1

Elinor Ostrom’s ‘Realist Orientation’: An Investigation of the Ontological Commitments of her

Analysis of the Possibility of Self-Governance

Paul Lewis
Department of Political Economy
King’s College London
paul.lewis@kcl.ac.uk

Draft: 22-9-201

1. Introduction

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom is best known for her studies of how local
communities are able to discover how to manage common property resources (CPRs) so as to avoid their
excessive depletion. As the Nobel Foundation stated when awarding her awarded the prize, her
contribution lay in the way she “[c]hallenged the conventional wisdom by demonstrating how local
property can be successfully managed by local communities without any regulation by central authorities
or privatization.”2 In addition to this work on the self-governance of CPRs, she also undertook path-
breaking studies of the provision of public services, especially policing, in which—along with her
husband, political scientist Vincent Ostrom, and other members of the Bloomington School of
institutional analysis—she contributed to the development of important concepts such as polycentricity,
quasi-markets and co-production.
Ostrom’s work has deservedly received considerable attention and acclaim. It has been the
subject of at least three book length studies (Aligica and Boettke 2009; Wall 2014; and Tarko 2017) as
well as several journal special issues.3 These contributions, along with many other articles, have provided
considerable insight into several dimensions of Ostrom’s work, encompassing her theoretical
contributions, her methodology, her applied work, and the influences that shaped the development of her
ideas. But there is one important aspect of Ostrom’s thought to which little attention has been paid,
namely her ontological commitments (that is, her views about the nature of social reality).4
This neglect is surprising because Ostrom’s work contains discussions of many other important
ontological issues (although they are rarely explicitly described using that term). These include the
openness of the social world; the nature of human agency; the configural nature of social rules; the
relationship between social structure and human agency; and the complexity of the social world, viewed
as a nested hierarchy of emergent systems. This article is the first to draw together systematically and in
one place Ostrom’s reflections about ontological issues. It is in doing so, and in identifying what Ostrom
saw as their implications for the appropriate methods for analysing and explaining the possibility of self-
governance, that its contribution lies.5

1
I am very grateful to Paul Dragos Aligica, Shaun Hargreaves Heap, and Jochen Runde for very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this
paper. Any remaining errors and infelicities are solely my responsibility. Financial support from the Centre for the Study of Self-Governance at
King’s College London is gratefully acknowledged.
2
See https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2009/ostrom/facts/
3
See, for example, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Orgnisation (2005), Public Choice (2010, The Good Society (2011), and the Journal
of Institutional Economics (2013).
4
Of course, these have not been entirely neglected. Perhaps most notably, the literature contains excellent discussions of the significance for the
work of Ostrom and the wider Bloomington School of the distinction, drawn by the analytical philosopher John Searle (1969, 2005), between
‘brute’ and ‘institutional’ facts (Aligica and Boettke 2009: 79-80, Wall 2014: 53-55; Aligica 2019: 106-10).
5
While I will focus principally on the work of Elinor Ostrom, I will also pay attention to the writings of her husband Vincent, whose work on
foundational issue in political economy profoundly informed his wife’s thinking and can therefore be used to illuminate her intellectual
commitments (Aligica and Boettke 2009: 1-3, 149).

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In considering the ontological issues raised in Ostrom’s work, the paper also contributes to the
growing literature on ontology and the history of economic thought (Lawson and Arena 2015; Lewis
2017a; Lewis et al. 2020). Heterodox economists often criticise orthodox economics and make the case
for their preferred methods of analysis and explanation on ontological grounds (that is, by arguing that
their approach is better at doing justice to some important aspect of social reality). Ostrom is no exception
in this regard; she resembles many other distinguished contributors to heterodox economics in adopting a
‘realist orientation’ (Lawson 2003a: 16) whereby they adjust their methods to fit their vision of the nature
of the social world. In documenting how this realist orientation informed Ostrom’s work, the paper adds
to research on the role of ontological thinking in the history of economics.
The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 2 introduces Elinor Ostrom’s work on the self-
governance of CPRs. It considers first her important distinction between models, theories and
frameworks, before examining why she thinks that formal, game-theoretic models have only a limited
usefulness for explaining the possibility of self-governance. Significantly, Ostrom views the social world
as being open in the sense that it displays few sharp, stable event regularities of the kind presupposed by
formal, deductive models. Her work can in many respects be thought of as an attempt to develop theories
and modes of explanation that do justice to the openness of social reality. In this respect she resembles
many other distinguished social scientists who also grappled with the openness of the social world,
including—to name but a few examples—Buchanan, Hayek, Keynes, Lachmann, and Shackle.6 Section 3
introduces the alternative approach that underpins Ostrom’s analysis of people’s efforts to develop
institutions—sets of rules—that enable them successful to manage their resource, namely the institutional
analysis and development (IAD) framework. In doing so, the section considers Ostrom’s account of the
relationship between social structures and human agency, a key feature of any social ontology. Section 4
outlines the account of causal explanation to which Ostrom’s views about the nature of the social world
gives rise. Section 5 concludes with some reflections about Ostrom’s identity as a scholar, covering two
main issues: first, how her methodological commitments are best described; and, second, her affinity with
heterodox economics.

2. Elinor Ostrom and the Study of Self -Governance in CPRs

Ostrom is best known for her work on the management of CPRs.7 These have two main attributes: the
property rights are held in common by a group of people; and one person’s use of the resource reduces the
amount available for others. Consequently, there is a very real prospect that the pursuit of individual self-
interest will lead to its excessive depletion of the resource (the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’)
(Hardin 1968). It has also been widely argued that the appropriate policy response is some form of
external intervention, involving either management by a government agency or the privatisation of the
resource (E. Ostrom 1990: 2-15).
The situation facing the users of such resources has often been portrayed as a prisoner’s dilemma
(PD), with the non-cooperative, Pareto-inefficient outcome representing the tragedy of the commons
(Ostrom 1990: 2-5). However, while Ostrom acknowledges that this model captures important elements
of the collective action problem confronting users, she also highlights its shortcomings. In particular, the
PD portrays users as passively accepting their circumstances rather than seeking to change them by
devising rules that might afford people both the motivation and the information required for successful
management. As Ostrom writes, modelling the situation as a simple PD game may provide a misleading

6
On Buchanan, see Lewis and Dold (2020); on Hayek, see Fleetwood (1996); on Keynes, see Dunn (2004); on Lachmann, see Lewis and Runde
(2007); and on Shackle, see Runde (1997).
7
Ostrom viewed CPRs as a relatively simple context for investigating processes of self-organisation and self-governance that are also relevant
for understanding other collective action problems such as those involved in the provision of public goods (E. Ostrom 1990: 25-29).

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guide to policy because “the constraints that are assumed to be fixed for the purposes of analysis are taken
as fixed in empirical settings, unless external authorities change them”:

The prisoners in the famous dilemma cannot change the constraints imposed on them … [But
n]ot all users of natural resources are similarly incapable of changing their constraints. As
long as individuals are viewed as prisoners, policy prescriptions will address this metaphor. I
would rather address the question of how to enhance the capabilities of those involved to
change the constraining rules of the game. (Ostrom 1990: 6-7; also see E. Ostrom 2005: 17
and [2009] 2014: 176-77.)

