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.