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some kinds of failures” 10 . This has granted prescriptive status to the design
principles. They are being adopted by multi-lateral lending agencies such as the
World Bank and the FAO, national governments and NGOs as tools for crafting
sustainable CPR use.
Section 2.6: Some Recent Criticisms of Ostrom’s Theory
Steins, Edwards and Rölling (2000) have argued that there are three problems
related to these design principles. Firstly, the CPR school has focused on studying
the workings of the common from the view point of the resource community. There
has been no attempt to take a view of the commons from a standpoint located
outside the community - CPR theory has not attempted to link the collective action
arena to the external world. Instead cases of “success” are described and attributed
to the internal characteristics of the management regime. CPR theorists ignore the
role of contextual factors – dynamic remote factors outside the control of the
community - in moulding collective action at various institutional levels. This is a
serious shortcoming, as the resource community will base their actions not only upon
alternatives embedded within the CPR system, but also upon alternative options
present in the external world. The perceptions of the resource community about the
dynamics of the external world will have a strong influence on the management
outcome. Similarly, dynamics of the external world can consciously or unconsciously
initiate changes in the community. However, most of the CPR literature either has
ignored external factors, or have treated them as sources of uncertainty responsible
for degradation 11 .
The lack of contextual analysis is partly because of the eagerness of CPR theorists
to rebut Hardin’s paradigm. In their attempt to bring forward evidence to show that
resource users are able to manage CPRs sustainably by creating institutions on their
own, CPR theorists have lost sight of their basic objective. Instead of examining the
process of creating CPR and the constraints to this process, they have shifted away
to merely describing institutional successes. Consequently, the further development
10 Ostrom , E. (1995), “Design Complexity to Govern Complexity”. In S. Hanna & M.Munasinghe (1995), pp. 33-
46.
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