10 - Conclusion

Summary

The goal of this book is to synthesize multiple perspectives and evidence on environmental property rights, and thereby improve understanding and decision-making. I begin this final chapter by reflecting on the methods used to conduct this synthesis. After this, I outline two ways in which we can use this synthesis to make better environmental policy decisions. First, I discuss a process of institutional diagnosis (Ostrom et al. 2007a; Young 2002). This is a process of ascertaining the relevant features of a problem to explore their implications for the design of responses. In the second section below, I describe how this book can be used to diagnose environmental problems by drawing questions from each chapter that we should ask about a problem and its possible solutions. Second, I discuss how expertise depends on the qualities of the expert. Here I am drawing on work by Matson, Clark and Andersson (2016), who describe qualities of effective sustainability leaders. The third and final section in this chapter explores the qualities of the experts who would be making the prescriptions based on these diagnoses.

Methods

Much of the motivation for this book is my perception of the synthesis bottleneck in the study of environmental property rights that results from the siloed nature of research. The goal here was to pull together multiple disciplines to tell a more comprehensive story about the meaning and role of environmental ownership. It is worth reflecting here on the methods that I used and the implications these have for how we should interpret this work. Poteete, Janssen and Ostrom (2010) reflect on the various methods that are used by scholars in the study of environmental commons governance. The types of studies that they consider are found through the pages of this book: individual and comparative case studies, experiments, large-n analyses and synthetic meta-analyses. And the method for the book as a whole is reflected in what Poteete et al. (2010) call a qualitative “narrative synthesis”, with their prime example of this being the well-known work on natural resource management by Baland and Platteau (1996).