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This essay examines the remarkable careers of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom, exploringpolycentricity and human management of common property resources from the \"no-name fields\" of public administration in the late 1950s, through the metropolitan public service industries and public choice approach to democratic administration in the 1960s and 1970s and the institutional analysis of common pool resource management of the 1980s and 1990s. It continues with the diagnosis of the self governing capabilities ofsocio-ecological systems in the 2000s. Many continuities underlie focal shifts in attention. Their work will be rehted to developments in the public administration field along with illustrations of their pioneer example for public administration on research as a collaborative enterprise. The 2009 Nobel Laureate in economics, Elinor Ostrom has been working from an academic background and intellectual tradition that, particularly through her long-term colhboration with Vincent Ostrom, is strongly rooted in the classical and prevailing institutional concerns that may be seen as core to public administration as an academic field of education and research.

Elinor (Lin) and Vincent Ostrom spent their lives creating a school of institutional analysis that focused on the power of human creativity to solve collective human dilemmas. The Ostroms used the abstract methods and language of public choice theory, but their appreciation of human capability and self-governing kept them solidly grounded in real world decision-making. This belief led to their rich analytic approach to understanding human institutional design, which combined theoretical analysis, laboratory experiments, and empirical fieldwork. This essay identifies the major themes that formed the Bloomington School—the importance of constitutional design and self-governance, federalism and polycentric orders, the challenge of institutional design to solve social dilemmas, the importance of using multiple approaches (analytic, laboratory experiments, and careful field work) to understand important social problems., and a personal examination of the Ostrom's lasting impact for public choice and public policy. Lin's and Vincent's lives and their academic careers came together to create their significant contributions. Observing how they collaborated and inspired students and colleagues provides a model for generations of scholars.

Vincent Ostrom challenged epistemic choices at the foundation of modern political science and proposed an alternative conceptualization of democracy based on a theory of federalism he derived from The Federalist and Tocqueville's Democracy in America. This essay examines Vincent Ostrom's critique of contemporary mainstream political theorizing, relates his original theoretical work to the empirical research Elinor Ostrom, other colleagues, and he conducted, advised, or sponsored at The Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis Indiana University, and concludes that \"Ostrom's democratic alternative\" constitutes an alternative scientific paradigm as defined by Thomas Kuhn. The paper concludes with a comment on the continuing relevance of Ostrom's critique in the post-9/11 era.

This guide provides definitions or brief explanations of all the major terms and concepts used in the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. Also included are terms from the closely related frameworks on local public economies, public service industries, grammar of institutions, and social‐ecological systems (SES).

Most social problems are \"wicked\", meaning that they are highly complex, intractable, open-ended, and multi-dimensional. In wicked learning environments, information is ambiguous, feedback may be slow, or causes and effects are difficult to ascertain. Using the insights from the Bloomington school of political economy, this paper argues that a polycentric approach is the most effective way to address wicked social problems. Polycentric systems are characterized by multiple, overlapping decision-making centers that have varying degrees of independence and interdependence. When decision-makers in governments, markets, and civil society tackle complex social problems simultaneously, various forms of cooperation and contestation emerge. These interactions subsequently produce the relevant knowledge and incentives to address wicked social problems on a variety of margins. Centralized, one-size-fits-all approaches are less likely to succeed because they have weaker epistemic and incentive-related qualities. We use two examples to illustrate our argument, including post-disaster recovery and climate change mitigation.

This paper reveals a novel and perhaps surprising ingredient in the mix of influences that inspired and informed the work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom on self-governance: cybernetics, understood as a theory of control via feedback mechanisms. Based on this crucial insight, the paper portrays self-governance as involving an architecture of multiple levels of so-called ‘second order’ feedback mechanisms. Such compounded systems of organization are the key to understanding any self-governance process and the paper argues that their intrinsic logic provides a critical link between the work of the Ostroms and the public choice and constitutional political economy perspectives on institutional order. The paper thereby offers both a fresh perspective on the Ostromian view of self-governance and also of also of governance theory in general.

When considered as a unified project, the Ostroms’ themes of polycentricity, self-governance, and the art and science of association have strong intellectual roots and connections with Austrian economics. In this paper, we show the close relationship between the Ostroms and the Austrians. We then describe how contemporary Austrian economists can be inspired and can further the work of the Ostroms in the areas of civil societies and self-governing communities, the use of fieldwork and case studies, and public economies and coproduction. Although there are perceived tensions between the Ostroms and the Austrians, we contend that these can be reconciled and pursued as fruitful areas of research.

Among Vincent Ostrom's many contributions to the study of public administration, policy and political science, the concept of polycentricity remains his single most important legacy. This essay locates the origins of this concept in Ostroms early research on resource management in the Western United States and demonstrates its continuing influence throughout The Intellectual Crisis in Public Administration, The Political Theory of a Compound Republic, and his other major publications. Although typically pigeonholed within the confines of the public choice tradition, Ostrom's body of work should be widely appreciated as an early statement of the critical importance of network forms of governance in democratic societies.

How can a self-governce perspective reshape our understanding of Indigenous Arctic histories? This paper aims at advancing our understanding about aborigil societies and their historical use of common pool resources. By applying a self-governce approach, it moves beyond state-centric rratives that have long domited interpretations of historical change, and highlights how Indigenous agency and interl dymics have shaped historical trajectories.Aborigil societies around the world have independently transitioned their production modes throughout history. In northern Eurasia, one such major transition manifested in a movement away from transport reindeer herding towards reindeer pastoralism from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Northern Fennoscandia was one of the first regions to witness this shift, and the Indigenous Sami there are an especially suitable case to study.The historical sources are exceptiolly rich in the area, and Sami are an interesting case because reindeer pastoralism developed in a foraging culture, with many households continuing on as hunters and fishers long after pastoralism had been introduced. The shift to pastoralism was driven by concomitant, self-governed responses as the transition progressed.By combining historical sources and self-governce frameworks, this alysis advances the discussion about how Indigenous reindeer-herding societies – governce and social relations included – were affected by the transformation from 1550–1800 AD. The Sami case reflects that there was a dymic interaction between customary rules-in-use and colonial rules-in-form, that complicates interpretations of Indigenous societies as either autonomous or passive in historical shifts.

Abstract A long-standing critique of liberalism is that it is both amoral and anti-communitarian. Bound to the totemic figures of the Law and the Market, the “liberal art of governing” is unable to conceive of social regulations outside this twin rational framework. However, the 1990s saw the international dissemination of State managerial reform—embodied by the slogan “doing better with less”—where entrepreneurial practices coexist with participatory and decentralizing policies. In the context of State redeployment, an emerging strategy is evolving as economic neoliberalism merges with cooperative liberalism inspired by the American myth of self-government. By establishing a genealogy for this other side of liberal governmentality, this paper demonstrates how contemporary neo-progressivism emphasizes “holoptic” technologies. By encouraging a “proactive citizenship” through moral and community coercion, holoptic technologies can provide new resources to resurgent authoritarianism. Thus, the study of governmentality within the field of international political sociology should take into account a power architecture that is based on the local scale and implemented by States in a context of convergence of global political orders.