Can we avoid the tragedy of the commons without social capital? A field study using the IAD framework in the Dragoslavele communal village.

• Author: Diaconu, David
• Position: Report

Introduction

This article represents an application of the institutional and development framework to the study of a form of self-governing common-pool resource organization, Obstea (3) Mosnenilor Dragoslaveni, from the Romanian village Dragoslavele. The primary research question that the article tries to answer is the following: what is the role of social capital in avoiding the tragedy of the commons? In order to provide an answer to this question, we advance one hypothesis and respond to five related secondary research questions. The hypothesis (H1) is the following: the more design principles are respected, the more robust is the CPR institution, irrespective of the level of social capital. We depart to some degree from Ostrom's own account, since she does not specifically mention this causality. She does claim, however, that robust systems had simply met most of these principles and that "those systems that had collapsed or were performing ineffectively were not so structured" (2005a, p. 259). We measure robustness as the capacity to avoid the tragedy of the commons. Regarding the secondary research questions, the first and second (RQ-1 and RQ-2) refer to the number of design principles from the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework fulfilled by the Dragoslavele communal village. The third secondary research question (RQ-3) refers to the particular forms taken by the rules-in-use in the horizontal conceptualization proposed by Ostrom (2005a, p. 190). In addition, RQ-4 refers to the transformations that the communal village had due to the communist and transition period in which the Obstea did not exist (1949-2000). Finally, RQ-5 refers to the state of social capital and has an exploratory character.

In the first section, we review the relevant literature. We introduce the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, and we briefly present the results of relevant similar research studies conducted in Romanian communal villages. In the second section, we present the methodology of this article, and we provide several reasons for not choosing a quantitative or a mixed-method design. In the third section, we explain why this particular study case was chosen, and we present an overview of the The Dragoslavele communal village and the obste. The overview is based on a review of the relevant literature regarding the village and on the interviews we conducted in the field. In the fourth section, we will offer an answer to the hypothesis and to the research questions mentioned beforehand. The fifth section concludes the paper, and presents several caveats regarding the article's limits.

Common pool resources (for brevity, henceforth CPRs) have been studied throughout the world, but no such application of the IAD framework has been done regarding Dragoslavele. We consider that our attempt to study the Dragoslavele Communal Village is justified by resorting to Ostrom's insistence on the necessity to continue studying specific CPR institutions in order to detect what form rules take there and to see how those forms of organization fare: "given the large number of components that combine in a non-additive fashion, our knowledge of how to design complex resource systems will continue to grow but will never be complete. As soon as one design has proved itself in one environment, innovations in strategies adopted by participants or changes in the environment will produce unexpected results" (Ostrom: 2005a, p. 255). Thus, the heterogeneity of human attributes and of the physical characteristics of CPRs mean that such case studies are not superfluous, but can prove vital for expanding upon our knowledge of the world surrounding us.

Literature review

An overview of the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework

The Institutional Analysis and Development framework challenges the predictions of previous models such as Hardin's tragedy of the commons (1968), (non-iterated) prisoner dilemma and Olson's problems of collective action plaguing large groups (1965). In nuce, these models state that common-pool resources will be affected by substractability issues (leading to phenomena such as overgrazing of pastures, deforestation, drying of water courses), that individuals will choose as dominant strategies defection instead of cooperation, and that large groups will be subject to problems of collective action in the absence of selective incentives. Furthermore, different instruments for studying political and economic processes have been proposed in the mainstream literature. Ostrom and the Bloomington school proposed a different approach, in the form of the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, which set out to "dig deeper than hierarchies and markets" (Ostrom: 2005b) by developing a metatheoretical language which could be employed to analyze phenomena as diverse as water management in Bulgaria (Theesfeld: 2004), evolution (Wilson, Ostrom and Cox: 2013), open access on Internet (Hess and Ostrom: 2007), or higher education policy (Richardson: 2004) (for other examples, see Ostrom: 2005b, p.822).

As Ostrom claims, models such as Hardin's tragedy of the commons are not inherently flawed--under certain circumstances, they lead to precisely the predictions they announce: "when individuals who have high discount rates and little mutual trust act independently, without the capacity to communicate, to enter into binding agreements, and to arrange for monitoring and enforcing mechanisms, they are not likely to choose jointly beneficial strategies" (Ostrom: 1990, p.183). What is wrong is the propensity to assume that these are generalizable in all situations. This context-invariance characterizing other approaches such as rational choice theory becomes problematic when public policies are based on recommendations to follow either the "market solution" (i.e. to privatize) or the "hierarchy solution" (i.e. to centralize decisional processes in the hands of a Leviathan-like government). Ostrom's experimental and field studies (for an overview of both, see Ostrom, Gardner and Walker: 1994 and Ostrom: 2005a) show that under certain circumstances individuals are able to transcend such problems and to develop stable, efficient and even fair institutions for "governing the commons" (Ostrom: 1990). The Bloomington school has conducted extensive research on common-pool resources situation, in order to detect the diversity of the self-organization forms: "analyzing the in-depth case studies can deepen one's appreciation of human artisanship in shaping and reshaping the very situations within which individuals must make decisions and bear the consequences of actions taken on a day-to-day basis" (Ostrom: 1990, p. 185).

Among the conditions that favor the development of self-governing common-pool resource institutions is social capital, defined as "the shared knowledge, understandings, norms, rules and expectations about patterns of interactions that groups of individuals bring to a recurrent activity" (Ostrom: 2000, p. 176). Social capital is considered a public good: "like all public goods, social capital tends to be undervalued and undersupplied by private agents. This means that social capital, unlike other forms of capital, must often be produced as a by-product of other social activities" (Putnam, Leonardi and Nonetti: 1993, p. 170). Therefore, social capital formation is favored by the existence of multiplex relations, in which persons share different kind of relations, relations that have as a defining feature the fact that "they allow the resources of one relationship to be appropriated for use in others" (Coleman: 2000, p.26). Why social capital contributes to the development of CPR institutions is easy to comprehend if one takes into account what Ostrom considers to be the differences between social and physical capital: that social capital is degrading when it is disused, that it is difficult to measure, that it cannot be constructed through external intervention and that it is affected by the processes happening at higher levels in a nested structure consisting of national, regional and local levels (2000, p. 179). If communities are provided with a certain degree of autonomy, and if the individuals forming them develop shared understandings regarding rules and norms, social capital can be formed and it can contribute to the appearance of trust among individuals, trust that in turn can change the payoff structure of a game. Thus, individuals can develop strategies of coordination related to appropriation or provision of the common-pool resources without fearing that most individuals in society have defection as a dominant strategy (Ostrom, Gardner and Walker: 1994, p. 16). Ostrom considers that in a community where individuals share sets of multiplex relations, there is a higher probability of "their developing adequate rules and norms to govern repetitive relationships [because] the importance of [...] a reputation is higher in such a community, and the cost of developing monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms is relatively low" (2005a, pp. 267). However, most of the literature on common-pool resources has not delved into the complexities posed by social capital. Therefore, we decided to include a social capital dimension in our hypothesis.

We have mentioned several times the concept of common-pool resources, without delving into what these are. A brief digression is necessary in order to explain this concept central to the Institutional analysis and development framework. If we take into account the 2 characteristics of a good, exclusion and substractability, we obtain 4 logical possibilities: s difficulty of exclusion and low levels of substractability characterize public goods, ease of exclusion and low substractability toll (club) goods, high levels of exclusion and high substractability private goods, and high substractability and difficulty of exclusion common-pool resources...