We can elaborate on Ostrom’s concerns if we consider the distinction she draws between
‘frameworks’, ‘theories’ and ‘models’. These terms “refers to a nested set of theoretical concepts—which
range from the most general to the most detailed types of assumptions made by the analyst” (E. Ostrom
2005: 27; also see E, Ostrom [2009] 2014: 174, 190 and V. Ostrom ([1997] 2014: 257). The most abstract
is the ‘framework’, which identifies “the elements (and the relationships amongst those elements) that one
needs to consider for institutional analysis … the universal elements that any relevant theory would need
to take into account” (2005: 28; also see E. Ostrom 1990: 192). In other words, frameworks specify the
social ontology or account of the basic constituents of the social world to which the analyst is committed:

Ontology refers to theoretical assumptions about the nature of reality. Ontology may refer to
the elements of reality or to how the world works ... [A]n ontological framework ... identifies
the essential elements of social-ecological systems” (Poteete et al. 2010: 275 n. 6).

More specifically, the framework identifies has two main parts. First, it includes “the most essential
features of complex systems”, the basic constituents of the social world, which on Ostrom’s account
include—as we shall see below—people, social rules, and social positions (to which particular rights and
obligations are attached). Second, it also encompasses “assumptions about the essential nature of reality
in terms of causality, such as the relative influence of structure and agency, and the degree to which
universal patterns exist” (Poteete et al. 2010: 216).
‘Theorising’ is a less abstract form of activity. It involves the social scientist selecting particular
elements from the framework, making more specific—though still abstract—assumptions about them, and
considering how they inter-relate in order to form a causal mechanism that generates particular kinds of
outcome:

The development and use of theories enable the analyst to specify which components of a
framework are relevant for certain kinds of questions and to make broad working
assumptions about these elements. Thus, theories focus on parts of a framework and make
specific assumptions that are necessary for an analyst to diagnose a phenomenon, explain its
process and predict outcomes. (E. Ostrom 2005: 28; also see McGinnis 2011: 170.)

In theorising, therefore, social scientists examine how specific groups of individuals interacting in
accordance with particular sets of rules generate certain types of outcome. If the outcomes resemble those
observed in the real world, then that theory is a plausible candidate for explaining those observed
outcomes, its explanatory “power being … [being] exactly proportional to the diversity of situations it can
explain” (E. Ostrom 1990: 24).
The development of a ‘model’ sees the theorist “make precise assumptions about a limited set of
parameters and variables” with a view to creating a “closed system” of related variables that makes it
possible to “deduce specific predictions about likely outcomes of highly simplified structures” (E. Ostrom
1990: 24, 2005: 28-29). The system is ‘closed’ in the sense that the relations between the variables can be
described in terms of regularities or general laws of the form, ‘Whenever event or situation x, then event

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or situation y’.8 When coupled with statements of initial conditions, those regularities make it possible to
deduce statements describing the outcomes in question (Poteete et al. 2010: 9-10). Ostrom elaborates on
the deductivist account of explanation, and its connections with closed systems, in an essay entitled,
“Beyond Positivism”, where she notes how it presupposes the existence of empirical regularities under
which the explanandum can be deductively subsumed, observes how that drives a search for the discovery
of such regularities, and argues in favour of an alternative approach to explanation centring on the
identification of the causal mechanisms that generate observable events (E. Ostrom [1982] 2014).
The connection between formal modelling and regularities of the kind found in the closed
systems assumed by such models has been discussed at length by Lawson (1997: 97-103), who argues—
consistent with Ostrom’s position—that the applicability of formal mathematical models presuppose the
existence of systems that are closed in the sense of displaying stable event regularities or correlations of
the form, ‘Whenever event or state or affairs X, then event or state of affairs Y’. For Lawson, the
construction of models that display such regularities requires that the entities posited in them—including
the human actors—take the form of isolated atoms. Those entities or factors must be atomistic in the
sense that their properties, including their causal powers, are independent of, and invariant with regard to,
the context in which they are found (so that in any context X they always tend to produce the same effect
Y); and they are isolated in the sense of being shielded from the operation of other, potentially
countervailing factors, so that nothing can counteract the effect Y. If these two conditions hold, then X
and Y will indeed always occur together, so that a regularity that can form the basis for deductive
modelling obtains) (Lawson 2019: 6). As we shall see, Ostrom is fully aware that in the case of CPRs
both these assumptions are violated. First, in her view the social world is in large part organic rather than
atomistic (as seen in the importance of relationally-defined social positions and also in how rules combine
with each other). Second, the causal relations between social structures and outcomes are, in her opinion,
intermediated by the causal powers of creative human agents, who have the capacity to offset the causal
influence of those structures in such a way that in any given situation x outcome not-y as well as y is
possible.
While Ostrom contends that models have an important role to play in policy analysis when the
assumptions on which they are based are “well-tailored to the particular problem at hand”, she also argues
that they are “used inappropriately when applied to the study of problematic situations that do not closely
fit the assumptions of the model” (E. Ostrom 2005: 29; also see p. 7 and E. Ostrom 1990: 183-85).
Modelling the situation facing the users of a CPR as a PD game is a case in point. The PD portrays people
as simply passively accepting their circumstances, rather than responding creatively to them by devising
rules that enable them to avoid the tragedy of the commons. This shortcoming is a consequence of the
mechanical, closed-system view of the world presupposed by formal models, which by portraying people
as always responding to the same circumstances in the same way “do not allow for human agency and
reflexivity” of the kind involved in crafting rules of the requisite kind (Poteete et al. 2010: 9).9 Ostrom
elaborates as follows:

To get clear results from a model, some variables are omitted or consciously or
unconsciously held constant … Models that use assumptions such as complete information,
independent action, perfect symmetry, no human errors, no norms of acceptable behaviour,

8
We can put this point slightly differently if we note that, according to Lawson (1997: 282; also see pp. 62-65), the closed systems presupposed
by formal models “demand that the real [including underlying, non-empirical causal mechanisms] is collapsed into the actual” as a means of
generating regularities of the ‘Whenever event x, then event y’ form. Against this background, Ostrom’s remark that, “What the research on
social dilemmas demonstrates is a world of possibility rather than a world of necessity” testifies to her commitment to an open-system view of the
world in which, thanks to the influence of countervailing forces, possibilities may go unrealised and event regularities may not obtain ([1998]
2014:149).
9
“Those who discount qualitative methods as incapable of evaluating general relationships signal a belief in both lawlike social relations [i.e.,
presuppose a closed system] and the relative unimportance of factors such as agency” (Poteete et al. 2010: 10).

