THINK BIG, ACT SMALL

Elinor Ostrom's Radical Vision for Community Power

Dr Simon Kaye
New Local (formerly the New Local Government Network) is
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transform public services and unlock community power.

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 4

FOREWORD 5

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 7

1. INTRODUCTION: THE GAP BETWEEN PEOPLE

AND INSTITUTIONS 12

2. OSTROM’S KEY INSIGHTS: SELF-GOVERNANCE,

POLYCENTRICITY, AND THE COMMONS 20

3. OSTROM'S CORE CONDITIONS OF COMMUNITY

POWER: LOCALITY, AUTONOMY, AND DIVERSITY 42

4. TOWARD OSTROMIAN POLICYMAKING AND THE

FACILITATOR STATE 56

5. RECOMMENDATIONS 69

APPENDIX: EXPLAINING OSTROM’S EIGHT DESIGN

PRINCIPLES 79
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

All of our research at New Local involves a lot of teamwork, even in

cases where the final report only has one listed author. My thanks to
my excellent colleagues Adam Lent, Jessica Studdert, Katy Oglethorpe,
Pawda Tjoa, Grace Pollard, Luca Tiratelli, Charlotte Morgan, Richard
Nelmes, Francesca Besana, Katy Evans, Jane Swindley, Vivek Bhardwaj,
and the ever-encouraging Donna Hall. I would also like to thank Adrian
Harvey for his important contributions at the project’s earliest stages.

This project has been particularly fortunate in its partners. Huge thanks
are due for all the time and input from Margaret Bolton and Rob Day at
Local Trust, Ailbhe McNabola and Susie Finlayson at Power to Change,
and Mark Pennington and Irena Schneider at the Centre for the Study of
Governance and Society at King’s College London.

This report was also informed by the fascinating discussions and

contributions of participants in a two-day remote symposium. Earnest
thanks to Martin Wheatley, Sophie Armour, David Archer, Chris Johnes,
Simon Parker, Jenni Lloyd, Jon Alexander, Vidhya Alakeson, and Deirdre
McCloskey.

Finally, my gratitude to all those who gave their time to discuss Ostrom’s
ideas with me or helped to inform the case studies in this report,
including Ian Burbidge, Harry Jones, Siân Jay, Syed Kamall, John Battle,
Greg Fisher, Mike Letton, Rebecca Luff, Joe Harrington, Marc Ellin, Kath
Mitchell, Nathan Marsh, Joe Wills, and Anne Johnson.

Any remaining errors or omissions are mine alone.

Dr Simon Kaye
Senior Policy Researcher, New Local
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FOREWORD

In an age characterised by ever greater levels of political polarisation

there is a desperate need to look for ways of addressing shared
problems that might transcend traditional political boundaries.
Nowhere is this a more pressing concern than in the search for ways
to empower the many communities in the UK that feel ignored, ‘left
behind’ and increasingly alienated from the centres of decision-
making in Westminster and Whitehall.

In one sense of course, there is nothing new or radical about this

analysis. For decades politicians of all parties have complained about
the lack of real local power in what remains one of the most centralised
governmental systems in Western Europe. Yet such analyses have
lacked a coherent framework of understanding that can open a space
for institutional reform that can be embraced across the political
spectrum. Traditionally, ‘left wing’ accounts have seen the case for
devolution only in terms of expanding the resourcing and ownership
portfolio of local governments. ‘Right wing’ accounts on the other hand
have conceived of empowerment only in terms of expanding consumer
choice in a competitive market. It is in this context that the work of Elinor
Ostrom, superbly summarised in this report from New Local, offers a
framework for genuine dialogue in seeking to create a space ‘beyond
markets and states’.

Ostrom’s contribution in many ways defies political labelling. She was

not opposed to the use of markets or of centralised state power where
these mechanisms are most suited to the challenge at hand. Equally,
she was keen to avoid the ‘panacea trap’ which sees the solution to all
socio-economic problems through a one-dimensional lens – whether
of markets, states – or of community power. What Ostrom’s work does,
however, is to emphasise a much greater scope for communities to
craft institutional hybrids that cannot easily be categorised as ‘private’
or ‘public’ and where decisions on the institutional mix emerge through
a process of ‘self-governance’.
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In common with other writers in the institutional economics tradition

– such as Ronald Coase – Ostrom’s work demonstrates that, if given
the space to do so, communities are able to solve a wide range of
dilemmas with institutional arrangements far more nuanced than
anything an economist or political scientist can devise on paper.
Understanding these models can help us move away from a style
of government where economists and political scientists design
solutions ‘for’ communities on the basis of pre-conceived ideals that
are then ‘imposed’ from above and move instead towards genuine
‘self-governance’ where our ideals are derived from communities
discovering, cataloguing and analysing ‘what works’ for themselves.
This is a vision that might just have the potential to forge unexpected
and productive alliances across the political spectrum and New Local
are to be commended for bringing it to a wider audience.

Professor Mark Pennington

Director of the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society
King’s College London
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Elinor Ostrom humanised the study of economics and politics.

She discovered what is possible, and the problems that can be
solved, when we trust each other. Her work inspires optimism, but
she was also a realist, basing her findings on decades of tireless
work in the real world.

This quietly revolutionary research led her to become the first woman
to win a Nobel prize in economics. She demonstrated that people’s
motivation and ability to cooperate, participate, and sustainably control
their own resources are far greater than is usually assumed.

Ostrom’s work offers grounds for ambitiously re-imagining the

relationship between people and institutions. It should inform and
inspire policy debate about community power, devolution, public
service reform, and organisational transformation.

This report draws out Ostrom’s insights for the UK in the context of a
growing crisis in the relationship between people and institutions. It
adapts and contextualises her work into a new set of practical lessons
for ‘self-governance’ – where communities take control over the things
that matter to them – and connects these with contemporary examples
of community-powered projects in the UK.

It offers a new analysis of Ostrom’s key insights: that a different model,

“beyond markets and states”, is possible in communities with high levels
of autonomy and internal trust. Recognition of these insights could lead
to more diverse and creative solutions to our problems.
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The experience of mutual aid in response to the Covid-19 pandemic

shows the power latent in our communities. Growing and sustaining it
will involve learning Ostrom’s lessons for community power, with strong
civil society and empowered, facilitative local government in place
to safeguard community rights and act as guarantor for three key
conditions: locality, autonomy, and diversity.

Three Key Insights

This report distils three important, overlapping arguments from across

Ostrom’s scholarship to form a case for decentralisation and enhanced
community power:

1. The commons: Communities can manage their own

resources. Beyond markets and states, there is a third model
where communities establish their own systems without the need
for regulation or privatisation. These communities can be found
all over the world and are demonstrably capable of managing
common resources and assets in a more sustainable and
productive way than comparable state or market systems.

2. Self-governance: Democracy is more meaningful at

a local level. Legitimacy and social trust can only flourish when
people have a reasonable expectation of influence over the things
that affect their lives. Mobilised communities will tend to benefit
from having decision making power and control over resources to
develop local services and facilities.

3. Polycentricity: In complex social and environmental

systems there are no one-size-fits-all solutions.
What is needed is a dynamic system that permits
experimentation, and which can tolerate the existence of diverse
and layered institutions of different kinds. The alternative – where
top-down, monolithic systems dominate – diminishes resilience.
Rather, it centralises risks and quashes creative, adaptive
solutions to problems.
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Three Core Conditions of Community Power

Ostrom’s best-known and most celebrated work is her scholarship on

self-governance of ‘the commons’ – an asset or resource shared by a
community rather than privately or state-owned. Importantly, she set
out a series of design principles that the most successful and long-lived
self-governing communities tended share. This report rearticulates
those principles, distilling them into three core conditions, which
correspond with the three key insights above:

1. Locality: Systems should be designed for specific places.

Systems – including the way that resources are managed, rules
are designed, and decisions are made – should be originated
within, and appropriate for, the particular places where they
operate. Ostrom’s evidence shows this makes it more likely that
people will collaborate and cooperate with each other, and that
overall outcomes can be improved this way.

2. Autonomy: The rights of communities to create and

run local systems must be respected. Communities will have
few incentives to come together without a basic expectation that
their decisions and participation will have meaning and impact,
and will that their decisions will be respected by external parties.

3. Diversity: Each community is different - and will

take different approaches. Context-driven, autonomous
communities will experiment with different systems. Taking different
approaches in different places means people have a range of
opportunities to get involved, enriching civil society. This diversity
should be promoted, as it may reveal strong new approaches.

Through a series of case studies, this report establishes how incentives

are important for communities to continue collaborating beyond
whatever situation or crisis first brought them together, and that the
relationship with local institutions can be a key determining factor
in whether local, autonomous, and diverse self-governance can find
space to function at all.
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Conclusions

The most important Ostromian conditions for community power in the

UK are locality, autonomy, and diversity. Without these, institutions will
be too distant from the real needs and preferences of communities,
and local-scale action will tend to be ignored - removing the
incentives for self-governance.

The best way to realise the goals of locality and autonomy is through
reform to the way the state – at both national and local levels –
functions, and a rebooted relationship between people and institutions.
This means institutions taking steps to become neither indifferent nor

“
controlling but facilitative.

...nothing should The only way to realise a more facilitative state is through
be done nationally an Ostrom-inspired approach to devolution, one that places
that would best be communities’ rights at its centre and works to a principle of
handled locally, and subsidiarity: every system should operate at the most local level
nothing should be consistent with its success. This means that nothing should
done locally without be done nationally that would best be handled locally, and
real engagement and nothing should be done locally without real engagement and
participation from participation from communities.
communities.

Recommendations

1. Reimagine devolution in the UK

= The UK government should move away from deal-making

and consolidation, recognising meaningful community
rights, and actively looking for opportunities to disperse
power away from the centre.

= There should be an Ostrom-informed audit of the UK’s

balance of power, designed to identify the reasons for the
UK’s over-centralisation and make proposals for a new model
of devolution built around the principle of subsidiarity.
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= A ‘community right to organise’ should be enshrined in central

legislation, incorporating explicit rights to local autonomy, self-
determination, and deviation from the norms and systems
used elsewhere when localities deem this to be necessary.

= A community wealth fund should be established to ensure

financial viability of much-needed civil society and
community groups.

2. Escape the duopoly of markets and states

= Central government should properly empower local
authorities, who should in turn lead a culture-shift toward
less centralised ways of working within services, with more
openness and horizontal relationships between institutions,
the social sector, and communities themselves.

= Specific policy areas would benefit from pilots of Ostromian,

decentralist reforms to grow a stronger evidence base of
the value of reforms that do not revolve around finding
efficiencies and economies of scale.

= Local government finance should be revolutionised, allowing

more local control of revenue-raising and ensuring councils
are resourced to be more autonomous and facilitative –
convening and supporting communities in their objectives.

3. Galvanise the change within localities

= Positive change can start to emerge, even without the
above recommendations being taken on, if localities work to
facilitate and create stability for nascent community groups,
and take a whole-place approach when making plans and
taking decisions.

= Communities themselves should reach beyond their localities

to build a new collaborative network for shared learning
between community-led groups, businesses, and projects in
the form of an open-access digital commons.

= Local councils, the social sector, and informal community

groups can create a stable environment for neighbourhood-
level projects by reviving the idea of local charters.
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1. INTRODUCTION:
THE GAP BETWEEN PEOPLE
AND INSTITUTIONS

Something must change in the relationship between people

and institutions.

Local authorities have borne the brunt of a decade of budget tightening,

but even if this were not the case, many of our essential public services
would by now be buckling. Demand is rising and becoming more
complex as our populations and demographics shift. The service needs
of different parts of the country are becoming markedly different,
deepening inequalities that in turn trigger yet more critical demands.
Further, there is a prevailing sense – captured by our 2019 Community
Paradigm report – that all of these systems are stuck within old
operating models based on one or another big, central reform agenda,
and that these old approaches are no longer capable of keeping up
with what people increasingly require from them.1

These social pathologies share an important cause. There is a

persistent, basic separation between the people who use services and
the increasingly untrusted institutions that make the most important
decisions about them .2 The useful levers for people to influence these
institutions are few and inaccessible. Key parts of our formal civil society
– the membership groups, voluntary outlets, and venues for mutual
support that have played such an important role in the development of
the UK – are starting to crumble.

1 Lent & Studdert, The Community Paradigm (New Local, 2019)

2 This has resulted in a long-term trend of collapsing trust in social institutions (though recently
complicated by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic): see the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer and
the 2019 Hansard Society audit of Political Engagement (both accessed 29/09/20).
 13

Community initiatives already underway in the UK make it clear that

a different approach is feasible. Our relationships with institutions do
not need to be one-directional. Communities of place and interest can
mobilise and commission some of their own services, take control of
their own shared spaces and local assets. Indeed, recent experience
makes clear the potential for spontaneous, grassroots-led action
at the neighbourhood level. The Covid-19 pandemic catalysed the
emergence of thousands of spontaneous mutual aid groups, and
without their voluntary contribution many aspects of the government’s
emergency response would have been impossible.3 This community
power movement involves growing activity across charities, community
businesses, delivery organisations, volunteer groups, and local
authorities which all place the self-organising potential of ordinary
citizens at their core.4

Mobilised communities – with objectives, plans, and resources –

can have a more meaningful say over the systems and institutions
that affect them. Under the right circumstances, people will invest
more time in connecting deeply with each other, their places, and
neighbourhoods than policymakers usually assume. They also stand
a chance of maximising their own flourishing with more preventative
interventions and outcomes that are better tailored to their specific
needs. But to realise these benefits, a bigger set of arguments must be
won – in central government, the policy sphere, and public discourse.
These will be arguments about the benefits and best mechanisms
of radical devolution, the legislation that will be needed to make it
happen, the underlying wisdom of subsidiarity, and what giving people
power and deepening their sense of belonging to the places where
they live really looks like.

This will not be easy. The UK is one of the most politically, fiscally, and
economically centralised countries in the world.5 The state of public
alienation from institutions is such that the ‘yes’ to Brexit in 2016 hinged,
in part, on an appeal to the usually-politically-disengaged to “take
back control”. Enormous differences in productivity, social mobility, and

3 Tiratelli, L., Kaye, S., Communities vs. Coronavirus: The Rise of Mutual Aid (2020)
4 According to analysis from Power to Change, the number of community businesses in the UK
grew from an estimated 5,000 in 2015 to an estimated 9,000 at the end of 2019.
5 As recently argued by, among others, reports from the Institute for Public Policy Research (2019)
and the UK2070 commission (2020) (both accessed 29/09/20).
 14

quality-of-life persist in different parts of the country. The UK’s seemingly

endless devolution project has resulted in a series of settlements with
national and local governments that seem to have satisfied nobody.
While state- and market-centric paradigms for public service provision
and community engagement seem clearly to be failing, there has been
no coherence or shared direction in the adaptations or reforms that are
emerging in response. A radical rethink of devolution is needed, with the
right to community autonomy and diversity at its heart.

