Reflections on Vincent Ostrom, Public Administration, and Polycentricity

Abstract

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 Ostrom's 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.

Weak feedbacks, governance mismatches, and the robustness of social-ecological systems: an analysis of the Southwest Nova Scotia lobster fishery with comparison to Maine

“…In hierarchical governance, governing bodies are neatly nested within higher level bodies. In polycentric governance, jurisdictions are messy, are overlapping, and come from public, private, and voluntary sectors (McGinnis and Ostrom 2012). We highlight some of the feedbacks and interactions that could be strengthened by polycentricity in both Maine and Port Lameron.…”

The changing role of NGOs in Mexican small-scale fisheries: From environmental conservation to multi-scale governance

“…It is necessary for institutions to have nested, quasi-autonomous decision-making units or authorities operating at multiple scales in order to achieve polycentricism [36,55,56]. None of the case study processes appear to be truly polycentric.…”

Chinese Rule-Abiding Decision-Making and Hidden Motives: Simulation Findings and Implications

“…In brief, social scientists have M. Y. Wen 2007). More important, researchers have documented the practicality and values of applying inter-epistemological approaches (e.g., Hummel, 2011;Ketokivi & Mantere, 2010), methodological pluralism (McGinnis & Ostrom, 2011), and multiple-level analysis (Perry, 2012). Based on the above, I tried to effectuate my quest for a more complete account of causal relationships of the subjects' rule-abiding behavioral tendencies and hidden motives, which I considered indispensable to forming a social scientific knowledge base for explaining and even predicting the occurrence of rule-abiding decision-making events in China.…”

“…It has been used in political and administrative studies in the US (Bozeman & Scott, 1992;Druckman et al, 2006;Jilke, Van de Walle, & Kim, 2017) to enhance theoretical breakthrough. Indeed, Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom had effectively conducted many human-assisted simulations to generate plentiful empirical findings indispensable to the articulation of the second generation public choice theory (McGinnis & Ostrom, 2011;Ostrom, 1998).…”