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zero monitoring and enforcement costs, and no capacity to change the structure of the
situation itself help the analyst derive precise predictions.
Models that make such assumptions do not, however, direct the attention of the policy
analyst to some of the problematic variables of the situation that affect the incentives and
behaviour of individuals. Assuming complete information about participant behaviour does
not push the analyst to examine how individuals obtain information … Assuming fixed
structure does not push the analyst to examine whether or not and how individuals change
their own rules and how the surrounding political regime enhances or inhibits institutional
change (E. Ostrom 1990: 191-92; also see pp. 183-84)

Where models that, for reasons of tractability, assume that the structure of the situation faced by resource
users is fixed are used to understand situations where people have the capacity to devise rules that change
that structure, then they are misapplied (“applied out of their range” [Ostrom 1990: 184]): “We do not
learn from these models what individuals will do when they have the autonomy to craft their own
institutions … Nor do we learn how the capacity of innovators to develop institutions that can lead them
toward better, rather than worse, outcomes for themselves and for others might be enhanced by the
structures of the institutional arrangements of the surrounding political regime” (E. Ostrom: 1990: 184-
85; also see pp. 214-15).
If the scope for successful self-governance is to be understood, therefore, analysts need to relax the
assumption of fixed structures and a closed social world and acknowledge the possibility—which
empirical evidence indicates is often fulfilled—of people responding creatively to their circumstances by
devising a set of rules that will enable them to avoid the tragedy of the commons (E. Ostrom 1990: 182-
216, 1999: 494-95). In Ostrom’s view, genuinely creative agency—or ‘public entrepreneurship’, as she
also terms it (1990: 127)—of this kind presupposes that the world is an open system, in which the
regularities presupposed by deductive models will not always obtain: “If agency is taken seriously, we
must allow for both creativity and differences in perspective. But creativity and differences in
interpretation mean that lawlike social patterns are unlikely to arise … Deductive-nomological reasoning
suggests a mechanical view of the world, in which the same stimulus produces the same effect, ceteris
paribus. Theories that view social phenomena as products of either evolutionary processes or intentional
action challenge this mechanical view” (Poteete et al. 2010: 9).10
Ostrom argues that, far from being trapped in the closed-system, PD representation of their
circumstances, people possess the capacity creatively to devise social rules that will enable them to avoid
the tragedy of the commons even without the intervention of external authorities. In writing about the
need to take such possibilities into account, she sets out what can be read as her methodological credo:

As an institutionalist studying empirical phenomena, I presume that individuals try to solve

problems as effectively as they can. That assumption imposes a discipline on me. Instead of
presuming that some individuals are incompetent, evil or irrational [as many earlier analyses
did of the users of CPRs], and others are omniscient [as earlier analyses tended to do of
external policy-makers], I presume that individuals have very limited capabilities to reason
and figure out the structure of complex environments. It is my responsibility as a scientist to
ascertain what problems individuals are trying to solve and what factors help or hinder them

10
A similar point is made by Vincent Ostrom, at the outset of his book on The Intellectual Crisis of American Public Administration, where
having written of the need for students of public administration to analyse the causal effect of different organisational arrangements, he states:
“We must, however, distinguish between a determinate causal ordering and a quasi-causal ordering. In a determinate causal ordering a cause
impinges directly upon and determines an effect. A quasi-causal ordering depends upon the intervention of human actors who are capable of
thinking, considering alternatives, choosing, and then acting. The one is determined, the other is constituted. In such circumstances we are
required to take account of how individuals view themselves, conceptualise their situation, and choose strategies in the light of the opportunities
available to them” (V. Ostrom 2008: 2; also see E. Ostrom 1999). In other words, because people have the capacity to (re)conceptualise and so
respond creatively to the situation in which they find themselves—that is, to do otherwise than they might have done—their actions are not a
determinate response to their circumstances.

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in these efforts. When the problems that I observe involve lack of predictability, information,
and trust, as well as high levels of complexity and transactional difficulties, then my efforts
to explain must take these problems overtly into account rather than assuming them away.
(E. Ostrom 1990: 25-26.)

On this view, social scientists should avoid relying on highly idealised models that ignore people’s
capacity to respond creatively to social dilemmas by fashioning rules that can help solve the underlying
collective action problems, even in the face of the complexity and uncertainty that characterise those
situations: “The theoretical enterprise requires social scientists to engage in model-building,” Ostrom
(1990: 216) concludes on the final page of Governing the Commons, “but not limit theoretical inquiry to
that specific level of discourse.”11
Some analysts may baulk at this, given their predilection for formal modelling: “Fads and fashions
sweep through academia as well as elsewhere,” Ostrom (1990: 184) observes. “Among many academics
there are strong preferences for tight analytical models that will yield precise predictions.” Nonetheless,
analysing people’s efforts to manage CPRs requires the use of theories that need not—perhaps, cannot—
be couched in terms of formal models. As Ostrom (2005: 7) writes, “Many … significant situations—
particularly where rules are the object of choice—are too complex to be modelled as a simple game” (E.
Ostrom 2005: 7):

[I]nstead of building a specific model of institutional supply, I shall develop a framework to

summarise the lessons to be learned from examining successful and unsuccessful efforts by
CPR appropriators to change their institutions. (Ostrom 1990: 192; also see E. Ostrom 2005:
7, 34, [2009] 2014: 175, 196-97.)

It is to that framework—which, as noted above, provides the elements out of which theories can be
constructed—that we now turn our attention.

3. The Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework

The framework Ostrom used was the IAD framework. In keeping with its ontological orientation, it
provides “a framework for doing theory rather than a theory itself” (2006: 7). At its heart lies what
Ostrom refers to as an ‘action arena’. This is composed of “participants in positions choosing among
actions at particular stages of a decision process in light of their control over a choice node, the
information they have, the outcomes that are likely, and the benefits and costs they perceive for those
outcomes” (E. Ostrom 2006: 7; also see E. Ostrom 2005: 37-55 and V. Ostrom [1997] 2014: 254-57).
More specifically, an action arena can be broken down into two main parts: the first is what Ostrom refers
to as an action situation; the second consists of the people who populate that situation (Ostrom 2005: 13).

3.1 Action situations

An ‘action situation’ is the “social space where individuals ... interact” (E. Ostrom 2005: 14). The
interactions might involve people exchanging goods and services in a market, devising future laws
through some legislative process, or utilising a CPR, to name but a few possibilities. Those interactions
are structured by various social rules, which serve several purposes: they define various positions, such as
those of (authorised) ‘user’ and ‘monitor’, in the case of CPRs; they assign to each of those positions
various rights (allowable actions) and obligations (duties), such as what technologies can be used to
access the resource, how much users are permitted to harvest and what they are obliged to do to maintain
it; they help to determine how much information appropriators have about the state of the resource and

11
As Aligica (2014: xiii) has perceptively written, Ostrom’s studies of CPRs led her to realise that there was “an increasing mismatch between,
on the one hand, the theoretical-epistemological frameworks used [in much formal social scientific modelling] … and the phenomena in question,
on the other.”

