"Because of the repeated situations involved in most organized processes, individuals can use contingent strategies in which cooperation will have a greater chance of evolving and surviving. Individuals frequently are willing to forgo immediate returns in order to gain larger joint benefits when they observe many others following the same strategy." (Ostrom)

Despite the myth of self-sufficiency, humans are social creatures. We follow social norms because we a) have faith in a reward, and b) want to avoid social shame. The other day I was reflecting on how to get people to sacrifice their immediate gratification in exchange for a bigger, future reward. Social norms and behaviours—especially public ones—play a role here.

Every kid understands the social power of waiting in a line. And every kid knows the social shame that comes from cutting (or, 'butting' as we used to call it). Even when there is a risk of the reward at the end of the line running out, a free-for-all would be chaos and set a precedent that would erode trust for future lines. Without shared trust in the line system, those who were the strongest or pushiest would always get there first.

Now, its very worth noting that the strongest and the pushiest do usually get there first in life. They bully or buy their way to the front and manipulate things so they get more than their fair share, leaving next to nothing for those at the end. I guess my point is that we've let trust in the system erode and we might need to figure out how to re-normalize the social shaming of "no cutsies" at a macro level.

"The key fact of life for coappropriators is that they are tied together in a lattice of interdependence so long as they continue to share a single common pool resource." (Ostrom)

Its hard not to see the trajectory of modern Euro-Atlantic society as an attempt to loosen our dependence. Dependence on each other and even, perhaps, the natural world itself. Self-sufficiency is a myth upon which our culture has been built. Though we believe this to our own peril.

Our lives our inextricably bound to the systems and participants of those systems that we are situated in. Trying to act independently from that truth wreaks havoc on the systems—something that we are seeing more and more as the natural world struggles under the unchecked demand we have put on it for the past century+.

Ostrom rightly suggests that when people act independently of these shared resources, especially when they are scarce, the total benefit is less than if they worked together. If not reigned in they risk depleting the resource entirely. Cooperation is essential.

"Individuals attribute less value to benefits that they expect to receive in the distant future, and more value to those expected in the immediate future. In other words, individuals discount future benefits..." (Ostrom)

Perhaps the biggest struggle with trying to get people to cooperate is getting them to act against their own (immediate) self-interest even for the sake of future rewards. I've offered this sort of thing to my kids—would you rather eat this one tiny candy now or have a full dessert later—and, unsurprisingly, they often choose the immediate reward.

Marketers know this. If you can get people's reward-gratification signals to fire in making a spontaneous purchase, it usually works. It's very hard to sell people on future gratification. Doing this usually requires playing to anxiety rather than reward (insurance, wills, device protection). But getting people to take less benefit now or share that benefit with others in exchange for a better future is no easy sell.

The main exception to this, according to Ostrom, is when people are more deeply connected to a location. They are likely to care about future benefits when they are hoping to see their kids share in those benefits as well. Conversely, the more transient people are, the less concerned they are about the shared resources within a given location.

I think the takeaway here for anyone working in the realm of the public good is that if you want people to care it needs to begin with forming connection to a community or place. People need to see their future as intrinsically bound to the sustained future of the place. Something, perhaps to consider in a later post.

Ostrom's principles for managing a commons rest on the idea that people will seek to solve the problems that they face as effectively as they can:

“As long as analysts presume that individuals cannot change such situations themselves, they do not ask what internal or external variables can enhance or impede the efforts of communities of individuals to deal creatively and constructively with perverse problems such as the tragedy of the commons.”

You cannot solve a problem until you know what it is and what is getting in the way of solving it. Once you know these things, you can bake them into the solution itself.

With a bit of a grounding via Nordman, I'm digging directly into Nostrom's Governing the Commons now. It's fairly dense so I appreciate giving myself a bit of a primer. A brief aside: this was how I was taught to study the works of great, past thinkers in my Masters. Begin with a biography to help contextualize their thinking within their life.

Ostrom breaks down the false dichotomy between state and private enterprise as being the only solutions to shared resource management, suggesting (as Nordman has shown) that plenty of communities across history have self-governed. She looks at three models that have tended to form theory—and then policy—that have enabled this dichotomy. I'm not going to go into them here, but what I want to note is that these models are concerned with what she calls the free-rider problem: when individuals become incentivized to take the benefits without contributing. The concern being that if everyone free-rides, then the collective benefit is lost.

These models suggest that the only way to deal with this problem is through an outside institutional force—whether state or private enterprise—that distributes the resource and disincentivizes free-riders. What Ostrom rightfully points out, however, is that these forces are incentivized to benefit themselves and everyone else becomes subject to the state or private enterprise's enforcement methods.

What's important here is that we have see this over and over again. When the state or the private sector takes control of a limited and essential resource, it is exploited for their benefit while those who rely on the resource suffer.