Unlocking Public Entrepreneurship and Public Economies

entrepreneurship, urban public services, polycentricity

Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource

The goal of this paper is to summarize the lessons learned from a large body of international, interdisciplinary research on common-pool resources (CPRs) in the past 25 years and consider its usefulness in the analysis of scholarly information as a resource. We will suggest ways in which the study of the governance and management of common-pool resources can be applied to the analysis of information and \u27the intellectual public domain.\u27 The complexity of the issues is enormous for many reasons: the vast number of players, multiple conflicting interests, rapid changes of technology, the general lack of understanding of digital technologies, local versus global arenas, and a chronic lack of precision about the information resource at hand. We suggest, in the tradition of Hayek, that the combination of time and place analysis with general scientific knowledge is necessary for sufficient understanding of policy and action. In addition, the careful development of an unambiguous language and agreed-upon definitions is imperative. As one of the framing papers for the Conference on the Public Domain, we focus on the language, the methodology, and outcomes of research on common-pool resources in order to better understand how various types of property regimes affect the provision, production, distribution, appropriation, and consumption of scholarly information. Our analysis will suggest that collective action and new institutional design play as large a part in the shaping of scholarly information as do legal restrictions and market forces

In pursuit of comparable concepts and data about collective action:

Research on collective action confronts two major obstacles. First, inconsistency in the conceptualization and operationalization of collective action, the key factors expected to affect collective action, and the outcomes of collective action hampers the accumulation of knowledge. Inconsistent terminology obscures consistent patterns. Second, the scarcity of comparable data thwarts evaluation of the relative importance of the many variables identified in the literature as likely to influence collective action. The International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) research program addresses both of these problems. Since its founding in 1993, the IFRI network of collaborating research centers has used a common set of methods and concepts to study forests, the people who use forest resources, and their institutions for resource management. The basic social unit of analysis in IFRI is the user group, defined as a set of individuals with the same rights and responsibilities to forest resources. This definition does not require formal organization or collective action, since these features are potential dependent variables. This strategy for data collection allows analysis of relationships between diverse forms of social heterogeneity and collective action within groups with comparable rights to resources. IFRI's relational database also captures the connections among forest systems, sets of resource users, particular forest products, formal and informal rules for resource use, and formal local and supra-local organizations. By the middle of 2001, the IFRI database included data on 141 sites with 231 forests, 233 user groups, 94 forest organizations, and 486 products in 12 countries. Drawing upon these data, IFRI researchers are contributing substantially to our understanding of collective action for institutional development, the mediating role institutions play relative to demographic and market pressures in patterns of resource use, and relationships between particular institutions and forest conditions. The paper describes IFRI's strategy for collecting comparable data based on consistent conceptualization and operationalization, summarizes the contributions of IFRI research to the study of collective action for natural resource management, and identifies continuing challenges.resource management, Forests and forestry Social aspects., Collective action, Forest products., Capacity,

Unlocking public entrepreneurship and public economies

Unlocking human potential requires a rich network of institutional arrangements in both private and public spheres. Opening the private sphere to entrepreneurship and complex market organization is well understood as a key to increasing the level and quality of private goods available to consumers. Opening the public sphere to entrepreneurship and innovation at local, regional, and international levels is also a key to increasing the level and quality of public goods – e.g., peace, safety, and health – available to citizens. This paper reviews studies of urban service delivery that have repeatedly found communities of individuals who have self-organized to provide and co-produce surprisingly good local services. In addition to unlocking individual freedom, we need to unlock the public sector from rigid, top-down, hierarchical organization

What do people bring into the game? experiments in the field about cooperation in the commons

The study of collective action requires an understanding of the individual incentives and of the institutional constraints that guide people in making choices about cooperating or defecting on the group facing the dilemma. The use of local ecosystems by groups of individuals is just one example where individual extraction increases well-being, but aggregate extraction decreases it. The use of economic experiments has enhanced the already diverse knowledge from theoretical and field sources of when and how groups can solve the problem through selfgoverning mechanisms. These studies have identified several factors that promote and limit collective action, associated with the nature of the production system that allows groups to benefit from a joint-access local ecosystem, and associated with the institutional incentives and constraints from both self-governed and externally imposed rules. In general, there is widespread agreement that cooperation can happen and be chosen by individuals as a rational strategy, beyond the ?tragedy of the commons? prediction. A first step in this paper is to propose a set of layers of information that the individuals might be using to decide over their level of cooperation. The layers range from the material incentives that the specific production function imposes, to the dynamics of the game, to the composition of the group and the individual characteristics of the player. We next expand the experimental literature by analyzing data from a set of experiments conducted in the field with actual ecosystem users in three rural villages of Colombia using this framework. We find that repetition brings reciprocity motives into the decision making. Further, prior experience of the participants, their perception of external regulation, or the composition of the group in terms of their wealth and social position in the village, influence decisions to cooperate or defect in the experiment. The results suggest that understanding the multiple levels of the game, in terms of the incentives, the group and individual characteristics or the context, can help understand and therefore explore the potentials for solving the collective-action dilemma.collective action, cooperation, experimental economics, field experiments, local ecosystems

La reglas que no se hace cumplir son mera palabrería

This paper synthesizes extensive research conducted by colleagues from a wide diversity of disciplines that examines the relationships between the social systems and ecological systems they use. One of the key observations is that efforts to design general-purpose blueprints frequently fail. The variety of conditions of an ecological system rarely fit a single scheme for good institutions for a large region.rules, social systems, ecological systems

A polycentric approach for coping with climate change

This paper proposes an alternative approach to addressing the complex problems of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions. The author, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, argues that single policies adopted only at a global scale are unlikely to generate sufficient trust among citizens and firms so that collective action can take place in a comprehensive and transparent manner that will effectively reduce global warming. Furthermore, simply recommending a single governmental unit to solve global collective action problems is inherently weak because of free-rider problems. For example, the Carbon Development Mechanism (CDM) can be ‘gamed’ in ways that hike up prices of natural resources and in some cases can lead to further natural resource exploitation. Some flaws are also noticeable in the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD) program. Both the CDM and REDD are vulnerable to the free-rider problem. As an alternative, the paper proposes a polycentric approach at various levels with active oversight of local, regional, and national stakeholders. Efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions are a classic collective action problem that is best addressed at multiple scales and levels. Given the slowness and conflict involved in achieving a global solution to climate change, recognizing the potential for building a more effective way of reducing green house gas emissions at multiple levels is an important step forward. A polycentric approach has the main advantage of encouraging experimental efforts at multiple levels, leading to the development of methods for assessing the benefits and costs of particular strategies adopted in one type of ecosystem and compared to results obtained in other ecosystems. Building a strong commitment to find ways of reducing individual emissions is an important element for coping with this problem, and having others also take responsibility can be more effectively undertaken in small- to medium-scale governance units that are linked together through information networks and monitoring at all levels. This paper was prepared as a background paper for the 2010 World Development Report on Climate Change.Climate Change Mitigation and Green House Gases,Environmental Economics&Policies,Climate Change Economics,Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Environment and Energy Efficiency