Three Key Insights, Three Core Conditions

This report distils Elinor Ostrom’s enormous body of work into three key
insights, each of which corresponds with a core condition for effectively
decentralising power to communities. These ideas will be explored over
the course of the report.
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Key Insights Core Conditions

The commons Locality

Mobilised and trusting communities can The objectives, approach, decision-
manage services, assets, and resources making and design of systems should be
without intervention from state or market driven by mobilised local communities
– and often achieve better outcomes. and tailored to their particular needs.

Self-governance Autonomy
Democratic legitimacy is best Community power, participation, and social
achieved by ensuring people have capital can only emerge if people can
meaningful control over their reasonably expect that their plans and decisions
lives – as active participants and will be valued and taken seriously, and if they
citizens rather than passive clients, have the power to shape their own futures and
customers, or users. the future of the places in which they live.

Polycentricity Diversity
There are no simple solutions or quick Autonomous, context-driven
fixes within complex systems. This makes communities will experiment with
monolithic policy approaches and different systems. This diversity should
centralised structures less desirable than be promoted, as it may reveal powerful
layered and varied systems. new ways to flourish for everyone.
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Who was Elinor Ostrom?

Born in 1933, Elinor Ostrom grew up as – in her words - a “poor

kid” in post-Depression California. She went to college against
the wishes of her own mother. Like many girls at that time, she
was dissuaded from studying mathematics at school – and this
led to her eventually being rejected from studying for a PhD in
economics at UCLA. Ostrom was later forced to leave for Indiana
when her and her husband’s research irritated their department
because it, against the fashion of the times, criticised
governmental centralism.

In her varied academic career, Ostrom worked on environmental

sustainability, police reform, local government, and the capacity
for communities to come together to solve problems. These
decades of painstaking work generated an extraordinary evidence
base that allowed Ostrom to influence academic debates even
though she was working against the grain of most of her peers.

Ostrom ultimately won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009,

having totally overturned some of the longest-standing
assumptions in economics and politics to show that, under the
right conditions, communities could self-govern without central
management or recourse to private property. She built her
insights from the ground up, drawing out evidence from research
of real-world examples of communities working together and
wielding meaningful power. This principle – that theory should
reflect reality – led to ‘Ostrom’s law’: an arrangement “that works
in practice can work in theory”.
 17

Ostrom also built a lasting legacy around her approach to

scholarship, which was highly collaborative and singularly
focused on the ideal of generating grounded new insights for the
‘knowledge commons’. She donated her Nobel Prize money to
the workshop that she founded with her husband to sustain its
support for interdisciplinary and mould-breaking research.

In the latter part of her career, Ostrom became interested in

pressing global challenges, such as articulating small-scale
community solutions to climate change when it became clear
that the international community was unlikely to overcome its
‘collective action problem’ in time to generate solutions. This was
the subject of her last article – Green from the Grassroots – which
was published on the day she died in 2012.

An Ostromian Framework?

The work of Nobel Prize-winning political economist Elinor Ostrom was

the scholarly foundation of the Community Paradigm.6 This New Local
report argues that her work can provide the broad basis for a full-scale
rethink of the relationship between people and institutions. It engages
in a systematic way with Ostrom’s scholarship, establishes its relevance
to contemporary challenges, and aims to give ballast to the top-level
debate about the role of community power in the coming century.

Ostrom’s research overturned many longstanding academic

assumptions, demonstrating beyond doubt that communities can
manage their own resources, assets, and services – and showing that
they often do so with more sustainable and efficient results. Some
of her empirical case studies revealed self-governing community
systems that had been in operation for a thousand years. This
informed her wider call for a different and much more participatory
realisation of the ideal of democracy, with assertive, engaged, and
resourceful communities at its centre.

6 Lent & Studdert, The Community Paradigm (New Local, 2019)

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This is a vision of community power that goes far beyond emerging

institutional norms of enhanced consultation exercises by public bodies,
or the ‘stakeholderism’ that is now often mooted as a solution to the
results of ‘shareholder capitalism’.7

Instead, Ostrom’s arguments for self-governance establish the value

of mobilised communities that originate and develop their own
approaches and systems to handle decisions, assets, and resources.
By working ground-up, they can tailor these systems to the needs of
their own local context. This in turn creates the conditions for a healthy
diversity of layered and overlapping approaches – live, contained,
localised experiments with in-built legitimacy and co-production for the
communities involved in them.

These radical implications may explain the relative lack of interest in

Ostrom’s insights among UK policymakers. While her scholarship has
disrupted many debates in the world of academia, Ostrom’s influence
over political discourse and UK policymaking has been limited. This
report is, in part, an attempt to (re-)introduce her insights to those
who are unconvinced about the plausibility of the community
paradigm as a working model for the self-governance of community
assets, spaces, and public services. At the same time, it aims to
provide fresh authority to those who are already working toward and
advocating for community power.

This report also uses Ostrom’s work as a lens to discuss community-

powered projects, businesses, assets, and services that are already
at work throughout the UK, via case-studies of communities
demonstrating Ostrom’s arguments and showcasing the importance
of her design principles.

7 For an interesting and recent discussion of stakeholder capitalism, see Sundheim & Star, Mak-
ing Stakeholder Capitalism a Reality (Harvard Business Review, 2020). URL: https://hbr.org/2020/01/
making-stakeholder-capitalism-a-reality (accessed 24/09/20)
 19

Self-Governance in the UK?

This report features a variety of case studies, and there are many
different lessons to draw from them. For example, several demonstrate
that, in places where self-governance is possible, a permissive, and
preferably a facilitative, stance from local government is a necessary
(though not a sufficient) condition for the emergence of community
power. This confirms that local government has new roles to play
within the Community Paradigm: as a facilitator, as the bridge between
different institutions and tiers of governance, and as a key player in
sharing learnings from the effects of community action.

Another important trend notable across several of the cases is that a

lot of community activity is triggered by some kind of crisis or outside
threat.8 It seems that, in a heavily centralised system, these challenges
can motivate more trusting, coherent, and mobilised communities. This
raises important questions – and makes it doubly important to look at
examples of self-governance that are self-sustaining enough to outlast
the crises that brought them together in the first place.

These studies include examples where environmental resources and

spaces, high-value assets and properties, major funds, businesses,
and public services are all under direct community management. Big
Local projects around the UK offer a proof-of-concept for the idea of
communities managing their own discrete funds – and for the many
different kinds of assets and services that can emerge from such
community control. Community businesses – enterprises that are
rooted in, accountable to, and work explicitly toward the betterment
of their localities – can give an insight into how spaces and assets are
taken on, improved, and managed by communities. Many successful
community groups transform into registered charities with a big role to
play in supporting particular places through different kinds of crises or
supporting particular communities to gain a meaningful say over the
commissioning and design of services.2

8 As noted above, the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic has had an extraordinary galvanising
effect on communities in the UK, with 2,773 mutual aid groups listed by mid-April 2020. It remains to
be seen whether this community mobilisation will be sustained after the end of the UK’s epidemic.
See the report from the APPG on Social Integration (2020, accessed 29/09/20).
 20

2. OSTROM’S KEY INSIGHTS:

SELF-GOVERNANCE,
POLYCENTRICITY, AND
THE COMMONS

Elinor Ostrom’s work was grounded in real-world examples and

case studies.9 These empirical foundations, anchored in the real
lives of people all over the world, have made her insights relevant
to many disciplines. Over her career, Ostrom’s contributions
ranged from granular discussions of specific policy areas in
particular places, to sweeping new paradigms of thought that
altered the course of whole fields of study.

Within this diversity, a few themes stand out: ideas and lines of argument
that Ostrom returned to again and again, layering and reinforcing her
insights over time. Far from being dry demonstrations of abstract points
in economics, some of Ostrom’s most important ideas are to do with
foundational problems such as the nature of democracy, the fundamental
relationship between individual and state, and how to grapple with the
extraordinary complexity of social and environmental systems.

The following three key, overlapping insights give a condensed account

of Ostrom’s findings about democratic legitimacy, localism, complexity,
and human nature. They are not an attempt to capture Ostrom’s entire
thought in a comprehensive way, but to summarise some of these
core ‘families’ of insight and the way they relate to each other and the
objective of community power.

9 Her work also involved a huge range of different methods: collaborative and individual investiga-
tions, empirical field work and lab-based game theory experiments, social science and political
theory.
 21

Together, these arguments add significant weight to three important ideas:

1. A distinct third governance model of community control – one

that lies “beyond markets and states”, as Ostrom put it – is not only
possible, but often preferable under the right conditions.

2. The self-governance that makes this alternative model possible

arises from localism and communities with high levels of
autonomy and internal trust.

3. One important product of such autonomy should be the generation

of a layered, diverse, ‘polycentric’ system of institutions as the best
way of identifying and securing good outcomes for everyone.

1. The Commons: Beyond Markets, States,

and ‘Tragedies’

The Insight: Local communities can do it

Communities, under the right conditions, are demonstrably capable

of managing their own affairs, and can even do a better job of it than
the state or the market because the systems they come up with will be
more likely to be localised – that is, tailor-made to their own specific
needs and circumstances.

The Argument: Respect beats regulation

Through an ongoing research programme that incorporated political

theory, empirical social science, game theory, and economics, Ostrom
identified the existence of a third ‘type’ of institutional arrangement –
beyond markets and states – to resolve the ‘tragedy of the commons’.

For many years there was an economic and political consensus around
the idea that, without some kind of regulation, individuals would tend
to ruin and degrade any resources that they attempted to share.
Self-interest would lead them to try to maximise their gains from the
‘commons’, with the effect that the resource would eventually be
wrecked, throwing away all future potential.
 22

The way to escape such an outcome was to allow either the state or
the market to take control. Resources would need to be divided up
as private property – creating an incentive to manage the resource
more sustainably without fear of ‘losing’ it to some other ‘appropriator’
– or protected by state ownership and/or regulation. Otherwise the
uncoordinated actions of individuals would destroy the longer-term
potential of all resources.

In this way, the assumption that ‘tragedies of the commons’ are

inevitable provided justification for governance that fitted into two
broad ‘families’ of institutional arrangements: private property rights,
and state control. The asset or resource in question would need to
be directly owned, so that the property-holder can extract fees in
exchange for its use and so prevent over-exploitation. Alternatively,
the state would impose top-down regulations, along with a scheme of
direct enforcement or fines to manage demand.

Elinor Ostrom identified a third approach. She demonstrated that

community ownership models do exist and that they can produce
more efficient and sustainable outcomes than state monopolies. For
example, in the management of complex irrigation systems in Nepal, or in
Japanese villages that have sustainably managed forested commons for
hundreds of years without any external regulation or privatisation.10 The
mere existence of such communities contradicts the classic economic
assumption that self-interested individuals will ruin their shared resources
unless privatisation or a coercive state monopoly steps in.

What makes such ‘commoning’ possible is that, in practice, individuals

are capable of acting in pro-social, sustainable, and collaborative ways
that standard behavioural modelling often assumes to be impossible.
They are also able to constructively influence each other to cooperate
rather than compete within communities. This cannot happen in every
case – indeed, several important conditions must usually apply for any
such management of common-pool resources to occur, as discussed in
the next section. But the results can be far preferable than one-size-fits-
all policy and regulation, because such systems will often be adapted to
the preferences of participants and the constraints of particular places.

10 Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge
University Press, 1990)
 23

Many of Ostrom’s empirical studies demonstrate this point. The case of a

Maine lobster fishery using top-down rules that "were not credible among
users" and so depleted its stocks and ran into trouble, for example, is a
powerful contrast to the competing lobster fishery which, "governed by
formal and informal user institutions", continues to flourish to this day, and
with more sustainable and environmentally friendly results.11

Similarly, much of the irrigation infrastructure that is so critical to agriculture

in Nepal is managed within 100 per cent farmer-managed systems.
This means that it is the farmers themselves who must manage and
maintain the entire system. The lucky farmers nearest to the water sources
resist the urge to take advantage of their privileged position in order to
sustain the agriculture of potential competitors. And every farmer must
contribute maintenance, no matter how much they individually benefit
from the system. All the rules and arrangements within these systems are
informal and based on mutual trust. Ostrom found that not only does this
collaboration work long-term, but the farmer-managed irrigation systems
usually outperform the comparable state-managed systems.12

Internal trust within a well-incentivised community is important if

‘commoning’ is to function well. Ostrom found that diverse systems and
a localist concept of democracy are both contributors to a community’s

“
chances of being able to manage resources without privatisation or
state supervision. Importantly, Ostrom identified ‘community’ itself as
a powerful source of incentives for self-governance, since it creates
a sense of
the conditions for the longer-term, deeper, and more close-knit local
community is lost,
relationships that make real cooperation most plausible.13
public facilities
… may become
The deterioration of such a sense of community, meanwhile, can have
a no-man’s land
enormous negative implications. As Ostrom wrote, “local governments
where the law of
depend upon a reciprocity of interests among members of the
the jungle prevails.
communities being served”. So when “a sense of community is lost,
The strong and the
public facilities … may become a no-man’s land where the law of the
powerful can drive
jungle prevails. The strong and the powerful can drive out the weak.”14
out the weak.”

11 Dietz, Ostrom & Stern, ‘The Struggle to Govern the Commons’, (Science, 2003) p. 1907
12 Ostrom, ‘How Farmer Managed Irrigation Systems build social capital to outperform Agency
Managed Systems that rely primarily on physical capital’ (Proceedings from the second interna-
tional seminar on farmer-managed irrigation systems in a changed context, 2002)
13 Ostrom, ‘Community and the Endogenous Solution of Commons Problems’ (Journal of Theoreti-
cal Politics, 1992) pp. 343-51
14 Ostrom, Bish & Ostrom, V., Local Government in the United States, (ICS Press, 1988) p.96
 24

What is the Tragedy Of The Commons?

The ‘tragedy of the commons’ is an assumption about what happens

to shared resources – ‘commons’ – if people are left to their own
devices. If lots of people value the same
resource, they could ruin it as they
compete to make the most of it.

This is because people have

lots of incentives to extract
value - but don’t have many
incentives to plan for the
future and look after the
resource. This leads to the
‘tragedy’ – the resource is
wrecked instead of being
managed sustainably,
which would have been
better for everyone.

To escape this outcome, you need a third party to step in –

= To give some people property rights over parts of the resource so

they have incentives to use it sustainable

= Or to set up state regulation so people will face consequences if

they ruin the resource.

Example One – if a number of local farmers want to

use the same pasture for their livestock they may
run into a tragedy of the commons.

