Ecological Science and Practice: Dialogues Across Cultures and Disciplines - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 21

joined to assess the results of these worldwide studies. This panel also promoted
a framework that had been developed in the 1970s by several social scientists,
including Ostrom, called the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework.
The framework was meant to provide a conceptual map that would help to organize
thinking about how individuals or groups dealt with collective-action problems.
Participation in the NRC workshops led Ostrom to try to synthesize the fi ndings
from the case studies, and this effort in turn stimulated an extensive research program
on common-pool resources.
The work of Ostrom and her collaborators involved consolidating data from
empirical studies ranging across many disciplines, carefully designed laboratory
experiments to test the assumptions of economic theory, extensive fi eld studies, and
theory development. In her ground-breaking topic, Governing the Commons , she
argued that any theory of human organization should be “based on realistic assess-
ment of human capabilities and limitations in dealing with a variety of situations
that initially share some or all aspects of a tragedy of the commons” (Ostrom 1990 ,
pp. 23-24). Her approach was interdisciplinary. It used the strategy then being
developed by social scientists under the rubric of “the new institutionalism,” which
called attention to the importance of understanding the details of institutional struc-
tures. But she also adopted the strategy biologists used when they linked empirical
work to a theoretical understanding of the biological world. Her inspiration in biology
came not from ecological studies but rather from the idea of selecting a simple
organism in which a process to be studied occurs in a clear or exaggerated way.
Her equivalent “representative organism” was instead a human situation, namely a
small-scale common-pool resource situation having certain characteristics. Among
the many lessons of her decades of work, as summarized in her Nobel Lecture
(Ostrom 2010 ), was that humans have much greater capacity to solve dilemmas
than early economic theories suggested. Moreover she concluded that “designing
institutions to force (or nudge) self-interested individuals to achieve better outcomes”
may be far less effective than facilitating “the development of institutions that bring
out the best in humans” (Ostrom 2010 , pp. 435-436).
Ostrom's work and that of her colleagues focused on human behavior and insti-
tutions and recognized the importance of a multi-level attack that includes the
socio-ecological context. This broad and ambitious program complements the lit-
erature of ecological science and suggests that dialogue between these disciplines
would be highly productive. The kinds of problems that Ostrom studied, and the
issues she confronted in the course of that study, such as how to deal with complexity
and contingency, are closely parallel to the problems and methodological challenges
that ecologists face. An excellent summation is the topic Working Together:
Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice (Poteete et al. 2010 ).
This topic offers much food for thought for ecologists who are grappling with problems
of stewardship and should suggest many ways of engaging with economists.
Like Ostrom, sociologists have also warned against over-simplifi cation of envi-
ronmental problems and the need to engage with communities in a productive way.
William R. Burch, Jr., a sociologist at Yale University, was an early critic of the way
environmental debates had split into either extremely pessimistic or overly optimistic