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the costs and benefits incurred by other users; and they also specify the benefits and costs that are
assigned to various actions and outcomes (E. Ostrom 2011: 11-12).
Rules are “the prescriptions that individuals use to organise all forms of repetitive and structured
interactions” (2005: 3). Following John Commons ([1924] 1968) and Vincent Ostrom (1980), Ostrom
argues that rules consist of “shared understandings … about enforced prescriptions concerning what
actions (or outcomes) are required, prohibited, or permitted” (2005: 18; also see pp. 20-21). She offers a
typology of seven different kinds of rules, and summarises their functions, as follows:

1. Position rules … specify a set of positions and how many actors may hold each one;
2. Boundary rules … specify how actors are to be chosen to enter or leave those positions;
3. Authority rules … specify the actions assigned to a position … ;
4. Aggregation rules (such as majority or unanimity rules) … specify how the decisions of
actors … are to be mapped to intermediate or final outcomes;
5. Information rules … specify channels of communication among actors and what
information must, may, or must not be shared;
6. Scope rules … specify the outcomes that can be affected;
7. Payoff rules … specify how benefits and costs are to be distributed to actors in positions.
(Ostrom 2010: 13; also see E. Ostrom 2005: 193-210, 223-36, E. Ostrom [2009] 2014: 181)

These rules shape the incentives faced by the users of resource, as well as the information they possess,
thereby fundamentally affecting the scope for successful management (Ostrom 1990: 19-20, 91-100, 136-
42, 185-88, 1999: 508-19, 2005: 233-36, 2010: 2, 6). Ostrom also refers to these sets or systems of rules
as ‘institutions’, defining the latter as “the set of working rules that are used to determine who is eligible
to make decisions in some arena, what actions are allowed or constrained … what procedures must be
followed … and what payoffs will be assigned to individuals dependent on their actions” (1990: 51; also
see Kieser and Ostrom ([1982] 2000): 56, 64-67 and E. Ostrom 1990: 51).12
Ostrom elaborates on the nature of these rules, and their role in the construction of the social
world, in two main ways. The first concerns how rules combine to affect outcomes. For Ostrom, rules are
atomistic in the sense that their combined impact is the sum of the separate effect of each taken in
isolation. Rather, “rules combine in a configurational or interactive manner” because “the way one rule
operates is affected by other rules” (E. Ostrom [1986] 2014: 108, 110; also see E. Ostrom 2005: 255-57
and E. Ostrom and V. Ostrom [2004] 2014: 76-77). For example, the particular boundary rules that are
used to determine who counts as an authorised user of a resource affect how easy it is to monitor and
impose sanctions on people, thereby shaping what kinds of information and payoff rules ought be used
(E. Ostrom 2005: 234, 239-41). Approaches that analyse social phenomena by studying each rule in
isolation and then aggregating the results erroneously presuppose that rules separable or atomistic,
ignoring the causal interaction between them and thus leading to misleading analyses of their
consequences: “If … combinations of rules work differently than isolated rules, we had better recognise
the type of phenomena with which we are working and re-adjust our scientific agenda.” Methods need to
be tailored to suit the configurational nature of the material under investigation, which in this case means
that theorists “need to specify a set of rules, rather than a single rule, when attempting to ask what
consequences are produced by changes in a particular rule” (E. Ostrom [1986] 2014: 110, 115; also see E.
Ostrom [1986] 2014: 104-112, and E. Ostrom ([1998] 2014: 146-47, 150).13 As we shall see in the next
section, this feature of rules also has important epistemic consequences, both for the people who seek to

12
For more detailed examples, see Ostrom and Basurto (2011: 327-29).
13
Ostrom’s recognition of the organic nature of the social world also led her to argue that statistical methods are less well-suited to the
investigation of complex social systems than their widespread use might suggest. The reason, she argued, was that the application of statistical
methods presupposes that variables combine in an additively rather than in the configurational fashion implied by the presence of organised
complexity (E. Ostrom [1982] 2014: 217, [1998] 2014: 14, 16).

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craft such rules as part of their efforts at self-governance and also (therefore) for how social theorists
should analyse people’s decisions.
Before doing so, however, it is worth considering a second aspect of the Ostrom’s discussion of
rules. This concerns how people use rules to create the institutions upon which, in her view, the
possibility of self-governance depends. This is, as we shall see, an account where ontological issues come
explicitly to the fore. Ostrom conceptualises those institutions, in particular the social positions out of
which they are composed, as ‘institutional facts’ in the sense in which that term is used by philosopher
John Searle (1969, 2005). Elinor Ostrom approvingly references Searle’s work, but because it is in her
husband and co-author’s Vincent’s writings that the most extensive discussion of Searle’s account are to
be found, we shall also refer to his writings (E. Ostrom 2006: 8; also see V. Ostrom [1991] 2012: 260-62,
1997: 25-26, 128, 288-91).
Central to Searle’s account is the distinction between brute facts and institutional facts. Brute
facts exist independent of people and language (e.g., the chemical structure of water is H2O). In contrast,
the existence of institutional facts depends on human intentions and language, because they are created
through certain kinds of speech act that assign collectively-accepted functions to people and/or objects.
“The biophysical world, or brute reality, exists whether or not humans think about it or relate to it,” Elinor
Ostrom (2006: 6) writes, “The social world simply does not exist without humans using language to
constitute it and relate to each other and to relevant physical objects”.
Searle’s account of the creation of institutional facts has three key elements: (i) the assignment of
function; (ii) collective intentionality; and (iii) constitutive rules.

(i) First, people have the capacity to assign functions to people or objects. For example, people may
assign to certain objects—seashells, say, or glass beads—the function of acting as a medium of exchange,
a unit of account, and a store of value (that is, the function of acting as money). Similarly, certain people
may be assigned by the members of their community the function or role of a ‘monitor’ of a CPR,
charged with the task of checking that users are complying with agreements about how much to consume
and what they must do to maintain it.

(ii) Second, this assignment of function is achieved, not by isolated individuals, but by a group of people
acting together. A single individual cannot unilaterally declare a particular kind of object to be money;
the object has to be accepted as such by other people as well. Similarly, an individual cannot simply
declare him- or herself to be a monitor; that status has to be bestowed upon the person by others. Searle
captures this aspect of social life through the notion of ‘collective intentionality’. Collective or ‘we’
intentions—whereby, for example, we declare that we accept physical objects with certain properties as
money, or that we accept that certain people will function as monitors—involve people sharing intentional
states such as beliefs, intentions and desires and therefore having the sense of doing (believing, intending,
desiring) something together. A social fact, for Searle, is one involving collective intentionality. In
Vincent Ostrom’s words, “What goes on in society requires a shared community of understanding about
rule-ordered relationships among the members of a society” ([1991] 2012: 261).