= Unless they come to some agreement and stick to it, each

farmer is incentivised to maximise their use of the pasture…

= …because of the likelihood that the other farmers will think the
same way, and also make maximum use of any of the pasture.

= This degrades the pasture quickly, so that in the end it’s useless
for anyone’s livestock.
 25

Example Two – climate change is arguably an

example of a supersized tragedy of the commons.

= We all know it’s better for everyone to stop wrecking the shared
resource of Earth’s atmosphere…

= …but individually we have strong incentives to keep doing the

things that are causing the damage.

= And now we’re working toward international agreements to try to

regulate all that damaging activity.

How did Ostrom

Debunk this Idea?
While the ‘tragedy’ does play out
sometimes, Ostrom proved that it
won’t always, and that we have
more options to prevent it than
private property and state
regulation. She found many
real-world examples of
communities sustainably
managing the
commons without state
involvement or breaking
it down into private
ownership.

Ostrom also found evidence that this can lead to better outcomes than
when the resource is managed by states and markets.

Her key discovery is that when people talk to each other and
communities can build up high levels of mutual trust, the ‘tragedy’ does
not take place. This was the insight that led to her winning the Nobel
Prize in economics.
 26

The Implications: Local solutions to local challenges

Ostrom’s insights about governing the commons highlight the value of

locality. This is made possible by placing communities at the heart of
planning and decision-making. The resulting context-specific design of
systems allows for the emergence of better outcomes. The one-size-
fits-all or top-down planning of systems – including how to manage
resources or assets and how to design and deliver public services
– destroys any chance of a system being context-sensitive, and the
incentives for community collaboration with it.

While it is possible to establish, as Ostrom did, both the realism and the
desirability of more localised and community-powered approaches
to the management of assets and resources, it is also clear that this
alternative approach is often made impossible by the pre-existing
institutions and actions of state and private actors. Simply not noticing
the possibility or discounting the realism of community power is itself
a danger to the possibility of its uptake. As Ostrom put it, one of the
biggest risks to self-governing communities are interventions that
make the mistake of “ignoring them or presuming they [do] not exist”.

In reality, community-based models can provide a “solid foundation

on which to build broader-based democratic institutions”, allowing
“individuals from all walks of life to perceive and articulate the
problems that are most important to them and find ways of
overcoming them.”15 In other words, there is a risk that the actions
of state or market actors undermine community power if they do
not recognise its existence and value. At the same time there is an
opportunity for institutions to play a role nurturing community power -
and thereby helping to create a strengthened civil society.

15 Ostrom, ‘How Farmer Managed Irrigation Systems build social capital to outperform Agency
Managed Systems that rely primarily on physical capital’ (Proceedings from the second interna-
tional seminar on farmer-managed irrigation systems in a changed context, 2002)
 27

2. Self-Governance: Real Democracy

The Insight: Deeper participation is impossible at

“
larger scales

The larger The larger the scale of politics, the harder it becomes for people to
the scale participate meaningfully in democracy. When important decisions
of politics, happen exclusively at a national scale, the result is disengaged and
the harder untrusting citizens who think of themselves as clients, customers, or
it becomes users rather than active participants. When communities set up local
for people to systems, a different culture and mindset of democracy can emerge.
participate This requires that local groups’ autonomy to arrive at their own
meaningfully objectives, ideas, and decisions should be respected by those with
in democracy. power. This creates the conditions for a more legitimate politics and
incentives that can sustain community power.

The Argument: Legitimacy through subsidiarity

It is easier to make a fair and legitimate decision if fewer people, with

more shared interests, have a stake in the outcome. It is therefore good
when decisions are taken by the people most affected by them. This is
the basic justification for the principle of subsidiarity, which states that
decisions should always be made at the smallest scale compatible
with their fulfilment. By implication, this also means that national- and
international-scale decision-making should be reserved for only the
issues that must be orchestrated at such a high level. Subsidiarity is a
principle that finds expression throughout Ostrom’s work, and in particular
in the way that she framed her case for genuine self-governance.

Broadly speaking, self-governance can be achieved in two ways. The

first is literal control over assets, resources, and decision-making by
the smallest-possible institution or community. The second is through
a democratic process that genuinely legitimises decision-making and
administration at larger scales. For Ostrom, localism was the best and
most legitimate scale for politics. There are ‘collective action problems’
in many decisions – where unintended effects occur and incentives
break down as people try to pursue their ends in ways that affect each
other; the tragedy of the commons is an example. These too often
stymie efforts at a larger scale or create unintended consequences.
 28

Democratic systems that neglect local-scale governance tend to

disincentivise civic engagement and unravel the social fabric of real
communities, Ostrom argued. It is also quite clear that the public prefers
power centres that are more localised. “Voters,” she wrote, “when provided
with the opportunity, have repeatedly rejected proposals to consolidate
governments in metropolitan areas.”16 Larger-scale democratic life also
creates the conditions for a huge variety of inefficiencies which are only
rarely compensated by the benefits and economies-of-scale that can
occur when centralised provision takes over.

Ostrom claimed that it is a mistake to think of democracy in purely

procedural terms. Properly understood, she wrote, democracy is “a way
of life”, one in which “people take responsibility for as much as possible
of what happens around them” rather than leaving their lives “totally
in the hands of others.”17 This is the only way to become practiced in a
“science and art of association”.18

People may not always be in a position to become experts over complex

and national-scale economic dilemmas or policy problems, but they
do have very good reasons to become ‘experts’ of another kind. They
have access to local knowledge about their everyday lives – the things
they need, the concerns of their families and neighbours, the persistent
problems that are distinct to the places where they live. This is the kind of

“
knowledge that a centralised system will always struggle to capture.

Moving towards What this means is that even if the good intentions of a highly
localism is not centralised state are beyond doubt, it will not always be able to access
just a matter of the information that it needs to deliver on them. Unlike local people, a
trying to ensure state bureaucracy may not understand why some aspect of one public
good outcomes, service is replicating the effort of another in a particular place, or how a
but of fostering certain family could be kept from creating complex and lasting service
a more full- needs if it were engaged earlier or more locally.
blooded notion
of what it means In this way, the practice of public service should also respond to these
to be a citizen. arguments about scale. As this report and Ostrom’s work shows, it is

16 Ostrom, ‘The Comparative Study of Public Economies’ (The American Economist, 1998), p. 6
17 Ostrom, ‘A Communitarian Approach to Local Governance’ (National Civic Review, 1993)
18 De Tocqueville: “In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science; the
progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one.” Democracy in America (this edition:
Chicago, 2002) p. 492
 29

not always economical to concentrate power rather than disperse it

– precisely because it excludes the most knowledgeable people of all
from the key decisions.

Centralism, then, is more likely to produce untailored, one-size-fits-all

solutions, while also creating a highly transactional, top-down social
model that excludes most people from both meaningful decisions and
any hand in co-production. Moving towards localism is not just a matter
of trying to ensure good outcomes, but of fostering a more full-blooded
notion of what it means to be a citizen.19 In Ostrom’s own words:

“In the current interpretation, people are viewed as clients who

receive what others provide for them. Their fate is totally in the
hands of others, rather than being something over which they
have some control . … If one presumes that teachers produce
education, police produce safety, doctors and nurses produce
health, and social workers produce effective households,
the focus of attention is on how to professionalise the public
service. … Ignoring the important role of children, families,
support groups, neighbourhood organisations, and churches
in the production of these services means, however, that
only a portion of the inputs to these processes are taken into
account when policy makers think about these problems.”20

The Implications: Fostering a culture of mobilised

communities

For local self-governance to emerge – and bring with it the advantages

of a more legitimate, context-sensitive, and informed politics –
communities must be able to act with a certain amount of autonomy.
This means that the spontaneous activities of communities should
have weight and be respected and taken seriously by both the state
and private sector institutions. In the UK, such autonomy would require

19 This resonates with many efforts to rethink the relationship between state and citizenry - see, for
example, Ridley’s work on the ‘enabling’ local state (Centre for Policy Studies, 1988) (accessed 29/09/20)
20 Ostrom, ‘A Communitarian Approach to Local Governance’ (National Civic Review, 1993)
 30

a significant culture shift – one which may well ultimately require that
communities’ rights to self-organise are formally and legally recognised.

Autonomy matters. During the Covid-19 pandemic, thousands of

spontaneous mutual aid groups appeared as communities sought to
support each other. Some of these groups undertook to supplement
public services; others coordinated with existing networks or charities
to supply new resources to get everyone through the lockdown. But
significantly, in many places the work of these groups was held back
by local or national state action. National-scale efforts to coordinate
volunteers were both less effective than community-scale efforts,
and ran the risk of crowding them out.21 Councils sometimes failed
to collaborate with mutual aid groups because of bureaucratic
requirements. Some well-meaning interventions by the state – such
as attempts to train and ensure the safety of mutual aid participants
– made it harder for communities to participate in their own defence
against the effects of the virus. By contrast, councils that respected
the autonomy of both communities and individuals – who offered
to facilitate, give support, and improve safeguarding without being
didactic – magnified the impact of mutual aid groups in many places.

21 For an early analysis of the mutual aid experience and evidenced comparison with national-
scale volunteer coordination, see Tiratelli & Kaye, Communities vs. Coronavirus: The Rise of Mutual
Aid (New Local, 2020)
 31

Locality

Case Study 1: Self-governing

through crises – The Brockham
Emergency Response Team

Autonomy
In many ways, the Brockham Emergency Response Team (BERT)
is a classic Ostromian case-study. A spontaneous, voluntary,
and community-managed organisation that emerged in
response to major local floods in 2013, BERT evolved from existing
informal groupings and structures that had arisen from the
normal flow of life in a rural Surrey village with a population of
less than 3,000.

Diversity
This group responded, in part, to a collective action problem.
Central government legislation in the years prior to the
floods had shifted the responsibility for rural watercourse
maintenance – such as drainage, streams, and ditches – out
of the hands of local authorities. It became the responsibility
of the people who own property that approximates these
watercourses to ensure that they are in good condition. Failure
to maintain these watercourses can impose huge risks and
costs on the wider locality, but most people are unaware of their
responsibilities, and often lack the skills required to effectively
maintain nearby ditches.

This situation exacerbated floods in places like Brockham

at the end of 2013. In response, an organic, community-
powered solution arose in the form of BERT, which organised an
autonomous response to flooding. More than 90 homes were
evacuated. Like Ostrom’s case studies, BERT has developed
its own internal structures, adopted some home-made
 32

governance procedures, and now forms an integral part of

local life. It solves the collective action problem by sharing
the burden of watercourse management over a network of
mutually interested volunteers, offering a more skilled and
efficient way of minimising flood risk than any of the responsible
private landowners could manage on their own.

BERT has now registered as a Charitable Incorporated

Organisation, and expanded its mission to include: support
for elderly and infirm residents, information-sharing and
environmental management support for the local council,
community support during severe weather and power outages, in
addition to ongoing flood prevention and management of ditches,
green spaces, environmental resources. Its primary function,
when not responding directly to an emergency, is to inform
private landowners and to pool local resources to ensure proper
management of the local watercourse. Otherwise, BERT’s explicit
aim is to shore up the wider resilience of the local community.

In 2020, BERT played a key part in the local response to the

Covid-19 pandemic, and the group now serves other roles beyond
supplementing emergency and council services. The participants
manage a shared central resource of supplies and tools, as well as
offering support and training to younger locals (ages 13 and up).
This group has even inspired some young people to study disaster
management at university.

How is it that this organisation appears to be maintaining its

importance within the local community, regardless of the
immediate risk of flooding? One answer is that the exceptional
success of BERT – which has now won an award for community
service – inspires continued confidence. The diversification of
BERT’s service offerings and the range of opportunities it supplies
for socialising and developing relationships may also play a
role. These are all key elements of how a real community builds
up social capital that, from an Ostromian perspective, can
both secure self-governance and create the conditions for the
emergence of more institutional forms.
 33

BERT is deeply enmeshed in local institutions and networks, and

has developed a functional and symbiotic relationship with both
the community that it serves and the local state. As one key figure
in the organisation explained, BERT emerged as a spontaneous
response to an immediate crisis: “You’ve got to have a problem;
you’ve got to have a threat. This gets people to come together
in the first place. If you’ve never had a big local issue play out it
just won’t happen.” But sustaining BERT long-term later became
a “deliberate decision”, since “if a watercourse goes to wrack and
ruin in one place then it becomes a problem for everyone else
upstream. It’s better to work together to keep the whole system
working properly. We all benefit from it – in lots of different ways.
BERT generates skills, puts things together, makes things happen.”

Critical to the continuation of BERT’s efforts is the relationship with

the council. “A lot of the time, communities moan at the statutory
authorities about what hasn’t been done. We take a completely
different approach. These authorities have a vast area to cover
and limited resources. We can moan every day about what
we think they should do – but the reality is that they can’t do
everything, they don’t have the resources. So we thought about
what the community should do for itself. We concentrate on the
stuff we can manage, and point out to the council where there
are things that we can’t tackle on our own.” The result is “a working
relationship, rather than one where we just berate one another.
It’s more sustainable. Our relationship with the local authority has
been transformed. I actually think they quite enjoy working with us.”

This suggests that BERT has asserted a community’s right to self-

organise and help itself, partnering with and being facilitated by
other institutions whenever necessary. These layered responses,
tackling different elements of a shared problem, are highly
Ostromian in nature – and help to explain why Brockham’s
community response has flourished.
 34

3. Polycentricity: Embrace the Mess

The Insight: Complexity is a hallmark of resilience

Autonomous and locally-working communities – those with the

conditions for Ostromian self-governance – will tend to diverge
from each other as their approaches and solutions become more
specialised and locally-tailored. While this increased complexity may
seem daunting, it can be highly advantageous, mitigating wide-scale
risks, building up the resilience of the whole, and offering lots of room
for experimentation and innovation in order to find good outcomes.
To embed these benefits, community systems should be allowed to
overlap and layer with one another, interrelate horizontally rather than
hierarchically, and therefore produce a nested diversity of outcomes.

The Argument: No universal answers, only

experimental solutions

In policymaking, there are no ‘silver bullets’. Human systems are

staggeringly complex. For every seemingly simple relationship there
are a multitude of unknown factors and confounding variables which
could lead to serious unintended consequences when new policies and
approaches are introduced. This is why Ostrom warned social scientists
and policymakers alike against the tendency to seize upon particular
models as panaceas – including her own.

