In this article, Dietz, Ostrom, and Stern set out to describe the ways that human institutions engage

in contention with each other to govern common resources in the environment, such as water
resources and fisheries. In this concise and clear article, they outline the players and tactics
engaged in that contention, framing it as a "co-evolutionary race" of governance.

Why a Struggle
One of the key insights of this paper is that rules cannot last, as society, business, and technology
change. Consequently, "successful commons governance requires that rules evolve." The authors
argue that effective governance occurs when:
● "resources and use of the resources by humans can be monitoried, and the information
can be verified and understood at relatively low cost"
● "rates of change in resources, resource-user populations, technology, and economic and
social conditions are moderate"
● "communities maintain frequent face-to-face communication and dense social networks"
● "outsiders can be excluded at relatively low cost from using the resource"
● "users support effective monitoring and rule enforcement"

Challenges for Governance

The authors identify four main challenges for governing commons:
● issues can be global in nature, with "environmental outcomes spatially displaced from
their causes and hard-to-monitor, larger scale economic incentives that may not be
closely aligned with the conditions of local ecosystems."
● differences in power between actors allow some groups to dominate others, especially
local groups
● policymakers who are unaware of the full range of governance tools that could involve
local groups
● no issue can be uniformly solved by a single type of ownership or power

Requirements of Adaptive Governance in Complex Systems

The authors argue that the answer to these challenges is adaptive governance, where institutions
are "designed to allow for adaptation" when facing issues where "fixed rules are likely to fail."
Adaptive governance requires the following things:
● information systems that match the scale of the problems, are verified, and are
presented in a way that empowers everyone involved
● means to deal with conflict, which is a fundamentally important ingredient in commons
governance. In this sense, designing for conflict and negotiation should be a basic
principle.
● inducing rule compliance through formal and informal sanctions, incentives, or group
exclusion
 ● physical and technological infrastructure, including "communication and transportation
technologies" to support collective reporting (here, they mention fishers who use mobile
phones to report unauthorized fishing) or link local communities with global systems
● be prepared for change, expecting a co-evolutionary race where contesting groups are
constantly seeking a competitive advantage in the ongoing struggle

Strategies for Meeting the Requirements of Adaptive

Governance
In this section, the authors offer three strategies for dealing with large-scale commons governance:
● analytic deliberation where "scientists, resource users, and interested publics" use
information together to deliberate on commons uses.
● nested institutional arrangements which include policies all the way from international
agreements down to local policies, to avoid setting policies at too high or low a level
● Institutional variety. Rather than suggesting a single solution, creating an ecosystem of
different kinds of policies and spaces of contention. Why? Because "innovative rule
evaders can have more trouble with a multiplicity of rules than with a single type of rule."