ABSTRACT. In 1990, Elinor Ostrom proposed eight design principles, positing them to characterize robust institutions for managing common-pool resources such as forests or fisheries. Since then, many studies have explicitly or implicitly evaluated these design principles. We analyzed 91 such studies to evaluate the principles empirically and to consider what theoretical issues have arisen since their introduction. We found that the principles are well supported empirically and that several important theoretical issues warrant discussion. We provide a reformulation of the design principles, drawing from commonalities found in the studies.

Research on policy entrepreneurs typically identifies these individuals as high-level government officials or actors who lobby such elites, largely ignoring low-rung bureaucrats whose entrepreneurship concerns policy implementation. These lacunae may exist because street-level bureaucracy scholarship does not necessarily expect implementing bureaucrats to be entrepreneurial. This article argues the contrary. The existence of street-level policy entrepreneurship and its influence on policy innovations pursued by public bureaucracies is illuminated via two US state case studies. The cases describe efforts by state bureaucrats to adopt and entrench a science policy innovation for wetland management into regulatory practice.

Narratives are highly consequential in policy processes because they shape public perception of policy issues. The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) seeks to predict the extent to which narratives are strategically used to influence policy outcomes. Its core hypotheses center around a winning vs. losing dichotomy, in which winning and losing narratives employ distinct sets of strategies. Due to the newness of the theory, there are few empirical tests of its components, and their results are inconclusive. We posit that the winning–losing paradigm does not accurately predict narrative strategy use. To test this hypothesis, we examine a policy dilemma where contextually similar jurisdictions adopted multiple different policy solutions over a common time period. From 2008 to 2012, more than 260 New York municipalities passed policies related to hydraulic fracturing (fracking). We analyze editorial content from two local newspapers in central New York whose distribution covers municipalities that adopted anti‐ and pro‐fracking policies. Our findings reveal that narrators consistently use narrative strategies that correspond to the side of the issue they support, regardless of whether they are winning or losing the policy debate. This suggests the NPF's winning–losing dichotomy may not be not well suited to predicting narrative strategy use or policy outcomes.