Community-controlled institutions and self-governance are powerful

contributions to the range of available systemic responses to social
problems, but turning to such approaches will always be contentious.
Some issues must be addressed at the more distant level of the central
state, while others would best be regulated by local authorities. At other
times, the best and most efficient outcomes can only be achieved with the
help of privatisation and market forces – for example, when competition
can drive down prices and raise quality of life for more people than other
approaches might. What is needed, then, is a structural emphasis toward
experimentation, with room for shifting institutional arrangements that
overlap with each other and nest within each other at different scales.
 35

Embracing ‘messiness’ in this way feels counterintuitive. Ostrom noted

as early as 1978 that “conventional wisdom alleges that overlapping
jurisdiction leads to wasteful and inefficient duplication of functions.” Yet
markets are a kind of institutional arrangement where efficiency is only
possible when monopolies are avoided: “overlapping service areas and
duplicate facilities are necessary for the maintenance of competitive
forces.” For non-market players to benefit from the same set up, “they
would need to be coordinated through patterns of interorganisational
arrangements rather than patterns of hierarchical control alone.”22
Autonomous, contextually-working communities should relate to each
other horizontally and as peers, rather than referring back ‘up’ to some
higher authority for coordination.

The complexity of polycentricity may seem off-putting to reformers

who envision a streamlined, coherent, and joined-up future for
public services. Ostrom points out, though, that this is really “no more
complicated than shopping in several establishments – some of which
are general purpose stores and others of which are specialised.”23 From
a policymaking perspective, the real challenge is in fostering – without
quashing – an environment that leads to institutional “designs that
facilitate experimentation, learning, and change.”24

While we may be concerned by the potential costs of such diversity and

people’s responses to it, Ostrom would note that monolithic, simplified
systems also come at a cost. Human society throws out a complex
“diversity of puzzles and problems”, Ostrom wrote. Humans have
“complex motivational structures and establish diverse private-for-
profit, governmental, and community institutional arrangements that
operate at multiple scales”, with the result that “one size fits all policies
are not effective.”25 And, perhaps most importantly, diverse systems also
supply some degree of resilience. In Ostrom’s own words:

22 Ostrom & Ostrom, V., Public Economy Organisation and Service Delivery (Indiana University Work-
shop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, 1977) (accessed 29/09/20)
23 Ostrom, Local Government in the United States, p. 97
24 Dietz, Ostrom & Stern, ‘The Struggle to Govern the Commons’, (Science, 2003), p. 1907
25 Ostrom, ‘Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems’
(American Economic Review, 2010)
 36

“Institutions must be designed to allow for adaptation

because some current understanding is likely to be
wrong, the required scale of organization can shift, and
biophysical and social systems change. Fixed rules are
likely to fail because they place too much confidence in the
current state of knowledge, whereas systems that guard
against low probability, high consequence possibilities and
allow for change may be sub-optimal in the short run but
prove wiser in the long run.” 26

The Implications: The state as one system

among many

If communities are empowered to participate in and design systems

that are well-adapted for context and enjoy the autonomy to do
so effectively, then a diversity of approaches will surely emerge. It is
important to see the advantages of such diversity. Rather than starting
from the assumption that all problems have a single best answer, a
polycentric and locally diverse approach recognises that there may
be multiple viable solutions. Some of these work better in particular
contexts, and others will only function if nested within other layers that
involve many different kinds of institutional forms working in concert.
Such variation will also help to avoid the emergence of nationwide
disasters when inadequate approaches, policies, or systems are
instituted in a way that affects millions of people. A more polycentric
order would not remove the need for efficient central and local
government. Rather, it calls for a facilitative approach to strengthen,
rather than undermine, the kind of diversity that could help everyone to
innovate more and discover new solutions.

26 Dietz, Ostrom & Stern, ‘The Struggle to Govern the Commons’, (Science, 2003) p. 1909
 37

Locality

Case Study 2: Self-governing services

– ‘Revolutionising Recovery’ in Essex

Autonomy
Communities can – and increasingly do – take on important
roles in the defining, designing, delivering, and owning the critical
elements of public service provision. More often than not, they do
so as one layer of insight among many, or in collaboration with
other systems that work in quite different ways. Essex County
Council has led the way in introducing community engagement
and commissioning into its services.

Diversity
A particularly innovative example is ‘Revolutionising Recovery’,
a major new community commissioning project supported by
the council and Social Finance.27 The organisation is set up as an
independent charity, co-led by a board of expert Trustees and
a Recovery Advisory Committee comprising local people with
experience of addictive substance recovery and services. Through
a grant agreement with the council, the committee plays a major
role in selecting and commissioning drug and alcohol recovery
services in Essex and simultaneously works to reduce stigma
around addiction and recovery. Involving the community allows
for the identification of on-the-ground issues in a way the council
may never be able to on its own.

Revolutionising Recovery shows how community-powered

services can make meaningfully different judgments, informed
by experiential evidence. At one important early meeting in this
initiative, some attendees from the recovery community pointed

27 Essex Recovery Foundation (‘Revolutionising Recovery’)- website here

 38

out that a newly created facility was broadly less favoured by

community members than the older, existing sites. As a result,
the service users tended to simply use the old facility. Several
members of the assembled board pointed out that the money
spent on the new facility could arguably have been better spent
elsewhere – a fact that may not have emerged without such
direct community involvement in this service area.

Another interesting feature from this scale of community

involvement is the potential for productive differences of opinion
between the community representatives, the commissioned
service providers, and the evidence-led experts who also have
a role to play. For example, the community could decide that it
wants a facility to be accessible on weekends, and the formal
service provider could argue that this would be too costly or even
contribute to overdependence on the service through constant
availability. A disagreement like this requires the opening of a new
kind of discussion: one that would be impossible if the community
were relegated to the role of passive service users.

One facilitator who is closely involved in Revolutionising Recovery

pointed out that only under a process that truly involves the
community could such a difference of perspective be discovered
in the first place, which is surely preferable to its never being
recognised or addressed at all. The need, then – as Ostrom
indicated in her design principles – is for a set of governance
norms that provide the conditions for a real forum, with enough
internal trust between the members of the community and those
they interact with to enable the discovery of a mutually agreeable
course of action. The facilitator added that the relative open-
mindedness of participants had become an important selection
criterion in the recruitment of board members.

Revolutionising Recovery demonstrates the potential for solution-

finding and experimentalism within the many layers of existing
institutional arrangements.28 Notably, the participation and good

28 For further exploration of community commissioning approaches, see Lent, Studdert & Walker,
Community Commissioning: Shaping public services through people power (New Local, 2019)
 39

will of the local authority has been a necessary condition for the
emergence of a more community-centred approach that goes
far beyond mere consultation. To work effectively, this project has
also had to develop its own internal processes, all within the useful
organisational structure of a charitable organisation – but to get
to this point has required support from the state, the third sector,
and many volunteers. Without the presence of these diverse
elements, such an experiment could not take place.

Structural Lessons: Economies of context vs.

economies of scale

Regardless of the three key Ostromian insights – each of which works

as an argument against the centralisation of systems into monolithic,
hierarchical structures – we are used to seeing policy debates and public
service reform agendas that revolve around very different assumptions.

With public institutions under constant pressure to demonstrate

efficiency and cost-effectiveness, patterns emerge:

1. Consolidation programmes are often considered an intelligent

way to achieve economies of scale.

2. When major reforms to the distribution of a resource, the

management of an asset, or the running of a service are
introduced, there is often an effort to strengthen the centre to
maintain continuity and universality over whole systems.

3. To ensure cohesion with this stronger centre, local institutions are

usually also saddled with hierarchical accountability structures
and target-setting.

All these linked norms of governance reform are, from an Ostromian

perspective, highly counter-productive. Rather than fostering an
innovative diversity of approaches, they apply one-size-fits-all thinking
in an effort to standardise outcomes. Rather than increasing the
autonomy of communities and frontline teams, they force them into
rigid patterns of behaviour with few opportunities to make local change.
 40

Economies of Scale are not Universally Desirable

Police reform is a salutary example of the dangers of service and

institutional reforms that prioritise economies of scale and the goal of
consistency over large jurisdictions. In the UK, there are regular calls
to consolidate police forces in a similar way to the 20th Century police
department consolidation projects that took place within the USA.29 In
Scotland, similar calls were heeded when regional police organisations
consolidated into a single Scotland-wide policing body in 2013. A
subsequent review by Holyrood’s Justice Committee concluded that this
approach had failed to realise any savings while also magnifying issues
in leadership, staffing, and logistics for the police.30

The case for a consolidation approach here is easy to state. Unified and
merged police forces would require less collaboration between different
departments and jurisdictions to get things done, so larger-scale or
geographically mobile crimes are easier to address. Consolidation
would also allow rationalisation of everyday activities, so more could be
done with a smaller force and at lower cost. Rather than a proliferation
of local offices, each with its own distinct administrative team and
approach, a single central bureaucracy could run the whole operation.
When a major challenge emerges, the consolidated force would be able
to deploy all its resources to address it, rather than waiting for outside
support. And – perhaps most important of all – consolidation allows
easier auditing and supervision in general, and so may help prevent
the speciation of undesirable police practices in particular places
(for example, the emergence of a racist or authoritarian culture in a
particular local department).

The only problem with this consolidating approach, as Ostrom and

others have shown, is that it does not work.31 While certain savings are
made possible through consolidation, other, harder-to-see costs are
also likely to emerge. The potential for lighter-touch and more informal

29 In 2019, a significant debate was triggered by Sir Mark Rowley, former head of counter-terrorism
in the UK, when he called for consolidation of forces throughout the UK. These calls were echoed in
2020 by the chief constable of Greater Manchester and by the head of the National Police Chiefs
Council (both accessed 29/09/20). In 2017, there was an abortive attempt – amid significant funding
pressures – to unify Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall police forces into a single body.
30 Review of Police and Fire Services (Scottish Parliament Justice Committee, 2019) (accessed 25/09/20)
31 Boettke, Palagashvili & Lemke, ‘Riding in Cars with Boys: Elinor Ostrom’s adventures with the police’
(Journal of Institutional Economics, 2013)
 41

engagement with communities becomes much more difficult at larger

scales – so preventative action, community-orientated solutions,
and efforts to keep smaller misdemeanours from scaling up to costly
criminal activities all become harder. Similarly, it becomes less likely
that police officers will be personally embedded within the areas where
they work or the communities that they serve – so sense of place and of
nuance are both likely casualties of a serious consolidation programme.
Other services find it harder to coordinate with or otherwise influence
policing in bigger departments, worsening outcomes overall. And while
consolidation may make it less likely for small, isolated departments to
end up with undesirable internal cultures, it also risks embedding those
undesirable traits at a much larger, systemic scale – where it can have
a worse impact and be harder to dislodge.

Ostrom’s extensive research into US policing outcomes showed that

larger and more distant departments ultimately generated higher costs
and worsened public perceptions of the police.32 In a time where the
institutional biases and behaviours of police in both the USA and the
UK are under unprecedented scrutiny, the idea of making police more
distant from the public they serve in the name of efficiency would seem
misguided.

“
Policing is just one example. Other policy areas, from the structure of
‘economies social service provision to the operational culture of local government
of context’: could also benefit from the Ostromian insights set out above. Through
smaller-scale them, there is the potential to transform outcomes through what might
efforts, better be called ‘economies of context’: smaller-scale efforts, better connected
connected to to communities, and with more autonomy and decision-making power
communities, for those with the best local knowledge. Efforts are already underway to
and with more introduce these new norms, for example in children’s social care.33
autonomy
and decision- To translate Ostrom’s insights into wider experimentation with smaller-
making power scale work and ‘economies of context’ across the public services, we are
for those with in need of design principles: a sense of the conditions that would allow
the best local self-governance and polycentricity to emerge in both communities and
knowledge. reformed institutions.

32 Vansintjan, What Elinor Ostrom’s Work Tells Us about Defunding the Police (Grassroots Economic
Organising, 2020) = (accessed 29/09/20)
33 For a powerful recent example, see A Blueprint for Children’s Social Care: Unlocking the potential
of social work (Frontline, Centre for Public Impact & Buurtzorg, 2019).
 42

2. OSTROM'S CORE CONDITIONS OF

COMMUNITY POWER: LOCALITY,
AUTONOMY, AND DIVERSITY

Key Insights Core Conditions

The commons Locality

Self-governance Autonomy

Polycentricity Diversity
 43

To unpack the particular circumstances that Ostrom identified as

integral to the success of what is sometimes called ‘commoning’, this
section sets out three of the core conditions that can be used to discuss
and inform community power in the UK. Each of these corresponds with
one of the critical insights outlined in the previous section.

One of Ostrom’s most lasting contributions is a set of eight design

principles for successful self-governance, derived from her observation
of the shared attributes of the best community-managed common
resources.34 These are reproduced in a slightly simplified form in this
report’s Appendix I, with some explanatory notes, and a description of
how these design principles stand in the specific context of the UK.

This report argues that, just as there are three major areas of Ostromian
insight for decentralisation and community power in the UK, Ostrom’s
eight design principles can be summarised into three corresponding core
conditions for the success of self-governance and long-term, sustainable
collaboration within communities.

These core conditions are:

= Locality: Communities should wield meaningful control over

their own shared resources, act collectively to make decisions
about them, and make their systems as closely-informed by the
particulars and specifics of their context as possible.

= Autonomy: Communities can and should self-govern

without the need for outside intervention in order to foster
active citizenship and create the incentives that sustain real
collaboration and build up social capital.

= Diversity: When working locally and with autonomy, different

communities will also generate a multitude of different solutions
to their challenges. These will vary from place to place, overlap
with each other, and function at different scales – creating the
conditions for experimentation and innovation.

34 Ostrom, Governing the Commons, p. 90

 44

Three Core Ostromian Design Principles for

Sustainable Community Power in the UK
As argued in The Community Paradigm, the growing complexity and
scale of social and environmental challenges calls for new kinds of
response. Among other things, institutional measures must become
more trusted, connected, early-intervening, and locally tailored.
Ostrom’s work demonstrates the tangible existence of a third model
– ‘beyond markets and states’ – which will often be better placed to
create the conditions for these desirable traits. This potential is visible
in community-powered programmes and projects that are already
playing out all over the UK.

An Ostrom-inspired vision for community power in the UK would not be

about finding the ‘right’ answers to questions or problems (many of which
will have multiple possible solutions anyway). A key lesson from Ostrom’s
work is the need to escape from assumptions of ‘common sense’
universal solutions. The result of Ostromian community empowerment
is not a stable, set outcome but arrival at a dynamic, layered set of
experimental relationships and institutions that include people, empower
communities, and can respond to changes as they occur.

Ostrom set out many important requirements for the flourishing of

self-governance – and some of these are only occasionally met in the
social and political environment of the UK. Most importantly, three core
conditions can be distilled from these design principles, particularly in
the context of Ostrom’s key insights about democracy, the commons,
and polycentricity.

