Ostrom, commitment & unobserved compliance

Recent studies of Elinor Ostrom’s work contain contrary accounts of the theoretical role she intended for commitment. For Lewis and Petersen commitment features in Ostrom’s theory only where agents decide on new rules. For Paniagua, however, successful self-organisation requires active self-regulation. There is evidence in Ostrom for each interpretation. She adopts a conception of agency in which incentives are decisive for agents’ choices. Yet Ostrom also observes that the need to resist temptation (and so the need for reflexive alignment of conduct with commitment) is an abiding feature of self-organising communities. This controversy reveals a tension in her work. She presents a stable system as one in which agents are adequately incentivised to carry out positional responsibilities. Yet she appears also to believe that system stability depends on unobserved compliance, moments when agents comply despite the absence of direct incentive. This paper’s purpose is to resolve this tension.