitability. They allow for simultaneous policy experiments that help us grope toward effective solutions. Successful policy can be easily observed and adapted to other jurisdictions and the damage caused by failed policy is contained.

To see the world more like Elinor Ostrom is to be guided less by ideology and more by the contours of the situation — to use the right institutional tool for the job.

Yes, an experimental mind set is better. Launching multiple concurrent experiments is a good path finding technique. But there is a crippling assumption in the above that there are effective solutions and that there is a "right institutional tool for the job". This is seldom true. Honest inquiry most often reveals that there are neither effective solutions or institutional tools that do not make things worse - different but worse. The proper response most often is to hold your mud and keep thinking and experimenting even though there is little reason to believe that some grand scheme will ever be discovered that improves the system as a whole. Said another way: the experiments are the grand scheme, the discovery machine is the great discovery. Don't break it.