These overarching conditions – locality, autonomy, and diversity –

must be in place for community-powered projects to reach the point
where they can self-sustain. They are requirements that establish the
ground for much that is desirable and empowering in Ostrom’s vision of
decentralised self-governance.
 45

1. Locality: Context is King

This is the stipulation that systems – including the way that resources
are managed, rules are designed and sustained, and key decisions are
made – should be originated within, and appropriate for, the particular
context in which they operate. Ostrom’s evidence shows that such
proximity to context and ability to tailor systems to meet the specific
needs of a community make it more likely that people will collaborate
and cooperate with each other. The ‘locality’ of work – and its proximity
to those with the best idea of how things ought to function in particular
places – is key to realising of the promise of the commons.

Ostrom found that a mobilised community will be more likely to work in

line with rules that it has had a meaningful amount of influence over, for
example. This is because the people expected to abide by rules will also
have been the ones with a hand in their design, so they have a stake in
them. At the same time, the products of such cooperation – the mutual
benefits, the social value, and any gains in efficiency – are more likely
to emerge and be visible at such a scale. These incentives can then
contribute to a virtuous cycle that leads to more social capital, higher
levels of trust within the community, and deeper cooperation. This
positive feedback loop is visible in the case of Bramley Baths community
business, for example, or many successful Big Local programmes (see
case studies 3 and 5).

As Ostrom explained, the incentives to find ways to build trust and

collaborate are strongest at smaller scales.

The locality core condition requires defining the scope of the resources
being managed and the community that is managing them. This
will involve stipulating that rules are contextually adjusted, in part by
allowing community members a meaningful say over how things
should work. Without this basic opportunity for individuals to deploy
their local expertise, a community power project is unlikely to succeed.
This is because locality is also about a shift in incentives. Participants
would be less likely to collaborate over long periods in a self-governing
system over a large scale, or within one whose processes are
externally designed, because some of the principle advantages of self-
governance would not be possible under those circumstances.
 46

Locality

Case Study 3: Self-governing

assets – Bramley Baths, Leeds

Autonomy The direct management of assets, resources, and service hubs

through the organising structure of ‘community businesses‘ is
growing in importance. Community business have a variety of
different forms, governance structures and purposes, and can
include things like pubs, village halls, bookshops, farms, energy
production facilities, and leisure centres. There are an estimated
9,000 community businesses operating in the UK.

Diversity The historic Bramley Baths in Leeds were taken on by local people
as a community business when it became clear that the council
was getting ready to sell them. The way this asset was taken on is
testament to its importance to the local community, but also to
the significance of the stance of local authorities for the success
of community-powered projects. Most significantly, this case
demonstrates that communities are capable of making more
of a valuable resource than a managing local authority – in this
case, by running a steady surplus where council management
was resulting in steady annual losses. This is not to diminish the
capabilities of Leeds City Council, which remains an important
component in the Baths’ current success – rather, this illustrates
Ostrom’s point that larger-scale administration will sometimes not
be best-placed to engage in the particular and detailed business
of resource management in the same way as a fully mobilised
community with skin in the game.

The baths are now run by the community as a company limited

by guarantee. It operates a tiered membership scheme that
 47

grants voting rights over the composition of the baths’ board, and
provides a diversity of services, employment opportunities, and
affordable health-and-fitness facilities to its community.

One important participant in the work to set up Bramley Baths as

a community business said the fact it was community managed
had helped create a deep resilience , even in the context of a
global pandemic that has forced the baths to suspend their
operations. He argues that their fundamental value is such that
“even if we completely collapsed, and lost all our members, we
would be able to bring it back. The essentials are all there, and we
know people want it and want to use the services we provide, so
we know the Baths can come back from anything.”

The community’s ambitions for the Baths extended far further

than the council’s did. Rather than operating on a limited schedule
to control costs or using the space as a kind of museum, under
community ownership Bramley Baths has been enhanced by
the addition of community gardens, a gym and pool with regular
classes, training facilities, special events, and a sauna. Dozens of
employees work on various aspects of the community business
and are developing useful skills as a result.

Participants in this project are clear that the relationship with Leeds
City Council has been key. “At first, the volunteers were hostile to
the council, and the council were hostile to us. But we realised that
we couldn’t win without the council on board, so we worked hard
to build a respectful relationship based on negotiation. By the time
the council came to make a decision over whether to lease the
baths to us, we had already ‘saved’ them through a sort of ‘use it or
lose it’ campaign. So we proved that the baths could be popular. By
the end the council wanted a seat on our board, but we decided to
maintain an appropriate distance from them.”

The architects of the Bramley Baths success story are also

ambitious in a wider sense, and suggest the potential to use
neighbourhood-led approaches to revive locally important
resources of different kinds: “I’m convinced that this model could
be used to revive community assets all over the place,” said one.
 48

2. Autonomy: The Right to Self-Organise

The rights of communities to originate and sustain local systems must

be respected by external parties. Without the basic expectation that
their decisions and participation will have meaning, communities will
have few incentives to come together or to self-govern. Instead, they
are strongly incentivised to enter into transactional relationships with
more detached representatives, service providers, and institutions.
Very often, these relationships will lead to dashed expectations, lack of
engagement, and collapsing trust.

With a fundamental principle of autonomy in place, the incentives

for community power have a better chance of being embedded.
This in turn will allow the emergence of experimentalism – different
approaches being tried in different places, as appropriate.

Such a ‘duty of respect’ for a mobilised community’s choices can

be realised in several ways. The ‘Revolutionising Recovery’ example
of community-powered service design and delivery in Essex, for
example, cements a productive relationship between institutions and
communities (see case study 2 on page 37 ). Very often, however, the
burden of proof is placed on communities themselves to demonstrate
the viability of an alternative approach before bigger players will give
them the space to flourish, as with Bramley Baths in Leeds (see case
study 3 on page 46).

In Ostrom’s original design principles, several of the shared traits of

successful self-governing systems are to do with mediation, localised
decision-making, and frameworks for imposing sanctions within a local
context.35 This is because localised systems and rules are more likely
to be adhered to by communities than those established top-down via
outside enforcement or regulation. In this way, the internal governance
– and its functional independence from larger institutions – establish
the potential for their autonomy.

35 See the appendix to this report for further specifics from the design principles.
 49

Locality

Case Study 4: Self-governing spaces

– Green spaces in Withdean, Brighton

Autonomy Institutional complexity can lead to a challenging diversity of

outcomes. This is the case for various community-powered efforts
to manage green spaces in the Withdean area of Brighton. While
some projects, such as the Westdene Green space and barn – now
operating as a community business – are increasingly successful
in engaging community support even without direct support
from local government, others, such as The Withdean-Westdene
and Eldred Avenue Copse Keepers organisation (TWEACK), are
Diversity struggling to remain active.

Previous research in this area has found that the management

of shared spaces seems to be particularly dependent on a few
highly dedicated individuals: "the very survival of the groups
appeared to depend on intensely committed individuals who were
prepared to shoulder the full costs of organising and maintaining
the groups’ political presence, because of the intensity of their
ideological commitment to environmental protection issues and
the enjoyment they personally derived from being involved in
this way."36 This is a familiar challenge in community-powered
projects: the risk of a ‘turn-up-ocracy’ dominated by a few
pivotal, community-spirited individuals who are not necessarily
representative of a cross-section of views in their area. An
associated risk is that activities can quickly cease if these
organisers move on or lose interest.

36 Pennington & Rydin, ‘Researching Social Capital in Local Environmental Policy Contexts’, (Policy &
Politics, 2000) p. 244
 50

An example of this is TWEACK – a community group dedicated

to environmental management of some large, healthy green
spaces and publicly accessible woods with strong environmental
value – was created in response to the risk of commercial
redevelopment. To preserve this environmental resource and
local amenity, TWEACK partnered with the Sussex Wildlife Trust
to gain control of the spaces, and proceeded to autonomously
manage them for 25 years, planting trees, maintaining hedges,
and collecting litter.

One key organiser, who has participated in TWEACK since its

founding, explains that there has been slowly declining interest
in the project, and that he expects that voluntary management
of these copses will soon end altogether. The core group of
volunteers dispersed over the years, as did the incentives for
younger people to get involved, as they had less personal
investment in their immediate neighbourhoods and were living
busier lives: “This is just a place where their houses are, their
lives are somewhere else.” In this case, the organiser argues
that the management of these spaces could be sustained if the
local authority offered more support, connecting specialists and
experts and facilitating the volunteers and community members
who remain interested. In practice, the council is strongly
incentivised to focus its efforts on green spaces that are likely to
help generate revenue streams.

Where TWEACK is an impressively long-lived community

project that is now losing out to changing priorities and local
demographics, the nearby Friends of Westdene Green (FWG) –
which maintains a sizeable green space as well as a community
hub – is a more recent project and a community business success
story. Like TWEACK, FWG was galvanised by the potential loss
of a community asset when the council advertised the barn on
Westdene Green for commercial let on the Gumtree website. A
campaign emerged to save the barn, which had been quietly
operating as a community asset for some time, and eventually
involved more than 300 people.
 51

The campaign to gain control of this asset from the council was
complex, again showing how crucial the council-community
relationship can be for self-governance projects. FWG moved
to register the space and barn as assets of community value,
and then petitioned a full council meeting. The local authority
initially turned down the ownership bid, despite the existence
of a longstanding covenant that the space should not be put to
commercial use. Ultimately, FWG were able to save this crucial
local asset and run it to the benefit of the community.

At this point, the Friends of Westdene Green have become

conveners and supporters for other community groups in the
area – including TWEACK – while the central asset of the barn has
become increasingly central to nearby residents’ lives. This is all
the product of the community’s hard work. The relative power of
the local state means that FWG have important reasons to foster
a mature and constructive rapport with the council: “At first, the
relationship with the council was a challenge – ‘this isn’t your
asset, this is our asset’. Since then, they’ve recognised the amount
of social value we bring to the community. We are definitely
saving money by adding to local wellbeing, though of course this
is hard to measure well enough to demonstrate that point. And we
have to hope that the council will bear this in mind when the time
comes to renegotiate our lease.”
 52

3. Diversity: The Power of Allowing Different

Approaches to Emerge
When the rights of communities are respected, and they can tailor
their systems and plans more closely to their local needs, diversity
and variation in approaches will necessarily follow. This throws up a
series of new opportunities and challenges. The state’s role does not
disappear within such a ‘polycentric’ order – it must support, facilitate,
and safeguard the action of communities where possible, fostering
horizontal relationships and identifying useful innovations as they
emerge.

Accordingly, Ostrom’s eighth and final design principle is about allowing

the conditions for experimentation and creativity in the way that
resources are handled and services are designed. When communities
have a reasonable expectation of autonomy and work locally to solve
local problems and address local needs, their approaches will be
likely to diverge. Rather than constraining this diversity in the name
of universalism, the diversity condition suggests that this kind of
speciation should be perceived as a legitimate and desirable outcome:
overlapping, variable, and layered systems give communities space to
innovate and experiment – which in turn offers wider society a chance
to find out which approaches and combinations work best, and under
what circumstances.

This condition leaves open an important role for local authorities whose
participation are in many cases a necessary condition for the success
of such projects.
 53

Locality

Case Study 5: Self-governing

funds: Big Local

Autonomy
Allocating funds – from charitable sources or otherwise – for direct
community management can create the conditions for a powerful
test of Ostrom’s assertions about the capacity of unregulated
communities to manage common resources. Like a natural
resource, a fund of money can be managed in ways that makes it
grow or shrink; invested in order to generate some return, or spent-
down to realise outcomes that deliver value in a different way.

Diversity The Big Local initiatives demonstrate both the potential and the
challenges of the self-governance of resources. Organised by
Local Trust, the scheme hands a substantial fund into the control
of a community, which then makes largely autonomous decisions
about what to do with it. Big Local has invested millions of pounds
into resident-led, long-term projects around the country. In each
case the spending is managed by a steering group populated with
facilitators and advisors, principally composed of and controlled
by local people themselves.

Governance within projects such as these can be difficult to

establish. Big Local’s many projects are a powerful source
of evidence for the practicability of meaningful community
management over a common resource. The money given to
communities by Big Local is under genuine community control:
it belongs to them. As a result, the services and facilities that are
bought with this money are directly responding to a community’s
perception of its own needs and gaps in provision.
 54

In Barrow Island in Cumbria, the community decided to maximise

the impact of its cash by investing it in the creation of a new
community centre and sports facility within an existing space that
was being under-used. Post-investment, the centre now provides
a hub for many more relationships within the community.37 This
is an approach which focuses on a core community asset rather
than investing more widely. Almost all of the Big Local funds were
invested in improving and building upon a single facility, which
has now – or at least before the current pandemic – achieved
financial self-sufficiency.

But Barrow Island’s experience has also been complicated

by bureaucratic barriers, which contrasted starkly with the
community’s more pragmatic ‘just do it’ attitude. As one
participant in the steering group put it: “This is a group that needs
to gain new knowledge to sustain its success. It has been hard to
convince them of the need for getting things like the paperwork
right because they’re basically so successful. The way things are,
there is a need for formality sometimes. This community is brilliant
at problem-solving, but does less future planning.”

The Ostromian autonomy evident in the Barrow Island story has

also been notable since the start of the Covid-19 crisis. Barrow
Island has been central to the local response – organising
hundreds of meals every day, and helping to tackle loneliness and
isolation – while the council supported local groups to cooperate
and coordinate their own response.

In Barrowcliff Big Local in Scarborough, the money was spent in a wider

range of areas. This is a community with a similar historic experience
of low public and charitable investment and relatively high rates of
crime. As the project has gone on, the community’s planning and
ambitions have become more long-term and more clearly directed
toward identifying and heading-off endemic service needs.

The resident-led projects have been manifold: they aim to improve

public health, strengthen community ties, create new spaces and

37 Herman, R., A Level Playing Field (Local Trust, 2019), p. 14

 55

outlets for families and young people, set up drop-in surgeries

for people with disabilities, make small loans to local businesses,
and establish a multi-purpose coaching, advice and support
unit for families and working-age people. The centrepiece of the
Barrowcliff project, a new park and play facility replacing unused
land in the middle of the community, was up and running within
a year of the publication of the first Barrowcliff Big Local plan, and
is now maintained through a combination of self-policing and
council support.38

Other Big Local projects have faced challenges familiar to Ostrom

scholars. The dynamic and highly diverse nature of communities
in urban environments can make it difficult to forge consensus
about the way forward. A participant in the steering group of one
metropolitan Big Local project suggests that thinking in terms of
the governance of common pool resources has been key – and
that the more closely the top team has reflected the context of
the community it is embedded in, the more useful its work has
become: “Reflecting the diversity of this area has been a huge
challenge. It is hard to engage with different groups, and hard to
get them to join up. It was critical to get to a point where we are
really representative of the community. It is helpful to think of the
Big Local funding as a kind of commons, with different ideas for the
best way to put it to use – so a sort of collective action problem.”

