Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

Ostrom examines the organization of mountain grazing and forest CPRs in Switzerland and Japan, as well as irrigation systems in Spain and the Philippines. Ostrom notes that these systems have survived for at least 100 years and as many as 1,000 years. While each system has distinct rules, the appropriators themselves play a significant role in monitoring in all of them. Given their long-term survival and the harshness of their environments, Ostrom suspects that appropriators have found principles of “good institutional design in a CPR environment” (59).

In the village of Tőrbel, Switzerland, there has been a mix of privately owned farmland and communally owned property for centuries. In 1483, the residents of the village established an association to regulate the use of the alpine grazing lands, forests, and waste lands. Boundaries of the communal property are well defined, and access to it is limited to citizens. Local regulations additionally limit appropriation levels. In most villages, a form of proportional allocation is used, dependent on the number of animals that a farmer feeds over the winter, the amount of land owned by the farmer, the value of said land, the amount of hay produced, or the number of shares owned in the cooperative.