(iii) Institutional facts are a subset of social facts, namely those whose existence depends upon what
Searle refers to as constitutive rules. “[I]nstitutional facts,” Vincent Ostrom ([1976] 2012: 15) writes,
“presuppose the existence of … ‘constitutive rules’.” The latter typically take the form “X counts as Y in
context C”, where X is a piece of paper of a certain size and with particular markings on it, Y is the status
“money” (e.g. a $1 bill), and C is “the United States” (cf. Searle 1995: 40, 43-51). That a piece of paper
with those physical attributes counts as money in the United States is an institutional fact, as is the way
that an individual taking on certain duties and enjoying particular powers counts as a monitor. For Searle,
therefore, institutional facts arise through certain kinds of speech acts whereby a group of people agree to
follow certain (constitutive) rules specifying the functions to be (collectively) assigned to particular
objects and people, thereby creating institutional facts such as money and the position of ‘monitor’. As

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summarised by Vincent Ostrom, “Social and political realities are constituted, not by brute facts, but …
are deeply grounded in the artisanship of rule-ordered relationships and emerge as institutional facts”
([1991] 2012: 261; also see 1997: pp. 26, 137). As Elinor Ostrom put it, the significance of her review of
case studies of successful local management of CPRs was that it “deepen[ed] one’s appreciation of human
artisanship in shaping and reshaping the very situations within which individuals must make decisions …
[and thereby] transformed the structures they faced, moving from a structure in which a set of
unorganised individuals made independent decisions about using a CPR … to a structure in which a set of
organised activities made decisions in a sequential, contingent or frequency-dependent manner” (1990:
185; also see Ostrom [1998] 2014: 138 and 2005: 132-33).14

3.2 The actor / models of human nature

The second key element of an action arena are the people who populate it. These individuals fill the
various positions, assess the associated obligations and opportunities for action, weigh the merits of the
options open to them, and then—in the light of those deliberations—act in a purposeful fashion. It is
through their occupancy of such positions that social structure and human agency are brought together in
Elinor Ostrom’s social theory (2005: 40-41).
Action is assumed to be purposeful or goal-directed but beyond that no particular theory of
human action has priority a priori. The IAD framework is consistent with “a diversity of theories of
human behaviour (including critical theory …, evolutionary psychology …, heuristic choice … or
bounded rationality” (2006: 7). These theories, which also include standard rational choice theory, give an
account of the behaviour of the people whose actions “animate the structure” or causal mechanism
formed by the set of rules under investigation (2006: 7; also see E. Ostrom [1986] 2014: 112 and 2005: 99
and V. Ostrom 1997: 102). As we shall see, according to Ostrom, which particular theory is appropriate
depends upon the kind of situation being considered.
Ostrom acknowledges that there may be situations where the standard, closed-system rational
choice account of people as utility-maximisers applies, most notably when people interact repeatedly in
relatively simple settings characterised by high levels of competition and the ready availability of
information (E. Ostrom 2005: 100-01, 117-18, 131-32, 2010: 18). However, she also contends that the
circumstances faced by the users of CPRs often render such models inappropriate. One important reason
for this lies in the configurational nature of social rules. When people are attempting to develop a set of
rules that will enable them to manage a CPR, they face a situation where the various rules under
consideration may interact with each other in surprising ways, generating novel, emergent outcomes that
had never been envisaged. In such circumstances, people will lack the knowledge required for expected
utility maximising behaviour. People confront radical uncertainty, as distinct from numerical risk, so that
“it is impossible for … direct beneficiaries to conduct a complete analysis of the expected personal
benefits, or broader performance, of all the potential rule changes that could be made” (Ostrom and
Basurto 2011: 324; also see Ostrom 2005: 48-49 and V. Ostrom 1982: 34):

To assume that individuals perform calculation processes requiring high levels of

information when they are acting in uncertain environments may lead to the formulation of
beautiful analytical models that are empirically irrelevant. A major question to be pursued is
how institutional arrangements structure decision situations in complex arenas so that

14
Elinor Ostrom’s account of how communities transform the institutions through which they manage CPRs resembles the process of social
positioning described by Lawson (2019: 12-17, 86-88, 128-30). Social positioning involves the members of a community (i) creating of a set of
social positions that are related in such a way as to orient their occupants towards serving some shared function or purpose, and then (ii)
allocating specific individuals to those positions. If appropriately organised, the positions form a ‘system’ that has properties not possessed by
any of its individual parts. In Elinor Ostrom’s analysis of the management of CPRs, the positions in question are ones such as ‘user’ and
‘monitor’, while the function of the system or totality of which they are a part is the preservation of the CPR. And, as we have seen, if the set of
positions and rules is suitably configured, then their interactions will generate the information and the incentives required for successful
management. The fact that the capacity for successful management arises only through the creation of an appropriately-organised set of positions
implies that it is an emergent property of the resource management system as a whole (E. Ostrom 1999: 520-21; also see Lewis 2017b: 46-54).

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individuals are able to achieve productive outcomes even when we cannot derive analytic
solutions. (Kieser and Ostrom [1982] 2000: 83; also see E. Ostrom 1990: 25-26 214-15,
1999: 508-09, 519, 523-24.)

In such situations, “the option of optimal design is not available to mere mortals” (E. Ostrom 2005: 31).
The analyst therefore “needs to substitute the assumption of bounded rationality—that persons are
‘intendedly’ rational but only limitedly so—for the assumptions of perfect information and utility
maximisation used in axiomatic choice theory” (2010: 18; also see E. Ostrom 1990: 58-59, 1999: 496,
508-09, 2005: 102-03, 270-71 and Blomquist and deLeon 2011: 4).

In complex situations involving unstructured problems ... [t]he most one can say is that the
individuals in such situations are engaged in a trial-and-error effort to learn more about the
results of their actions so that they can evaluate benefits and costs more effectively over
time. (E. Ostrom 1990: 38; also see pp. 190-91, 208-09).

On this view, people are best viewed as pursuing goals but doing so by relying on various heuristics and
rules-of-thumb rather than simply maximising expected utility (E. Ostrom 1990: 34, 2005: 104-09, [2009]
2014: 190-91, 2011: 14). They are eminently fallible, making errors in choosing the rules upon which
they rely but also possessing the capacity to improve their choices (E. Ostrom 2005: 106, 118; Ostrom
and Basurto 2011: 335; cf. V. Ostrom 1986).
Hence, while Ostrom observes that many of the features of action situations “[a]re similar to the
elements identified by game theorists to construct formal game models” (E. Ostrom 2005: 34), and while
she also readily acknowledges that “[t]he mathematical tools of game theory are powerful and
enlightening” (2005: 34), she also argues that the circumstances faced by the users of a CPR do not lend
themselves to representation in game-theoretic terms. The latter “can only be used … to elucidate the
structure of relatively simple action situations” (E. Ostrom 2005: 34), whereas the situation faced by a
community seeking to manage a CPR is “too complex to be modelled as a simple game” (E. Ostrom
2005: 7):

I do not confine analysis to those situations that are simple enough to be analysed as formal
games. The core concept of an action situation … can be formalised as a mathematical game
to represent many simple and important situations. Many other significant situations—
particularly where rules are the object of choice—are too complex to be modelled as a
simple game. (E. Ostrom 2005: 7; also see [2009] 2014: 175, 196-97.)