The Covid-19 crisis has galvanised a response from many

communities, and in the ‘urban commons’ of some Big Local
sites seems set to help draw the community further together
to collaborate over the best use of its common resources: “The
pandemic has created an opportunity to expand and grow
our reach through the new networks that have emerged from
voluntary groups and mutual aid. At present we mainly connect
with the wider community through already-established networks,
which tend to be organised along the lines of the key cultural and
ethnic groups in the area. So the pandemic creates an opportunity
to reach further, and across those lines.”

38 The Halfway Point (Local Trust, 2019)

 56

The Conditions for Community Power

Ostrom’s eight design principles offer a powerful understanding of

the traits of particularly successful self-governing communities. The
condensed ‘core principles’ set out in this report – locality, autonomy,
and diversity - allow for a more focused sense of the central
requirements for the emergence of sustainable self-governance in
the UK, a country with a highly politically and economically centralised
environment, where community rights are generally side-lined or
ignored altogether.

Her body of work shows how the right conditions must be in place
for highly context-specific systems and solutions to emerge, and for
those systems and solutions to be plausibly respected – that is, not
side-lined, overridden, or crowded-out by the state or the market.
When this happens, Ostrom is clear about the potential benefits: real
systemic diversity can develop at larger scales, allowing innovation and
experimentation and setting up a discovery process for the best and
most contextually appropriate answers to problems.
 57

4. TOWARD OSTROMIAN
POLICYMAKING AND THE
FACILITATOR STATE

What might an Ostrom-informed approach to policy look like?

The range of relevant policy areas is enormous, and includes:
the enablement of neighbourhood-level community power and
communing, the flourishing of community businesses and the role
of civil society organisations, the structure and design of a plethora
of public services, the empowerment of local government for true
subsidiarity, and the reimagination of the distribution and devolution
of power throughout the UK. The core conditions identified above –
locality, autonomy, and diversity – are a starting point, and the case
studies show how these conditions can find practical expression.

What Can We Learn from the Think Big, Act

Small Case Studies?
The case studies presented throughout this report have each discussed a
slightly different governance situation, illustrating the Ostromian point that
a diversity of systems is needed, since different things will work in different
places and in response to different kinds of challenge. Each of these studies
also illustrates the importance of – and challenges around – the other
two core design principles identified in this report: autonomy (particularly
with respect to the relationship with the state) and locality – the in-built
value of bringing systems closer to communities and tailoring them to
smaller contexts. The community businesses of Bramley Baths in Leeds
and Westdene Green in Brighton make clear the potential for community
ownership of local assets. The Big Local projects in Barrow Island and
Barrowcliff are case studies in how communities can collaboratively
manage resources. BERT and TWEACK showcase spontaneous
environmental management, while the work of Revolutionising Recovery is
an indicator of the need for diverse and layered systems.
 58

These diverse examples demonstrate the value of an Ostromian analysis of

community-powered projects in the UK. Each case study includes a number of
challenges – highlighting ways in which the governance norms and general
centralisation of the UK can make life difficult for communities that seek to work
autonomously. Yet they also show how a diversity of systems, each finding
subtly different ways to put communities in the driving seat, can find the space
to flourish in this country.

In different ways, both BERT and Big Local function as fundamental proofs-
of-concept for Ostrom’s claims about self-governance. These examples
show communities resolving collective problems and managing shared
resources in a cooperative way. Several also shed light on the question
of community mobilisation. BERT, Bramley Baths, and the examples from
Brighton’s green spaces each showcase community actions that are
galvanised in response to a major, shared crisis: genuine environmental
disaster in the case of BERT, or the risk of losing valuable local or
environmental assets in Leeds or Brighton.

Several of the Big Local projects discussed here, as well as Bramley Baths,
indicate the potential for communities to make better custodians of such
important assets than the local state, ultimately deriving more value from
them and getting them into the position of being financially self-sufficient
institutions in their own right.

In every case study, the posture of the local authority was critical to the
outcome. A facilitative council can help communities flourish, and even
play a central role in the diverse responses needed for innovative new
approaches to emerge, as in the case with Essex County Council and its role
facilitating Revolutionising Recovery. Meanwhile, an indifferent or controlling
local authority can have the opposite effect. This chapter will consider what
it means in practice to play an effective facilitation role.

Ostromian Approaches in Wider Policy Areas

The five main case studies in this report set out examples of localised
solutions, autonomous community activity, and diverse approaches in the
areas of: environmental management, public hubs and spaces, local assets,
fund-management, and public service delivery. But the usefulness of an
Ostromian approach could go much further than this. This table sets out the
implications of Ostrom’s insights for a wider set of important policy areas.
 59

Policy Area Ostromian Insight In-practice Example

Some communities have already

Poor access to a good internet demonstrated a willingness to
connection has been a severe cooperate in the production of a
barrier for some communities, mutually desirable outcome in this
particularly during the Covid-19 area. Residents of the Welsh village
pandemic. Digital infrastructure of Michaelston-y-Fedw established
Digital
of this sort is also a tool to a community interest company
Infrastructure build resilience and organise to provide fast broadband, and
local social capital.39 Where dug the trenches for the cables
communities are poorly served by themselves to minimise costs,
the private sector there is scope contributing thousands of hours of
for a self-governance solution. voluntary work to do so.40

Electricity is a resource that is

highly amenable to collective
ownership and by a self- There are thousands of active
governing community.41 This could community groups with energy
Energy produce the kind of resilient self- production objectives active in the
Production sufficiency and grassroots change UK – including commonly owned
that will ultimately help to address renewable projects involving solar
otherwise intractable large-scale panels and wind farms.42
collective action problems, such
as climate change.

Various community-powered
models include housing association
Most of the social housing models co-operatives and tenant
in the UK leave tenants with management organisations.
little control over their situation. Collaborations between adjacent
Housing The quality of homes and their co-ops can also lead to deeper
Management; immediate environment have improvements to social capital
Social and implications for their general – e.g. the ‘Coin Street Community
Affordable welfare. More sustainable and Builders’.43 Community land trusts
Housing legitimate approaches would represent a way for communities to
democratise the governance manage land long-term and create
of housing, increasing genuinely affordable housing as a
stakeholdership in turn. result, as well as developing non-
housing assets that are important
to the local area.

39 Tiratelli & kaye, Communities vs. coronavirus (New Local, 2020)

40 See the webpage for the ‘myfi’ project (accessed 29/09/20)
41 Melville et al., ‘The Electric Commons: A qualitative study of community accountability’ (Energy Policy, 2017)
42 UK Government Department of Energy & Climate Change, Community Energy Strategy (Gov.uk, 2014) (accessed 29/09/20)
43 See the webpage for the Coin Street Community Builders (accessed 29/09/20)
 60

The potential result here would be

a greater proportion of successful
By localising and empowering
planning applications alongside
the planning process, mutually
a higher overall level of public
agreeable outcomes are more
Planning and satisfaction with all developments.
likely to emerge from bargaining
Development and deliberation processes that
In some places, - such as the
‘on the rise’ redevelopment in
lead to the building of more
Clapham, London – residents have
houses overall.44
collectively pushed for higher-
density and higher-quality housing.

Ostrom contributed to a broad

Benefits can emerge from
research agenda exploring the
more informal, localised, and
Police impact of ‘consolidation’ policies on
neighbourhood-orientated
Structures public trust and general relations
policing models that are
and Reforms with police forces. More negative
embedded within, and contributed
perceptions tend to emerge when
to, by communities themselves.
police forces are less local.

Prisoner councils – with Experiments in prisoner

meaningful participation, civic democracy – with varying extents
Prison Reform interaction, decision-making of actual impact on internal prison
and Anti- for convicted criminals – could policies – are quite common in
Recidivism have an important role to play some jurisdictions. They have
in reducing the incidence of also been experimented with and
reoffenders and building skills. evaluated in several UK prisons.45

Ostrom wrote widely on

the possibility of treating
knowledge as a commons.46 Many online resources function
While knowledge-generation is as effective common-pool-
Public sometimes a competitive process, resources for the public good, with
Information the management of archives or varying levels of hierarchy in how
and Archives resources of information can be contributions and additions are
collaborative, inclusive, and widely approved or modified. Wikipedia is
co-produced to make the most the definitive example.
of the distributed information
throughout an entire population.

44 Myers, ‘Fixing Urban Planning with Ostrom’ (Urban Economics, 2020) (accessed 29/09/20)
45 Solomon & Edgar, Having Their Say: The work of prisoner councils (Prison Reform Trust, 2004)
46 Hess & Ostrom (eds), Understanding Knowledge as a Commons (MIT Press, 2006)
 61

The State’s Role is Crucial for Realising Self-

Governance in the Uk
The relationship between spontaneous community organisations and
councils can be challenging. One anecdote from a former council
officer illustrates the difficulty that spontaneous community groups can
have in having their value recognised by councils - even those providing
support to people who would otherwise require service interventions.

Here, officers became belatedly aware that a social forum for minority
ethnic pensioners had been meeting in a room on council premises. It
had been providing will-writing advisory services, tackling loneliness
and holding educational events on ailments and diseases common
within their community. Relevant council staff only became aware when
the group requested a larger room for its expanding membership. The
council was set to decline this on a technicality, since the forum was not
fulfilling an officially recognised ‘service need’ according to the council’s
own guidelines. In the former officer's words, “because they were largely
a self-sustaining community group who didn’t interact that much with
the council, and didn’t respond to one of our professionally defined,
siloed service ‘needs’, we weren’t obliged to support them in the way
we would for other organisations. It speaks to the perverse way that
institutions work: actively neglecting the good stuff that is happening
‘out there’ if it isn't directly commissioned by the council itself.”47

So, how can the three fundamental Ostromian conditions identified

in this report best be realised and facilitated by policymaking in
the UK? As this report has shown, much depends on the stance of
both the local and national state. If local authorities are sufficiently
enabled to work closely with communities and minded to support their
choices, community power has a far greater chance of establishing
and sustaining itself – as in, for example, the cases of ‘BERT’ in Surrey
and Bramley Baths in Leeds. But the state can become an obstacle
to community power if local authorities are hamstrung by their own
narrow definitions of value or their operating framework determined

47 As told by an interview subject for this project. This story has a happy ending: the council was
ultimately persuaded of the value of the social forum and allocated a better space where it contin-
ues to operate to this day.
 62

by central government leaves them little room for manoeuvre. This can
create strong incentives towards a primarily transactional or otherwise
top-down relationships with communities – which sometimes proves
fatal to lasting community mobilisation.

It is possible to categorise state activity into three broad types:

controlling, indifferent, and facilitative. In practice, a given regional or
national authority will probably operate in a combination of these ways
at different times. There is certainly room for these different ‘styles’
of state activity to run concurrently within the full range of possible
solutions to complex social problems and dilemmas.

= The Controller State seeks to play a central role in every

aspect of a given area of activity. For example, in public services,
the controller state would be responsible for the design, funding,
and delivery of a given service; it would coordinate both the
discovery of service need and the evaluation of the impact of
its interventions. Its connection with the public operates via a
framework of minimal democratic accountability and, in many
cases, a limited degree of consultation.

= The Indifferent State, by contrast, is wholly laissez-faire.

Where the controller state seeks to manage every aspect of
a given activity area, the indifferent state simply stands back
and allows other institutional solutions to operate instead – for
example, in the form of a 100 per cent market-driven response to
some community’s needs.

= The Facilitator State — also sometimes called the ‘partner

state’ or the ‘enabling state’ — charts an alternative path. It meets
needs where appropriate and where state action has emerged
as the best systemic response to a problem. At the same time, it
does not establish itself as the default arbiter of which systems
should evolve: it creates the space for alternative approaches to
emerge, while also supporting and protecting their activities when
possible and when these non-state institutions are best-placed to
sustainably meet people’s needs.
 63

In this framework, one clear conclusion from the available arguments

and evidence is that the UK tends to veer wildly between ‘control’ and
‘indifference’ in the stance of both national and local state behaviour.
These baselines, for example, help to explain the dominance, by turns,
of the ‘state paradigm’ and the ‘market paradigm’ in public services.48
What is needed, rather than another pendulum-swing in one of these
directions, is a pivot to the facilitator state model.

The facilitator state, by allowing the emergence of localism,

safeguarding the autonomy of communities, and supporting (while
also placing itself within) a productive diversity of systems and
institutions, would be the most effective boon for the decentralised
flourishing of community power in the UK. Any Ostrom-inspired policy
platform should be built around the objective of working toward the
emergence of a genuine facilitator state.

Figure: Models of State Activity

The
The Facilitator The
Controller State Indifferent
State Seeks to achieve
State
Seeks to achieve good outcomes by Believes the state
good outcomes by responding flexibly should not intervene
centrally managing to the needs of the in the name of good
all aspects of communities that outcomes
relevant systems are the default
source of legitimate
power over systems

48 See Lent & Studdert, The Community Paradigm (New Local 2019), p. 10 for an in-depth analysis of
these governance paradigms in public services.
 64

A controller state cannot plausibly manage systems that are

contextually tailored and locally embedded, even when these would
be best. It also crowds out the community-level activity that might
more plausibly lead to such solutions because it fails in the duty of
respect that must be in place to incentivise sustained activity from a
mobilised community. Meanwhile, an indifferent state would certainly
leave enough space for these alternative arrangements to emerge
– but would then also fail to support, insulate, and add expertise to
community-powered efforts when needed.49

Toward the Facilitator State

To safeguard both the autonomy and locality conditions we have
gleaned from Ostrom, we require this different kind of state – facilitative,
supportive, and deeply grounded in the needs and expectations of real
people and a diverse array of other systems.

This can be achieved through realising devolution through recognition

of community rights, as a precondition to then fostering a closer
relationship between councils and communities, two themes to which
this section will now turn.

1. Realising devolution through recognition of

community rights

Devolution in England been a patchwork affair – one which has done

little to reform the nature of the state itself or create the conditions
for communities to take meaningful control and participate in their
own flourishing. In practice, the result is that this country remains, by
most measures, one of the most politically, fiscally and economically
centralised in the world.

From an Ostromian perspective, this approach – in its top-down design,

its emphasis on deal-making, and its side-lining of actual communities
– is wholly inadequate. Rather than helping to create the conditions

49 Academic research has explored the extent to which a totally laissez-faire approach can result
in community activities – and, by extension, community rights – being quashed by competition
from other systemic approaches or unintended risks. A more active and facilitative approach can
take on a safeguarding and support role to insulate community power. Richards, ‘Common Property
Resource Institutions and Forest Management in Latin America’ (Development and Change, 1997)
 65

wherein newly mobilised communities can assert themselves and begin

to revise institutional structures from the ground up, English devolution
is compartmentalised, underfunded, driven by the quest for efficiencies.
Even when powers are localised, the existing incentives tend to lead to
command-and-control anyway – only originating from the local, rather
than the national, state.

