One aspect of the dialectical approach is historicity. To fully understand a subject, we need to know its history – not only the history of the subject itself, but the history of how scientists and analysts have been thinking about that subject. The fact that humans have been “engineering” their ecosystems for thousands of years is explored with the idea that agriculture is usefully interpreted as simply an extreme form of ecosystem engineering. A framing in modern terms is introduced through the work of various thinkers, from Thomas Hobbes to Elinor Ostrom, ending with a critical description of the modern industrial agriculture system.

This part considers how markets and other institutions decoupled society and environment and how to recouple them. Transitions along the way include the Western belief in progress by controlling nature, the reorganization from feudal to market systems, as discussed by Polanyi, and the idea that land can be divided and owned. The challenges and opportunities of collective use, of common-pool resources, were discussed and debated by Gordon, Hardin, and Ostrom. Economics needs to integrate ecology, as Daly emphasized. The implications can be dire, as Sen showed for famines. Catton and Dunlap made a like plea for sociology and the environment, and Bullard showed the environmental justice implications of unfairly sited urban waste and pollution. Lele explored the disconnect between the ideal of sustainable development and its application, arguing for knowing first the complex links between social and natural systems. Norgaard frames development as an evolutionary problem, arguing that knowledge, values, technology, organizations, and the environment coevolve. Diverse experimentation can provide the raw material for selecting more-sustainable paths.

This chapter takes stock of Green Market Transformation in the built environment and explores the potential to replicate this model. It notes that market-based solutions, while canonical in policy spheres, have failed to solve the climate problem. Instead, by drawing upon Elinor Ostrom’s work, opportunities for institutions and polycentric solutions as well as to leverage voluntary actions are observed. Rather than frame the problem of markets versus regulation, the limits of both are recognized and a way to harmonize them sought. When ecological crises require massive solutions, we look to harness the power of market forces rather than sideline one of our most effective institutions. A vital role is seen for policy to guide and foster markets to find and implement solutions. The scale of the problems facing us demands a grassroots, bottom-up approach that enlists the efforts of households, workers, and firms around the planet. The challenge for policy-makers is in facilitating that and in devising and supporting mechanisms so that voluntary action also serves the greater public benefit.

We have entered the era of the Anthropocene. Our rapid transformation of the planet poses a particular threat to socio-ecological systems and the Indigenous peoples who create and sustain them. A strengthened partnership between Indigenous knowledge holders and scientists is required based on decolonized knowledge co-production (DKC). Quite the opposite of scientific extractivism, which selectively exploits local and Indigenous knowledge to its own advantage, and more ambitious than the mere recognition and appraisal of Indigenous knowledge, DKC requires dedicated partners from knowledge systems who have learned through years of collaborative work. This introductory chapter proposes a methodology and ethic for DKC based on a problem-oriented and engaged approach built around mutual trust and benefits, and a profound equity between knowledge systems. It examines the intellectual contributions that laid bare the legacies of colonialism and the hegemony of science, opening the way for DKC: Elinor Ostrom who first coined the term co-production, Bruno Latour and Sheila Jasanoff from science and technology studies, with decisive insights from, among others, Edward Said, Vincent Deloria and Tuhuwai Smith.

Henry L. Doherty was one of the primary proponents of unitization in the oil and gas industry the early 1900s. His goal was the prevention of waste, improvement in reservoir management, and serving the public interest in the conservation of a critical national resource. The key realization that unitization enabled was the treatment of a reservoir as a single mechanical unit, regardless of the division of its ownership. Cooperation between these ownership interests enabled joint operation of the common mechanical unit: the reservoir. This approach is similar to Elinor Ostrom’s approach, identified in her 1965 doctoral dissertation, and her work with common pool resources. In her work, she suggested that organizations formed to address groundwater issues in southern California resembled public entrepreneurs combining to form a more effective enterprise. As such, Doherty and Ostrom relied on similar foundations and theories but in different contexts.

Innovations in commons research and extensions of the commons framework have moved far beyond the archetypal village grazing pasture.The dynamism of the field may therefore prompt some reflection on what “commons theory” or “the commons framework” means in non-territorially bounded commons.Fortunately, the origins of Elinor Ostrom’s framework are compatible with such innovations and extensions; indeed, reexamining the line of inquiry that gave rise to the Ostrom framework may benefit those working now on the field’s research frontiers.A political scientist, Ostrom was principally concerned throughout her career – and acutely in the period leading to Governing the Commons – with how people manage (and sometimes fail) to organize the governance of anything by creating and modifying institutional arrangements for coordinating their behavior and pursuing shared goals.In this chapter, those original questions that animated Ostrom’s work are reconsidered for the insights they can provide for current innovations in commons research.

Intuitively, much research in commons research focuses on collaborative governance of environmental resources. At the same time, due to the pressures of climate change, the number of natural disasters will only increase, and humanitarian crises are already on an uptake. As a result, I aim to extend this line of inquiry in my discussion of humanitarian aid as a shared and contested common resource. I take the example of the 2013–2016 West Africa Ebola Epidemic, which occurred along the border of three countries with different institutional histories.Drawing on interviews with 100 civil society organizations and domestic NGOs, I illustrate how top-down management of the 2013–2016 Ebola Response by governmental and international organizations led to policy failure, only until local organizations were involved. Ebola unveils the inefficiency of neglecting local actors, typical in international humanitarian response. In addition, contestation of humanitarian aid resources viewed as “commons” by recipients and “private” by international aid organizations fuels tensions in the aid relationship, and particularly during a crisis where local buy-in is essential.

The resource management complications posed by “Temporal Commons”– the common pool of time shared by present and future generations when making resource management decisions – are understudied in the literature. This chapter attempts to briefly describe their nature, before detailing how the typical solutions to the tragedy of the commons – private property, government regulation, and Elinor Ostrom’s successful collective action model – fail to adequately account for temporal commons. Next, the chapter explores some factors that distinguish temporal commons from traditionally studied commons, making them subject to a potentially more inevitable form of tragedy. The chapter concludes with initial thoughts on avenues for better addressing the dilemmas created by temporal commons.

This chapter applies the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework conceived by Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom in 1990 to the institutional arrangements that structure and organize the operating environments for civil society organizations (CSOs). We begin by defining what is meant by “civil society” and “CSOs,” and highlighting their essential attributes, followed by a discussion of the importance of the legal and regulatory frameworks that underlie the existence and operations of CSOs. We then briefly review Garett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” thesis before discussing the role of CSOs in preventing such tragedies from emerging. After presenting the types of rules that inform every IAD action situation and applying them to the existing research on CSO laws, we conclude by reconceptualizing CSO regulatory regimes through the lens of Ostrom’s IAD framework and analysis.

Since the early discussions of polycentricity, the concept (and variations such as polycentric political systems, polycentric governance, polycentric order, etc.) has seen the development of numerous permutations, digressions, and contradictions. This chapter is meant to carefully step through key notions tied to polycentricity and polycentric governance. The chapter’s purpose is to discuss polycentric governance in particular, while giving some attention to polycentricity as a term from which polycentric governance originates. We build upon the classic version of polycentric governance as a 'polycentric political system', link this concept with broader conceptualizations of polycentricity, and survey the related ideas that have been investigated around the concepts of polycentric political systems, polycentric order, polycentric governance, and polycentric arrangements.