As Ostrom writes at the end of her Nobel Prize lecture, explaining real-world outcomes requires that we
“be willing to deal with complexity instead of rejecting it”. Formal models may be useful for analysing
simple situations, but “[w]hen the world we are trying to explain and improve … is not well described by
a simple model”—as in in the case of CPRs—“we must continue to improve our frameworks and theories
so as to be able to understand complexity and not reject it” ([2009] 2014: 197). In other words, in
complex real-world settings, modes of analysing and theorising that are irreducible to formal, game-
theoretic models must be used.

3.3 Bringing structure and agency together: The Ostroms’ transformational model of social activity
We can elaborate on the relationship between the actors and the social structures into which they slot by
noting that the Ostroms subscribe to what might be described as a transformational model of social
activity (TMSA), according to which people draw on social rules in order to act and, in doing so, either
reproduce or transform those rules. In driving on a public road, writing English prose, or conducting
business, people draw on pre-existing social rules (namely the rules of the highway code, English
grammar, and contract law respectively). Each of those forms of action presupposes the relevant kind of

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rule. The rules facilitate and constrain what people do, thereby causally influencing—without, of course,
precisely determining—how people act. But the dependence is mutual—the direction of causal influence
runs not only from structure to agency but also from agency to structure—because the rules continue to
exist only because people draw on them and, in doing so, reproduce them (or, on occasions, transform
them). On this view, therefore, human agency and social structure are ontologically distinct but
recursively related: each is both a condition for, and a consequence of, the other (Lawson 1997: 166-71;
Lewis 2000; Lewis and Runde 2007: 179-83).
The TMSA can be seen in Elinor Ostrom’s analysis of the emergence of successful, bottom-up
solutions to the problem of managing CPRs. According to the TMSA, at any one moment in time, people
face a given set of rules that structure people’s interactions and therefore affect what outcomes arise (E.
Ostrom 2005: 13-17, 33-34). In order to see how this works out in the context of Elinor Ostrom’s analysis
of the possibility of self-governance, it is important to discuss her three-fold distinction between three
different kinds or levels of rule. Rules at any one level are embedded in a higher-level set of rules that
defines how they can be changed (E. Ostrom 1990: 52, 2005: 58-62):

• operational rules concern people’s everyday interactions with the resource (regulating how much
of it users are allowed to use, what they are obliged to do by way of maintenance and upkeep,
how people who violate the rules will be punished, who is to monitor and enforce these rules,
etc.);
• collective choice rules specify the procedures through which the operational rules are chosen;
• constitutional choice rules specify how the collective choice rules are determined, including who
is involved in decisions about what they will be.

In investigating whether people are able to craft operational rules that enable them to avoid the tragedy of
the commons, Ostrom conceptualises them as acting against the background of given collective choice
and constitutional rules (E. Ostrom 1990: 52-54, 2005: 3, 33-34):

The opportunities and constraints individuals face in any particular situation, the information
they obtain, the benefits they obtain or are excluded from, and how they reason about the
situation are all affected by the rules or absence of rules that structure the situation. Further,
the rules affecting one situation are themselves crafted by individuals interacting in deeper-
level institutions. (E. Ostrom 2005: 3; also see pp. 33-34, 62-64).

And one of the key influences on whether people are able to manage resources is whether the collective
choice and constitutional rules they face afford them the autonomy to devise their own operational rules
(that is, to use the language of the TMSA, whether the collective choice and constitutional rules facilitate
their efforts at self-governance) (E. Ostrom 1990: 20, 50-54, 81-82, 2005: 132, 2006: 7; also see
Blomquist and deLeon 2011: 3).15

15
Vincent Ostrom’s analysis of the importance of pre-existing, semi-autonomous linguistic rules in facilitating human speech and
communication also exemplifies the TMSA (V. Ostrom 1997: 127-38, 148, 167-68). For him, at any given moment in time people inherit a set of
pre-existing linguistic rules that facilitate and constrain their speech acts, thereby shaping but not determining what is said. Moreover, as he also
acknowledges, it is only through people’s speech acts that languages continue to exist (which is why he describes such structures as being only
semi-autonomous). On this view, human agency and social structure are ontologically distinct but recursively related: each is both a condition for,
and a consequence of, the other. Further support for this interpretation is provided by the analogy Vincent Ostrom draws between the artisanship
through which institutional facts are produced and the way that a potter makes his work by drawing upon pre-existing material that shapes,
without determining, what kinds of pots are produced (V. Ostrom 1980: 309-10). This is closely akin to the sculptor metaphor used by exponents
of the TMSA, who argue that just as the material with which a sculptor works affords her certain possibilities and so shapes, without determining,
her designs, so the social rules on which people draw in order to act shape, without determining their actions. To use an Aristotelian typology of
causes, while people are the efficient cause or driving force of social action, pre-existing social structures are the material cause of those actions
(Lewis 2000).

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In her later work, Elinor Ostrom articulates her account of the relationship between structure and
agency using the theory of complex systems. She portrays the world as consisting of a nested hierarchy of
systems, whereby a system at one level (the biological, say) is (i) composed of (lower-level) elements
(micro-physical particles, in this case) standing in certain relations to one another, (ii) possesses so-called
emergent properties not possessed by its lower-level parts, and (iii) constitutes one of the building blocks
out of which still higher-level systems (individual people, say) are made (Lewis 2017b). Following
Arthur Koestler, Ostrom refers to “such nested sub-assemblies of part-whole units in complex adaptive
systems as holons” and contends that an organised whole at one level (the individual person, say, or the
social) “cannot be ‘reduced’ to its elementary parts” (to its biological and physical parts, in the case of a
person, or to people, in the case of society) (2005: 11, quoting Koestler 1973: 29; also see Ostrom 2005:
12-13, Ostrom 2004: 41 and Ostrom [2009] 2014: 173).
Systems at one level possess emergent properties that cannot be reduced to the properties of the
parts out of which they are composed. For instance, people have capacities—to interpret situations, to
imbue them with meaning, and to choose how to act—that are not possessed by the micro-physical and
biological components out of which they are formed (Ostrom 2005: 11). Analogously, when the
interactions between those individuals are structured by certain kinds of social rule, they form a higher-
level social system that possesses its own emergent properties, not least the capacity to facilitate the
successful management of CPRs. “We need to recognise that not only are humans complex systems; so
are the structures they build” (E. Ostrom 2005: 125; also see E. Ostrom 1999: 520-21, 2005: 255-56;
Gibson et al. 2000: 234; also see Lewis 2017b: 48-50). “Building on top of the single individual are
structures composed of multiple individuals,” Ostrom (2005: 11) writes, “themselves composed of many
parts and, in turn, parts of still larger structures. What is a whole system at one level is a part of a system
at another level.”
Consistent with the TMSA, social structure and the human agency are ontologically distinct, but
mutually dependent, features of the social world; each is both a cause and a consequence of the other.16
Hence Ostrom’s remark, made when outlining her goal of developing a theory of institutions, that “The
diversity of regularised social behaviour … that we observe is constructed, I will argue, from universal
components organised in many layers” (2005: 6). On this view, outcomes of interest are generated by the
interplay of the emergent causal powers of people and higher-level social systems, with certain kinds of
higher-level system possessing the capacity to facilitate effective self-governance. As Ostrom writes, the
focus of her work is the action arena “in which two holons—participants and an action arena—interact”
(2005: 13). Thinking along these lines, Ostrom argues, “will allow scholars who stress structural
explanations of human behaviour and those who stress individual choice to find common ground, rather
than continue the futile debate over whether structural variables or individual attributes are the most
important” (E. Ostrom [1998] 2014: 124). This brings us to Ostrom’s account of explanation, to which we
now turn our attention.

4. Methodological implications: Ostrom’s account of causal explanation

Ostrom is, as we have seen, sceptical about the usefulness of formal, deductive modelling for explaining
the successful management of CPRs. In her view, the social world is an open system displaying few event
regularities of the kind presupposed by formal, deductive models (E. Ostrom [1982] 2014; Ostrom 1998:
14, 16; Poteete et al. 2010: 9). Therefore, rather than continuing to search for such regularities, she seeks
to explain the possibility of self-governance by identifying and illuminating the (non-empirical) causal
mechanisms that underpin and give rise it (cf. Fleetwood 1996: 735-36; Lewis and Runde 2007: 179-81).

16
This arguably includes the possibility of ‘downward causation’, whereby through processes of habituation and the like, social rules can react
back on and shape the attributes, as well of the actions, of the individuals whose lives they govern (V. Ostrom 1997: 286; also see Lewis 2012:
374-76).

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There are two main aspects to this: one concerns the social-structural conditions that Ostrom believes are
conductive to successful self-governance; the other centres on the attributes of the people who attempt to
develop informal systems of management. These two aspects of her explanations correspond to the way
that, as described above, Ostrom thinks that social outcomes are generated by the causal interplay
between people and social structures. Consistent with this, in explaining the possibility of successful self-
governance, Ostrom emphasises both social-structural influences and also the attributes of the people in
question.
One illustration of this switch in mode of theorising towards identifying the underlying conditions
of possibility for successful self-governance can be found in Ostrom’s emphasis on the (systems of) rules
governing people’s interactions as a key factor in accounting for the possibility of self-governance:

In the main, I do not view our primary enterprise as one of explaining individual events.
Rather, given the number of conditions that affect most political choices, our normal task is
to understand structures and resulting processes and how specific combinations of elements
affect the likely outcomes of these processes. (E. Ostrom 2006: 6.)

Whilst acknowledging that she “could not identify any particular rules associated with robust governance
of common-pool resources” (E. Ostrom 2005: 258-59), Ostrom argues that it was nevertheless possible to
identify “eight underlying design principles that characterised robust common-property institutions.” By a
‘design principle’ Ostrom (1990: 90) means “an essential element or condition that helps to account for
the success of these institutions in sustaining the CPRs.”. These include the need for resources to have
clearly-defined boundaries, so that users can limits access to people who have a long-term interest in their
preservation; the imperative that the rules allocate benefits amongst users roughly in proportion to the
inputs they provide and, therefore, the costs they incur; the importance of rules that sustain effective
monitoring, graduated sanctions, and effective conflict-resolution processes; use of collective choice rules
that include most of the relevant community in the processes by which operational rules are decided; and
the recognition by external authorities that the members of the relevant communities have the right to
self-organise (E. Ostrom 1990: 27, 90-102, 178-81, 2005: 259-70). These design principles describe the
“broad structural similarities” (E. Ostrom 2005: 257) between the systems of rules that have provided a
basis for the successful self-management of CPRs. As such, they summarise Ostrom’s analysis of the
social-structural conditions of the possibility of successful self-governance.17
It is in this context that the notion of polycentric social systems, a concept central to Ostrom’s
thought, assumes considerable significance. If people are boundedly rational and fallible, and—not least
because of the configural nature of rules—face decision-making situations of considerable complexity,
then the question arises of how they are able to identify rules that will facilitate the successful
management of the resource (Kieser & Ostrom, [1982] 2000, p. 83; 1990: 19-20, 33-34, 37-38, 209). For
Ostrom, the answer lies in people experimenting with different combinations of rules until they find one
that works sufficiently well for their particular purposes. Such experimentation is facilitated by their
acting under a polycentric governance regime (that is, one where the collective choice and constitutional
rules afford the members of the community the authority to decide upon the operational rules governing
their interactions with a CPR). Moreover, if people are able to see how similar but separable resources
controlled by other groups fare, then they may be able to learn how to refine and improve their own
choice of rules. While the outcome produced by such an approach might not be optimal, it will often be
superior to that produced by central government control of the resource (E. Ostrom 1990, pp. 133-42,
182–216, 1999, pp. 497, 508–521, 525–530, Ostrom 2005: 239-45, 281-86; Ostrom and V. Ostrom 2009:
155-57).

17
Ostrom also discusses how (groups characterised by) rules that conform to the design principles can arise through a process of evolutionary
selection in Wilson et al. (2013; also see Lewis 2017b: 54-56).

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However, as befits someone who sought to transcend the opposition between social-structural and
individual choice-based explanations of social phenomena, Ostrom’s account of the possibility of self-
governance also encompasses the attributes of the people who form the relevant community. Another
important condition for the possibility of self-governance—and, therefore, another important factor to
take into account when trying to explain why particular efforts at self-governance succeeded or failed—
concerns whether the members of the relevant community possess the practical capabilities needed to
create and maintain the rules required to manage natural resources (E. Ostrom 1990: 7, 14). On this view,
which is elaborated at length in the work of Vincent Ostrom in particular, people—viewed as citizens—
must possess the intellectual resources and imagination to conceptualise the very possibility of self-
governance; the courage to assume responsibility for managing the relevant CPR; and the skills in relating
to and negotiating with others needed to identify, agree upon and resolve conflicts over the requisite rules
(V. Ostrom 1997: 271-302). This vision of citizens as “co-creators and designers” (Boyte et al. 2014:
207) of the rules governing the groups to which they belong is central to the Ostroms’ vision of a
democratic society and extends well beyond the governance of natural resources to encompass their views
on the nature of democratic societies (Aligica 2019).
What this all goes to show is that, according to the Ostroms, successful self-governance requires
people to possess certain capabilities, felicitously termed “civic competence” by Aligica (2019: 105).
Possession of the capabilities required to practice “the arts and science of association”, as Vincent Ostrom
([1997] 2014: 251) terms it, is another condition of the possibility of self-governance (also see E. Ostrom,
quoted in Boettke and Aligica 2009: 159, and V. Ostrom 1997: 273, 276, 282, 285). As such, it features in
the Ostroms’ efforts to explain the success or failure of efforts at self-governance and also in their account
of what is required for people to exploit the full potential of polycentric systems of governance more
generally (cf. Lawson 1995).

5. Conclusion

While Elinor Ostrom rarely referred explicitly to social ontology, her writings—along with those of her
husband, Vincent—reveal a scholar whose efforts to understand how people are sometimes able to avoid
the tragedy of the commons led her to reflect deeply about the nature of the social world and the methods
appropriate for investigating it. She was acutely conscious that the social world is a complex, open and in
many important respects organic or internally-related system where outcomes are generated through the
interplay between people—who possess significant creative powers—and influential, but not all-
determining, structures of social rules. As a result, she was sceptical about the widespread use of formal,
deductivist models that presuppose that the social world is a closed system and instead sought to develop
methods of analysis that did justice to the causal efficacy, and explanatory significance, both of creative
human agency and also of the social structures that facilitate and constrain it. The IAD framework was the
result.
Ostrom thus adopted a realist orientation that saw her tailor her methods to suit key features of
the social world (cf. Lawson 2003a: 160). “Scholars must do more to … ensure that their methods match
their underlying assumptions about causality, ontology and epistemology” (Poteete et al. 2010: 14).
Consequently, she emphasised the importance of using theories and modes of explanation that did justice
to the openness of the social world; to the way that social rules combine organically rather than
atomistically; and to the recursive relationship between (creative) human agency and social rules.
Ostrom’s commitment to a realist approach also manifested in her emphasis on the importance of
transcending approaches that seek to “fit the world into simple models” ([2009] 2014: 168) in favour of
those that do justice to the complexity of the social world, as manifest in the variety of institutional
arrangements, goods and motivations on display: “To explain the world of interactions and outcomes
occurring at multiple levels,” Ostrom ([2009] 2014: 197) argued, “we also have to be willing to deal with
complexity instead of rejecting it.” While Ostrom’s connections with philosophical pragmatism have

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often been remarked upon—she drew, for example, on John Dewey’s conceptualisation of policies as
experiments (Aligica 2014: 166-99)— this paper reveals that there is also a strong realist aspect to her
though (if, as here, the term ‘realism’ is taken to denote a concern to tailor methods and modes of
explanation to the nature of social reality).
In taking the ‘realist turn’, Ostrom shared a good deal in common with many prominent political
economists over the course of the twentieth century including, to name some of those whose approach to
political economy resembles her own, Hayek, Buchanan and Sen (see Fleetwood 1995 and Lewis 2014;
Lewis and Dold 2020; and Martins 2009 respectively). It is also worth noting that, like several of the
political economists who had reflected on ontological issues (see Lewis et al., 2020: section 2), Ostrom’s
explicit reflections about the methodology of the social sciences were not always completely and
immediately consistent with her emerging vision of the nature of the social world. For example, she once
argued that her work exemplified a ‘methodological individualist’ perspective according to which
“[a]ttributes of the individual decision maker constitute the core of the analysis” (Kieser and Ostrom,
[1982] 2000, p. 58). However, she ultimately came to recognise that, at least as it is commonly
understood, the term ‘methodological individualism’ sits rather uneasily with her substantive work, which
in seeking to explain patterns of success and failure in managing CPRs places considerable causal and
explanatory weight on social structures. Ostrom herself came to recognise that tension and distanced
herself from methodological individualism. Writing in 2004 about the works that had most influenced
her, she explained how reading American evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr’s (1982) writings on
emergence had opened her eyes to the shortcomings of the term ‘methodological individualism’:

Mayr’s book … laid the foundation for my understanding of the importance of the embedded
nature of systems. I was raised on methodological individualism and the mantra ‘the
individual is the basic unit of analysis’ was solidly pounded into my head. Therefore, coming
from that scholarly tradition, reading Mayr’s discussion of emergence was also a major
shock. Mayr was of course reacting to the presumption made by physical scientists that you
could reduce all biology to chemistry and physics since underlying any living system were
chemical and physical elements (E. Ostrom 2004: 44)

What reading Mayr enabled Ostrom to realise was the shortcomings of the presumption that the
individual is the basic unit of analysis, to be accorded special methodological status: “there is no single
basic unit of analysis. All organised life is nested in higher levels of organisation and contains lower level
units of organisation” (E. Ostrom 2004 41; also see E. Ostrom 2005: 11–15). Therefore, as Ostrom came
to appreciate, describing her approach as ‘methodological individualism’ is misleading. Since, on her
view, social outcomes of interest are in fact produced by the interplay of social structure and human
agency, each of which possesses its own emergent causal powers, her approach might be more accurately
described (as above) as an example of a transformational model of social activity.18
Ostrom’s individualism is not the only commitment or source of identity commonly attributed to
her that can be called into question once her views about the nature of the social world are examined.
Another concerns the way that her work is often described as an example of the ‘new institutionalism’ in
economics. Certainly, Ostrom describes herself as an “institutionalist” (E. Ostrom 1990: 25) and she has
been hailed as one of the founders of the new institutionalism (Tarko 2017: 2, 7). Against that
background, however, it is interesting and instructive to compare her ontological commitments with those
of the new institutionalist scholar alongside whom she was awarded the Nobel Prize, namely Oliver
Williamson. Williamson’s efforts to operationalise his claims about the connections between different

18
A long-standing colleagues of the Ostroms, Michael McGinnis, has observed that Vincent Ostrom underwent a similar epiphany, preferring in
his later years to describe his approach not as methodological individualism but rather as ‘methodological communalism’ or ‘Tocquevillian
analytics’ in recognition of the fact that individuals and institutions were to be accorded equal casual and explanatory weight (McGinnis, 2005:
170).

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types of transactions and various kinds of governance structure arguably left him committed to the
deductivist model of explanation employed by mainstream economists and (therefore) also to the same
closed-system ontology. This led in turn to the foreclosure of many of his efforts to do justice to the
importance of human agency and to the dynamic, processual nature of the interaction between such
agency and social structures (Pratten 1997; also see Groenewegan 2011). In contrast, as we have seen,
Ostrom is willing to acknowledge the openness of the social world and therefore to move beyond
methods and modes of explanation—such as formal, game-theoretic modelling—that presuppose closure.
The picture of Ostrom’s work to which all this gives rise is that of an open-minded scholar who
drew on a wide range of traditions and methods in order to understand people’s efforts to manage CPRs,
but whose willingness to rely on particular methods was informed and shaped by her sense of their
capacity to justice to the openness, complexity, and internal-relationality of the social world. Ostrom’s
concern to adjust her choice of methods and modes of explanation to those features of social reality marks
a distinctive and important, but hitherto under-appreciated, feature of her work. It is a concern that is
arguably shared by many heterodox economists (Lawson 2003b: 168-83). And it is for that reason that,
notwithstanding the recognition and status accorded her by the economic mainstream through the award
of the Nobel Prize, Ostrom has more than one foot in the camp of those distinguished heterodox
practitioners who have prioritised realism and relevance over spurious rigour.

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