Unconditional devolution and community rights

In 2019 New Local’s Community Paradigm, inspired by Ostrom, called for

unconditional and fiscal devolution, and an overall approach driven by
community empowerment. This report suggests that the best way to
realise the new model of devolution is by upholding Ostrom’s insistence
that the autonomy of communities be respected as a “right to
organise”.50 This was Ostrom’s seventh design principle revolving around
the idea that “external governmental officials give at least minimal
recognition to the legitimacy” of locally-devised systems: something she
deemed impossible in any situation where those officials “presume that
only they have the authority to set the rules”.51

Without this minimal recognition of local organisational rights at the

heart of policymaking, community power will remain marginal. But
with that right formally reflected as an operating principle for the
further devolution of power from the centre, the nature of the UK’s
devolution agenda can begin to shift. To make the difference, these
must go much further and be far more balanced than the community
rights recognised in previous central government legislation (for
example, the rights to challenge local service provision approaches,
bid on assets, or veto council tax rises that were incorporated into the
Localism Act of 2011).52 These rights defined exceptions to a top-down
norm; an Ostromian right to community organisation would entail an
inversion of the norm so that the source of all legitimacy moves back
toward local communities.

50 Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990)

51 See the appendix to this report for an exploration of Ostrom’s eight design principles.
52 See (then) DCLG’s guide to the Localism Act (Gov.uk, 2011)
 66

2. Fostering a closer relationship between

councils and communities

Devolution, rather than being institutional in character and establishing

a few exceptions to the rule that the centre maintains as much power
as it can, should become about fostering a symbiotic relationship
between the local state and communities of both place and interest.
Local authorities shouldn’t be set against communities or vice-
versa. The rights of communities are the prime reason for all kinds of
devolution – and such rights are only sustainable via enough devolution
to create a facilitative state. Rather than obsessing over performance,
accountability, and functional economic geographies, devolution in this
approach becomes an incremental policy solution for a longstanding
problem: at present, our institutions do not reflect communities’ rights to
locality, autonomy, and diversity.

Reduce scale whenever possible

The state must accept its new facilitative role at both the local and
national scales – not through a series of one-off deals, but through the
establishment of a new set of norms: actively looking for opportunities to
share power, involve communities, bring decisions closer to people, and
respect their choices. Councils should seek to support and reflect the
will of the communities within its jurisdiction, just as the centre should
embrace a general preference for subsidiarity. Nothing should be done
centrally that would be better done locally. People should stop being
assumed to be users, clients, customers, or dependents: the working
assumption should instead be that communities will have a distinctive
insight into how things ought to be done, and so their decisions should
not be contradicted under any ordinary circumstances.

Embrace diverse approaches

While the state will always have an important role in determining what
our key social objectives should be (supported by democratic processes
at every scale) there should not be a presumption about ‘best practice’
in how different localities work toward the realisation of such goals.
Such micro-management would be inappropriate if the autonomy and
diversity of different local approaches are to be respected as rights, and
 67

certainly not if the best consequences of these rights are to be given the
time they need to emerge.

Horizontal, not vertical; learning, not targeting

This paradigm shift will also mean different ways of thinking about
impact, performance, and accountability. Rather than demanding
efficiency and high performance through vertical accountabilities,
Ostrom points the way to networks of horizontal relationships. The
diversity that emerges from community power will itself generate
innovation and improvement that is suited to particular places, and
the facilitator state can help by connecting, networking, and sharing
the things that are learned as communities iterate upon their solutions
to problems. This new approach would mean prioritising learning and
adaptation for the improvement of practice rather than target-setting
and top-down performance monitoring.

The final section of this report offers a series of recommendations to

deliver genuinely Ostrom-informed policymaking in the UK.
 68

5. RECOMMENDATIONS

Some practical policy proposals flow from the Ostrom-inspired

analysis set out in this report. These recommendations are for both
local and national government, where rights-driven devolution and
the creation of a facilitator state are the main objectives, as well as
for civil society organisations and community groups themselves.
The recommendations range from the wholescale reinvention of
how power is distributed in the UK, to pragmatic steps that individual
councils and community groups can adopt now to help foster locality,
autonomy, and diversity within an overly centralised system.

1. Reimagine Devolution

English devolution, as currently conceptualised, replicates the top-

down norms of the wider system. It is effectively seen as one more
policy tool or means to realise central objectives, rather than as the
basis for an essential and fundamental shift in the country’s centre of
gravity. The 2011 Localism Act created a weak set of entitlements rather
than truly recognising community rights and coupled these with an all-
encompassing need to manage dwindling budgets by cutting back on
services. It was, in effect, decentralisation of blame in challenging times,
and a decade of funding cuts since then has created an ever more
fraught operating context for councils. An undermined, underfunded,
and undercut local government sector cannot function in the facilitative
way that Ostrom’s research suggests is needed.

The emergence of deal-based devolution was led by the priorities of

Westminster and Whitehall – creating new sub-regional governance
structures operating at strategic scale in order to receive new powers
 69

and funding. The approach has defined recent years of reform intended
to shift power from the centre and looks set to continue with plans
for two-tier areas to be incentivised to merge in order to secure new
powers. Devolution seems to be driven by the requirements of the
centre, rather than any great notion of subsidiarity or strengthening
civic connections between the public and local institutions.

While Ostrom had plentiful criticism for the state of local government
and democratic participation in the USA, the norms of regional
autonomy and localism are more thoroughly embedded that side of
the Atlantic. As a highly centralised country, England has a different
starting-point for community power: we must begin by challenging
the power and initiative held by national government. This means a
new approach to devolution is needed – to reset the balance between
the centre and the locality and create the conditions for real self-
governance at smaller scales.

The insights from Ostrom’s research – and the lessons from the deep
crises of 2020 – suggest that the time has come for a much more
radical approach. Local institutional structures do not need to be
made bigger to take on more powers; Ostrom’s research shows that, if
anything, the opposite is true.

A reimagined, Ostrom-informed devolution programme would:

1. Move away from deal-making, because local autonomy should

not be transactional and is not supposed to be a bargaining chip
in a longer play for endless, efficiency-driven restructuring.

2. Recognise a core set of community rights, similar to those

outlined in Ostrom’s design principles, and associate the
distribution of power to localities with the further and continual
empowerment of civil society organisations and community
groups themselves.

3. Actively look for opportunities to disperse power away

from Whitehall and Westminster in line with a core principle of
subsidiarity. Any programme of institutional streamlining at the core
would be incomplete without a binding commitment to localism,
particularly in times where there is a clear need to urgently build up
resilience and self-sufficiency in every part of the UK.
 70

To realise these objectives, we recommend the following measures:

= Launch an Ostrom-informed audit of the

balance of power in England.

This should be a full-scale, high-profile examination of the

constitutional structure of England with the objective of
analysing the relative powers of central and local government,
and identifying how both can work more collaboratively with
communities and civil society groups and move definitively
toward a facilitator-state model.

Crucially, the audit will have a remit to scrutinise the truth of

operational assumptions – such as those around economies
of scale – that lie behind efforts to centralise and consolidate.
This will also involve meaningful reforms to the way things are
done in Westminster and Whitehall, because real devolution
isn't just about change outside the centre, but will involve a
fundamental streamlining of the core. The audit’s final report
should identify the obstacles that stand in the way of real local
autonomy and structural subsidiarity, and offer proposals to
see that these obstacles are removed.

= Legislate for community rights – in particular,

an Ostromian ‘right to organise’.

This should take the form of a new legislative commitment to

recognise the rights of communities to organise, including the
establishment of localised rules systems, approaches, and
internal methods of deliberation and decision-making. The act
should stipulate that, unless there is a wider, democratically
identified strategic priority, the democratically agreed choices
of a given well-defined locality will always entail a responsibility
on the part of national and local government to respect
that decision.53 This should also include the right to deviate
significantly from the norms and systems established elsewhere.

53 Lent, A., Communities are Being Failed. It's Time to Enshrine their Rights (New Local, 2020).
 71

= Establish a Community Wealth Fund.

A succession of governments have put forward a plethora of

strategies for the strengthening of civil society, the rebuilding
of the social fabric in local places, and the empowerment
of communities. But even legislating toward these ends is
meaningless in the absence of the money and resources
that such endeavours often need in order to prosper. There is
urgent need for hyper-local investment, long-term civil society
development, and the facilitation of more community-centred
decision-making along Ostromian lines. Just as local authorities
need a (long-overdue) fairer and more flexible funding
settlement, a dedicated fund is required for a new generation of
civil society projects and informal community groups. It should
be organised in a grassroots-led way, with clear prioritisation
for the least advantaged communities. This fund should also
be a permanent endowment, with monies dedicated from the
‘shared prosperity fund’ that is being brought online to succeed
EU investment after Brexit, and potentially supplemented by the
realisation of dormant assets.54

2. Escape the Duopoly of Markets and States

As this report has set out, one of the main obstacles between the current
centralised status quo and the alternative approaches explored in
Ostrom’s work is a certain narrowness of view - that every service must
be fulfilled by either the market or the state (or some combination
of the two), or that every asset or resource should be organised and
managed via a state monopoly or competitive private ownership. This
excludes a whole universe of possible approaches and models. In many
cases community businesses, cooperatives, voluntary groups, or micro-
democracies could be best placed to do the job. For the greater resilience
that emerges from diversity, the latent creativity of local communities
and third-sector organisations must now be fully unleashed.

54 See the webpage for the Community Wealth Fund Alliance (accessed 29/09/20).
 72

The state/market duopoly can be disrupted with a concerted effort to:

1. Empower and resource local authorities so that they can

become truly facilitative of diverse approaches by local communities.

2. Explore less centralised ways of working within services

and discrete policy areas in order to demonstrate the value of
‘economies of context’ and other benefits.

3. Break down barriers between institutions, civil society

organisations, and communities themselves.

We recommend the following measures in pursuit of the

above objectives:

= Pilot Ostromian autonomy in specific policy

areas.

What might policing, social services, or planning look like

in ten years if they were reformed in line with Ostromian
ideas about locality, autonomy, and systemic diversity?
They would be embedded in communities – not via cycles of
consultations, but because the fabric of these systems would
originate from each community’s idea of how things should
operate, and how resources should be disposed. They would
incorporate community-led activities not as an attempt to
plug a gap in services, but because a new norm has emerged
that communities have a hand in the things that make a
difference to their lives and the lives of their neighbours.
They would be more diverse in every sense, with exciting
new approaches trialled in different places. They would have
better and more extensive working relationships with existing
civil society structures. Their work would be at smaller scales –
whatever scale seems most appropriate in each place – and
built from the autonomy and local expertise of communities
themselves and front-line operatives who really know their
patch. And they would be less bureaucratic, accountable not
‘upward’ into the administration, but horizontally to the public
with which they are so closely enmeshed. The time to attempt
these ways of working together has come.
 73

= Reform local government finance so

councils can facilitate communities and
diversify approaches.

Councils are positioned to support local efforts beyond

markets and states, to resource and enable communities to
meet their objectives, and respect the new organisational
rights detailed above. So the centre must empower them
to act with more autonomy and independence, and ensure
they have access to the resources they need to play an
effective role. Devolution of powers would be meaningless if
councils simultaneously face a funding crisis, as they would
not be able to train, resource, learn, or network in the ways
required to truly become facilitative of community groups. A
generous funding settlement for community development,
engagement, and facilitation is needed, alongside more fiscal
devolution so different localities can begin to evaluate and
meet their own resource needs more flexibly, whilst the centre
still retains a legitimate role in equalising between different
local authority starting points.

3. Galvanise the Change within Localities

Local government and civil society groups should not wait for
Westminster and Whitehall to deliver a meaningful programme of local
devolution, community rights, and resourcing for autonomy. Experience
tells us that, if they do, they may be waiting for a long time! As Ostrom’s
work demonstrates, many of the steps to localise, democratise, and
tailor public services – bringing them closer to communities – also
function as a way to head-off and manage complex demand on our
systems ‘upstream’; solving problems before they become too huge
to handle. It is harder to make community power and self-governance
a reality under present conditions, but there are some practical steps
toward more Ostromian practices that can be taken now. Many places
have already seen a great deal of work done in this area; many have not.
 74

The following recommendations are intended to provide some ‘next

steps’ for localities that are at any stage in this process. This kind of
change-making, if informed by Ostrom’s research, would be about
creating the conditions and incentives for the emergence of community
power even within less-than-ideal circumstances. The objectives should
therefore be to:

1. Create a stable environment within which new kinds of

collaboration and community-led projects can emerge.

2. Facilitate learning and connections between communities and

social sector organisations within jurisdictions.

3. Involve the entire locality in the big plans and decisions that will
need to be made to realise more autonomous, local, and diverse
ways of doing things in future.

To kick-start a new set of Ostrom-inspired approaches at the

local level, we propose that councils, civil society organisations,
and communities:

= Plan now for hyper-local collaboration by

including communities from the start.

Councils and civil society organisations should work together

to map the formal and informal networks within each locality,
and begin a genuinely open dialogue at the neighbourhood
level to understand the contours of public need and potential
mobilisation in each area. When engaging without a pre-set
agenda, what kinds of suggestions and issues surface? How
diverse are people’s ideas? Where can they be connected
and encouraged to develop distinct solutions to problems?
Does every part of the local social fabric have the space
and time needed to connect, organise, and be heard? Local
institutions may be in a position to create the conditions for
truly mobilised communities – and these are an effective
precondition for the autonomy and diverse outcomes that
Ostrom’s research prizes.
 75

= Build a new network for shared learning

between community-led groups,
businesses, and projects.

Many resources already exist for community groups,

even within the current centralised and institution-led
context. And, as this report has set out, there are Ostromian
experiments taking place within forward-thinking councils,
civil society organisations, and spontaneous community
projects. This proves that communities can realise some
aspects of Ostrom’s core conditions on their own terms –
and, indeed, that they must do so if a compelling evidence
base for community power is ever to be constructed. A
comprehensive learning and information-sharing network
for UK communities and third-sector organisations
would make a huge difference as these new approaches
proliferate, serving as both a catalogue of the potential
outcomes for autonomous, local, and diverse self-
governance and a crucial resource for those who are at
the start of that journey. This network should be wholly
independent of state and market actors and function as a
digital nformation commons in its own right.

= Develop local ways of explicitly respecting

and honouring the objectives of community
groups.

A key part of the facilitator state model is that councils can

act as a guarantor of stability within which community
groups and their partners can feel confident about
getting to work. Even in the absence of strong, centrally
enshrined community rights, councils can and should
find compelling new ways to signal their commitment to
community autonomy. A charter system of agreements and
commitments between communities and town halls – with
enough flexibility to allow creative approaches to emerge
 76

– would allow all participants in new local partnerships to

reflect the facilitative new relationships and agreements
that emerge.55 This would provide all parties with the
stability and security they may need to be fully incentivised
to work together over longer periods of time, and provide a
sound basis for further collaboration as communities gain
confidence.

