How does context affect self-governance? Examining Ostrom’s design principles in China

Yahua Wang,Jingning Kang,Minghui Zhang

doi:10.18352/ijc.916

Abstract

<span><span style="font-size: medium;">Ostrom’s Design Principles (DPs) are believed to be a set of the best practical guidance for governing natural resources, but applying the DP theory should consider the local context, especially the political context, which has been examined little so far. Using the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework as a conceptual and analytical lens, this paper examines the impact of authoritarian context on self-governance in China. Based on the results of Barnard’s test and Crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (csQCA), our comparative analysis of nine Water Users Association cases provides consistent evidence that supports the DP theory generally on all outcome dimensions. But self-governance under authoritarianism has unique characteristics and its operation depends on proper design of institutional configuration in accordance with context. Our analysis highlights the influence of resource intervention and leadership intervention. It sheds new insights for understanding the significant impacts of the authoritarian context on institutional design of common-pool resources.</span></span>

Highlights

Besides the ways of privatization and state’s coercion imposed by external authorities, self-governance is the third way of governing the commons, based on social rules supplied by users themselves (Ostrom 1990, 183)
Using the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework as a conceptual and analytical lens, this paper examines the impact of authoritarian context on self-governance in China
The theoretical contribution of this paper is to demonstrate that in general, the design principle theory rooted in a western context can be a real guidance to design successful autonomous institutions (Ostrom 1990; Cox et al 2010), but in specific practical situations, the self-governance under authoritarianism cannot conform with the theory completely

Summary

Introduction

Besides the ways of privatization and state’s coercion imposed by external authorities, self-governance is the third way of governing the commons, based on social rules supplied by users themselves (Ostrom 1990, 183). While national institutions and policies provide preconditions and constraints on local institutions (North 1990), few empirical studies in the commons literature have studied the connections between external political factors and self-governance (Lam 1996a; Clement 2010). Most examined cases were from the western world, i.e. countries with liberal democratic systems but very few came from non-western countries with authoritarian political systems (Cox et al 2010; Baggio et al 2016).. Over the last two decades, self-governance has been promoted by authoritarian governments as an important policy instrument, to be rebuilt and integrated into the broader administrative system for managing the “last mile” affairs (Mustafa et al 2016; Xia and Guan 2017)

Results

Discussion

Conclusion