= Pursue internal transformation and culture

change to mirror the outside collaboration.

Ostrom’s insights apply not only to the way that organisations

and institutions should relate to communities, or to the way
that communities themselves should operate. They also
have important implications for the way that organisations
themselves can and should function internally. The general
insight that problems are sometimes best solved at smaller
scales – because this limits the complexity of the collective
action problem in each case – can be a transformative way
of thinking about how organisations can go about their
business. This runs counter to the usual logic that favours
the pursuit of shared costs and economies of scale to
maximise impact from investment. But more tailored activity
can find efficiencies of a different sort – more impact, more
legitimacy, and more efficacy are all possible. Councils could
start by finding ways to empower their 'on-the-ground'
employees to solve problems more autonomously, and allow
the emergence of very local processes and techniques that
are able to engage completely with the context they must
operate within.

55 These should build upon the local charter approaches explored more than a decade ago by the
Young Foundation, among others – see Savage, V., How to Develop a Local Charter (DCLG & Young
Foundation, 2008).
 77

Conclusion

Elinor Ostrom’s brilliant work could revolutionise our public services,

motivate a renaissance on community autonomy and power, and inform
a badly needed redistribution of power in our country. Unfortunately,
there is a yawning gap where Ostrom’s insights should be playing a key
role in our national conversation, much like the gap between people and
institutions. This report is an attempt to bridge those gaps by explaining
the enormous potential for more localised systems and services, more
autonomous and trusting communities, and the diverse innovations that
may emerge as a result. The case studies presented here demonstrate
that community power can emerge even against the odds – imagine the
possibilities if such efforts had the wind at their backs.

Many of this report’s recommendations are to do with establishing a

true facilitator state: a way of imagining a role for the state which could
finally allow for a break from our old patterns of centralised dominance
or transactions with big businesses, with little in-between. With newly
devolved powers and funding streams, and with communities’ rights
safeguarded, local government would be positioned to actively
encourage systemic diversity in community-powered projects,
including community businesses and self-governing spaces, services,
and assets.

This new approach – built outward as the policy expression of

communities’ rights – could yield many benefits. Invigorated
communities with a repaired social fabric. A new take on the best
relationship with the state built upon coproduction rather than
compliance. Diverse approaches leading to innovative solutions.
Localised systems that are tailored to the particular needs of places and
people. Greater resilience, both socially and economically, in what may
yet prove to be a century filled with crises and challenges.

Ostrom made it clear that we can escape the duopoly of markets and
states. In essence, she advised us to think big enough to notice that it is
at the smaller scale – with our systems arising from and closer to real
people and places – that genuine legitimacy and creativity can emerge.
For that reason, it would be no abdication of responsibility to create
enough space for communities to govern themselves. Rather, it would
represent the attainment – long-postponed – of real democracy.
 78

APPENDIX:
EXPLAINING OSTROM’S
EIGHT DESIGN PRINCIPLES

Ostrom’s design principles codify some of the most important findings

from her empirical research. They set out the shared traits of self-
governance systems that can sustain themselves, even outlasting
comparable private or state-managed systems. In this report, we have
condensed these design principles further, to three ‘core conditions’
of community power, namely locality, autonomy, and diversity. These
are intended to capture the content of Ostrom’s design principles in a
simplified and – appropriately enough – contextually-adapted way.

There remains significant value in a reiteration in full of Ostrom’s original

principles, however. In this appendix, each of the eight principles is
set out below in the original order, defined as clearly as possible, and
explicitly connected to the conditions for community activity and
self-governance that operate within the UK. While some of the original
design principles are powerful provocations that give rise to some key
policy proposals in this report, others are more difficult to digest from
the perspective of the UK’s entrenched liberal institutions.

The first few design principles essentially define the contextual

boundaries – the locality – for effective self-governance. The systems
in question must be clearly definable, and to succeed they should enjoy
a close correlation between local conditions and the particulars of
the system’s operation. Later design principles are primarily features
that ensure that the local community is capable of originating and
modifying its own design for the local system – and has robust methods
in place for dealing with internal disagreements and dissuading people
from shirking responsibilities or taking advantage of others. As such,
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these principles establish the plausibility of allowing communities

to exercise a right to self-governance – in this report, this is broadly
identified as the autonomy core condition. Finally, the eighth design
principle recognises the importance of situating such self-governance
within a wider array of layered and overlapping systems. This
experimental polycentricity is captured in the main text of this report as
the core condition of institutional diversity.

Ostrom’s Self-Governance Design Principles

1. Clearly defined boundaries – The people with rights/

claims to shared resources must be clearly defined.

Ostrom’s analysis is focused on ‘collective action problems’, applied

to a certain kind of shared resource: common-pool resources
which, though shared by a discrete community, are not generalised
‘public goods’ (that is, universally available to absolutely everyone).
You need clearly defined limits on who gets to use the resource and
has a say over its governance in order to make the usage, and the
rules, legitimate for the whole community. If an outsider can enter
the system and appropriate resources and assets or ignore the
rules, the system is likely to break down.

Relevance to UK communities: This design principle can be

interpreted, from the perspective of community power and public
service reform in the UK, as a general argument for localism. It’s
easier to legitimately govern anything, after all, within a smaller
basic political unit. Beyond this, some kinds of common assets,
services, and goods in the UK are effectively limited to a given
community of place or interest – and Ostrom is arguing that those
communities should have a big say, if not outright control, over the
things they have a stake in.

2. Congruence between rules and local context

– The ways that resources are managed, decisions are made,
and rules are designed should be well-tailored to specific
requirements imposed by local conditions.
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Even between neighbouring examples of self-governance,

handling the same kind of resources in generally the same way,
Ostrom noted a high degree of variation in the rules imposed by
the respective communities.56 This reflects one intuitive advantage
of localism: it is possible to design systems to perfectly suit the
particular needs and constraints of a specific place or community.
This is clearly desirable compared to one-size-fits-all and top-
down planning from one or another distant institution.

Relevance to UK communities: This design principle is

already implicit in the case for decentralisation and greater
community power in the UK. As discussed in the previous section,
a key question is whether the efficiencies possible from local
tailoring will outweigh the economies of scale against which
they are traded-off. Another objection to this (and the other
contextualism principles) is that meaningful variance from place
to place could lead to a ‘postcode lottery’, where some places will
simply be worse than others. The Ostromian point here would be
that uniformity of experience is seldom achieved by our systems
as they stand – and when they are, it is generally by levelling-
down rather than levelling-up. Diversity is better understood as an
opportunity to discover new ways of doing things: if communities
control the variance and tailor it to their needs, the results are
more likely to be desirable than not.

3. Collective-choice arrangements – The people

affected by local rules should be able to participate in their
design and modification.

This design principle – essentially one requiring community

decision-making – generates two kinds of advantage. First, it
enhances the legitimacy of the local system; second, it takes
advantage of people with ‘skin in the game’ – people who have
something at stake from the operation of self-governance and who
are therefore very strongly motivated to get it right. This principle
helps to ensure that rules are well-tailored to their context. It also
increases the likelihood that any such rules will be adhered to by the
whole community, a critical finding from Ostrom’s empirical work.

56 Governing the Commons, p. 92

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Relevance to UK communities: This design principle is a

critical component of most conceptions of how community
power ought to work in the UK. The main limiting factor here is
motivating and mobilising entire communities to participate in
decision-making in this way. Shifting their incentives by bringing
important decisions closer to them is a necessary, but probably
not a sufficient, part of avoiding a ‘turnupocracy’, where the
key decisions, the main rules, and indeed the entire style of
communities’ self-governance are defined by a very active core of
participants. This could work well – indeed, a turn-up-ocracy may
well work better than distant decision-making in many cases – but
does not capture the full legitimacy and informational benefits
of large-scale community participation. Framed as a right, it is
difficult to dispute the idea that, for example, frequent service-
users should have at least an opportunity to an important say over
how services are designed and delivered.

4. Monitoring – Conditions of community-managed resources/

assets/spaces/services should be monitored, as should the
behaviour of community members with respect to them. The
monitors should be drawn from within the community itself, or at
least be accountable to the community.

Localised, well-tailored systems that communities have a stake

in and a chance to influence will be less prone to uncooperative
behaviour and undesirable outcomes. However, Ostrom’s empirical
work makes it clear that these features are not, by themselves,
enough to guarantee cooperation and rule out exploitation.
A system of monitoring is thus a regular feature of long-lived
self-governance; the legitimacy of the monitors themselves is
established through connection back to the community.

Relevance to UK communities: Monitoring and evaluation

of community-powered projects is a good idea – not only for the
reasons set out by Ostrom. New approaches to governing useful
resources and important public services should have some
means of recognising the basis of good outcomes when they
happen, learning from less desirable outcomes, and sharing this
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information. Ostrom’s stipulation that this monitoring function

should be embedded within the community is more problematic
in the UK, where the dominant norm is that misconduct
monitoring, sanctioning, and enforcement should be handled
by a dispassionate, abstracted arbiter. The avoidance of bias
is the main gain from this liberal approach, but for Ostrom, the
reliability and strength of rules, sanctions, monitors, and enforcers
is explicitly enhanced by their proximity to communities.

5. Graduated Sanctions – violation of community rules

is disincentivised by the existence of a sanctions scheme with
severity proportional to infraction, decided within the community.

“In … robust institutions, monitoring and sanctioning are undertaken

not by external authorities but by the participants themselves. The
initial sanctions used in these systems are also surprisingly low.”57
Ostrom explains that, against expectation, community members
seem to be willing participants in deciding sanctions schemes and
enforcing them – and where this happens, self-governance tends to
successfully operate for longer periods of time.

Relevance to UK communities: As discussed in the ‘monitors’

design principle section above, the concept of community-
designed and -enforced sanctions does not sit easily within
the normal concept of rule of law in the UK. Notably, of course,
private property rights do confer some exclusion and sanctioning
capabilities under particular circumstances.

6. Conflict Resolution Mechanisms – a rapid, low-cost,

local way of addressing conflicts between members of the
community.

Even the best-designed governance system will contain unforeseen

loopholes, fail to account for outliers, or not provide indisputable
grounds to support one side or another in some kind of dispute.
It is wise for self-governing communities to plan ahead for these
circumstances so that these kinds of conflict can be addressed.

57 Ibid. p. 94
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Relevance to UK communities: Again, such a community-

specific system would need to fit carefully within the frameworks of
adjudication and dilemma-resolution that already exist at multiple
scales in the UK. The key here is to recognise that some differences
of opinion will emerge within even the most cohesive and trusting
communities, so it is prudent to plan for them rather than allow
them to become a breaking point for community-powered efforts
or an excuse for third parties to step in.

7. The Right to Organise – community self-governance –

including the ability to devise rules and sanctions – should not be
challenged by external government.

This design principle is about creating the space for self-

organisation at the scale of communities. If there is doubt over the
relative authority of external government vs. self-government, or if
external officials do not recognise in a minimal way the legitimacy
of institutions created by communities, it becomes extremely
difficult for self-governance to flourish. Ostrom explains that
part of the reason for this is that there is a strong possibility that
community members who wish to sidestep local systems will do so
by appealing to larger-scale authorities.

Relevance to UK communities: The rights of communities

to initiate projects, participate in decisions, own and manage
assets and resources, and design and deliver public services,
are all contingent on a basic assumption that government will
not intervene unless absolutely and demonstrably necessary.
Safeguarding these rights relative to different tiers of government
may yet require support from purpose-designed central legislation.

8. Nested structures – all governance activities should be

organised over multiple, overlapping layers (more complex
cases only).

Explanation: This asserts that accounting for the wider network

effects of governance choices and recognising the enormous
complexity of social systems are central to their survivability. It
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may be best for a sub-community to design its own governance

rules, but these may not be universally acceptable or appropriate
for the locality to which they belong, or the layers of local
government that organise the wider jurisdiction. Even very similar
community assets in nearby places may have legitimate reasons
to diverge, but will simultaneously need to belong to a larger and
more general structure in order to cooperate with each other and
work efficiently.

Relevance to UK communities: As Ostrom suggests, the

importance of nested organisation is probably minimal – and may
even be counterproductive – in the case of discrete and highly-
targeted community-powered projects. A single community-
controlled asset or space or a community business without very
complex relationships with other parts of the local economy can
probably ignore this design principle. Community commissioning
or design of public services, or larger-scale and more
comprehensive community-powered projects, however, could
benefit from accepting such complexity. In particular, this principle
leaves open an important role for local authority structures whose
participation are in many cases a necessary condition for the
success of such projects.
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Centre for the Study of

Governance and Society,
King's College London

Housed in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College,

London, the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society (CSGS)
examines how both formal and informal rules of governance operate
and evolve, and how these rules facilitate or imperil peaceful,
prosperous, and ecologically secure societies.

The Centre supports research asking broad questions about social and
political power and is especially interested in comparative research
assessing the performance of alternative governance in ‘real world’ or
‘non-ideal’ conditions. The Centre convenes a regular research seminar,
holds academic conferences and book events open to the public, and
hosts seminars focused on questions relevant for policy-makers and a
general audience.

For more information, visit csgs.kcl.ac.uk/

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Power to Change

Power to Change is the independent trust that supports

community businesses in England. Since 2015 we have awarded
over £70 million to over 1,000 community businesses.

We’re interested in everything from high streets to pubs, community

energy to health and social care. Get in touch if you’d like to work with
us institute@powertochange.org.uk

For more information, visit www.powertochange.org.uk

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Local Trust

Local Trust was established in 2012 to deliver Big Local, a unique

programme that puts residents across the country in control of
decisions about their own lives and neighbourhoods.

Funded by a £200m endowment from the National Lottery Community

Fund – the largest ever single commitment of lottery funds – Big Local
provides in excess of £1m of longterm funding over 10-15 years to
each of 150 local communities, many of which face major social and
economic challenges but have missed out on statutory and lottery
funding in the past.

For more information, visit www.localtrust.org.uk

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There is a growing crisis in the
relationship between the people of the
UK and their institutions of public service
and political authority – a crisis that
is only deepened by the effect of the
many challenges our society faces in
the 21st Century. New Local’s Community
Paradigm set out the blueprint for a
localist transformation to address that
crisis, and Think Big, Act Small explores
the revolutionary work of its intellectual
hero, and the first woman to win the
Nobel Prize in Economics: Elinor Ostrom.

This report draws on Ostrom’s huge

body of scholarship to find insights for
community-powered assets, spaces,
services, and funds. Taken together,
these insights form an incisive case for
a more decentralised, diverse, and self-
governing country in every respect.

Supported by: