Listen Now
Is good governance a choice between markets and states, or is there a third way? How can institutional diversity help us fight climate change or enhance social welfare? Tune in to this conversation with Dr Derek Wall of Goldsmiths College on what we stand to learn from the intellectual legacy of Elinor Ostrom, the first and only woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify
Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket.
The Guest
Dr Derek Wall is an associate lecturer in Political Economy at Goldsmiths College. His books include The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom (2014) and Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals (2017). He is a former International Coordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales and contested the Maidenhead constituency in the 2017 General Election. He is currently writing a political biography of Hugo Blanco. He is a patron of Peace in Kurdistan.
For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl).
Skip Ahead
0:45: What was Elinor Ostrom’s main contribution to the social sciences?
1:55: Was Ostrom successful in moving beyond markets and states?
4:44: What is the relevance of her work for green politics?
8:00: Is Ostrom’s framework limited to localities? If so, how well does it tackle environmental problems in the global commons?
15:30: What is the connection between Ostrom and John Dewey?
19:26: How did Vincent Ostrom influence Elinor’s work?
22:43: Was there a possibility of confirmation bias in Elinor’s work? Was she interested in demonstrating outcomes in her empirical work that we might view as favourable to building a self-governing citizenry in the way that Vincent envisioned it?
25:46: What happens when localities come up with bad rules, or even oppressive ones? Should the state monitor local policy experimentation?
29:43: What are the social justice implications of Ostrom’s research framework? Should we be comfortable in accepting institutionally diverse approaches to income redistribution?
31:23: If there are macro-level structural inequalities in society that are too big for any one person to overcome, wouldn’t the state be the only entity capable of solving problems at that scale?
36:01: Let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about your political background. How do you translate such complex ideas from the academy into policy?
40:15: What are the 13 rules for policy makers to begin thinking in an Ostromian way?
42:28: Let’s take a more pragmatic challenge to the Ostroms. If we’re dealing with a diverse constellation of rule systems in a given country, it looks like utter chaos for investors. Doesn’t the diversity and localism implied in the framework undermine the Ostroms’ pragmatism?
45:02: What is Elinor Ostrom’s legacy? What research programs has she left open for the future?
Full Transcript
Irena Schneider
Welcome back to the Governance Podcast at the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society at King’s College London. My name is Irena Schneider, and I’m your host. Today I’m really pleased to welcome Derek Wall who is associate lecturer of political economy at Goldsmiths College. He is a former international coordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales and contested the Maidenhead constituency at the 2017 general election. His most recent book is called Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals, where he outlines the pragmatic nature of the Nobel Prize winners’ work on governing the commons. Derek, thanks so much for joining us at the Governance Podcast.
Derek Wall
Thank you so much for asking me.
Irena Schneider
I’d love to discuss your latest work on Ostrom. You argue that there’s a uniquely pragmatic dimension to her work. I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about what is her main contribution to the social sciences first.
Derek Wall
I don’t know whether I would be as bold as to say that it’s unique. But I would say that maybe one thing which is distinctive and important is that what she does is that she has an approach of trying to solve problems. So what I’m trying to do is kind of contrast her work with work from political science, which is more ideological, in the sense that by ideology, we might have some kind of collective identity that is kind of socialist or classical liberals or whatever. And then what we’re doing with that is exploring a sense of pure principles. And, you know, I don’t think what she was trying to do was come up with axioms of political philosophy for all time and space, or she’d come up with this kind of very pragmatic problem solving approach. So that I think it’s maybe not unique, but it’s relatively rare and it’s, I think, very refreshing.
Irena Schneider
Do you think that she was successful and moving beyond markets in states or can we actually have her legacy claimed by one side more than the other?
Derek Wall
Well, I think it’s it. You know, in essence, she’s almost unique in doing that, because what we have if we look at kind of political economy is that most political economies are still in this binary, that you have states and you have markets. I think she’s almost unique to say that economic activity covers a whole kaleidoscope of different forms of governance, that get us beyond simply market exchange, and the actions of state. And I think that’s really bold. I mean, we’re in a society where, you know, in society and academically, and there’s a lot of kind of criticism of what might be termed neoliberalism. Whether we think that’s an appropriate term or not, is another debate. And it’s very much a kind of debate that, hey, there’s too much market, we need more states, or the people opposing that would say there’s too much data and we need more market. And Ostrom wasn’t somebody who was radically going sustain or radically against the market. But she is almost unique. Elinor was somebody who would theorise and analyse forms of economic governance that weren’t purely state and market. And I think that really is unique.
Irena Schneider
Do you think that it’s really a third way between markets and states? Or should we abandon that spectrum altogether?
Derek Wall
Well, I don’t think we should abandon the spectrum, but I don’t think she’s in essence doing the spectrum. Because what people then say is, maybe the commons are a third way. And you know, I’ve learned from other Ostrom scholars that she wasn’t simply saying, state, market, commons, but actually there’s a diversity of different institutions. And then there’s also different ways in which states and markets and market exchange can interact. So one of the things that I emphasise about her work, she had this kind of anti slogan of no panaceas, right. And what people want to do is kind of ignore that and say, she was the grand theorist of the commons. But she wasn’t saying that the commons are a monolithic solution to everything. What she was saying is that you have a variety of different forms of governance and institutions and property rights. And many of the most important kinds are very informal, decentralised and local. And that’s kind of forgotten if we, you know, kind of say the comments as a third way. You and that’s how much you homogenise what she said too much.
Irena Schneider
What is the relevance of her work for green politics and environment?
Derek Wall
Well, I think it’s absolutely massive. Because she and Vincent would always say, I was lucky enough to interview her, and there’s a nice video on YouTube for the Green Party magazine Green World. She would say, um, you know, it’s her work that was always kind of related and done with her husband. And then they are then related to a whole other network. So, you know, another controversy you might get onto later is the fact that they’re very committed to methodological individualism, but they’re much more kind of collectivist network scholars than we find with scholars on the left, but to keep the environment you know, before she met Vincent, you know, right back in the late 1940s and 1950s. He was a political ecologist, but he was thinking about the political institutions we need to conserve nature. You know, he was thinking of, you know, people in the West of America and you know, Wyoming and you know, how they would graze that capital and cooperate. And his early research when he became an academic was looking at water tables and height hydrology. So, you know, he started off literally looking at the environment and how we manage the environment as a political problem. And I’m, you know, I’m obviously very committed to green politics, but green politics tends to be quite ideological in the sense of what we care about the environment, as Donald Trump, he doesn’t care about the environment. And it’s, you know, we’ve got to kind of be more environmentally friendly.
And what the Ostrums were doing was saying, that’s inadequate, what you have to do is look in very great detail of what works and what doesn’t work. And I think one of the major problems of politics is quite often we can be quite statist that we would kind of say, you have the government, we’re going to come up with policies, we’re going to enact the policies and that solve the problem. And what the Ostrums were doing, they were not radical anti status, but they would say we can’t view the state as a black box, states often get things wrong. And also when you’re looking at governing environmental resources and doing this in a sustainable way, quite often you have things which are informal, traditional, which the state can kind of snuff out.
So I could kind of wax lyrically, I think, for hours about their contributions in green politics. And I’ll try and keep it to a couple more minutes. I mean, she was very happy. It wasn’t an identity identified as kind of green. But she was very happy to be interviewed by me. She was going to be on one of the panels of the European Green Parties to speak. I think he missed that because of ill health. So she was certainly interested in the green project and a lot of her and Vincent’s values, you know, it’s very much about bringing in policies that would work for the next seven generations and decentralisation, very concerned with kind of non violence, equality, diversity. So in some ideological sense, there’s lots of boxes that we can take in terms of Ostrum and green politics, but I think the importance goes beyond that.
Irena Schneider
Well, typically when we think about the market, for instance, we see it as something that brings about socially optimal coordination between individuals on the basis of price signals and private property. But these kinds of mechanisms don’t typically work and in the global commons and common pool resources in general, because people don’t own these resources, they don’t own fisheries or oceans or forests. So she emphasised a specific kind of social order that would help maintain these resources. And she stressed the importance of things like trust and communication, and delivered rulemaking at the local level. But it seems that these kinds of mechanisms tend to only work on a local level, and it’s very hard to scale them up to solve the challenges of climate change. So do you think that there’s a limit to how much your framework is actually helping the environment or can help the environment?
Derek Wall
Um, well, she didn’t claim to be the kind of kind of goddess of everything and I think you know, social theory like everything else, you are modular when it works best that you have different people doing different things. And then you kind of aggregate that. And that’s reflected in her kind of practice as an academic and the collective practice that she felt to deal with environmental problems you need in natural scientists. You need it, you know, political economists, you know, so when she did practical research, it was normally with others. So she wasn’t claiming to come up with this kind of solution for everything. Though she was mainly focused on kind of local commons. I would stress that what she looked at is things as dilemmas and problems, she wasn’t saying, if we localised everything, it then works. And she did do some a lot of work on climate change on a global level. And she would say, Okay, I don’t have a solution to this, that’s my understanding, but you have problems of trust at a global level. And she would be very explicit that you would have climate negotiators. And they’re not going to get very far with negotiations and maybe sacrifices and reducing CO2, if there isn’t trust. So I would say she might not have an automatic solution to building trust when you have global negotiations. But she was doing the research and actually posing this as a problem. And the kind of research she did where you would have kind of run experiments. You know, she’d use game theory to look at how you promote competition and overcome the traditional Nash equilibrium. I would say that those kinds of things make it more and more easier to deal with the dilemmas that we have globally. You know, I think if you’re not using those you’re maybe rather disarmed and if what she’s doing is posing the fact that you have issues of trust, and you have issues of negotiation. And they’re extremely difficult and maybe almost impossibly difficult. But if you problematize them, and then look at what creates better negotiations and better trust, you’re opening up a space and it becomes less impossible. So, um, you know, the classic stuff that she did was to look at kind of formal models that I’m sure a lot of people listening are familiar with Ostrum’s collective action problems, free riders in the prisoner’s dilemma. And the kind of formal models, as we know, would suggest that competition overruled cooperation, and in fact, they’re quite challenging to a lot of market based conventional economics, because in the conventional classical economics, we’re self interested, but that leads to greater social goods. And then, in fact, things like the prisoner’s dilemma, and they’re actually quite subversive of that, because they would say that when we’re self interested, everybody loses. Right? Um, so again, I think it’s one of the things we all struggle with. She does actually get us to kind of rethink a lot of the things which are very, you know, we think of kind of traditional wisdoms. So, you know, it’s quite often people say, hey, you’re using game theory, and that’s very right wing individualistic. But the kind of Nash equilibrium, if we really look at how it works, is actually quite subversive of Adam Smith.
Irena Schneider
Well, let’s look at a very specific policy example in terms of pollution. We know that there is an island of plastic waste floating in the Pacific Ocean, the size of France, but there are no communities surrounding that piece of territory to manage that waste. How does Ostrum’s framework cope with a truly global commons problem like that?
Derek Wall
I’ve taken, I don’t know if you’d agree with them or not, but one of them is to be specific. And plastic is like a huge problem. But it’s also an environmental recon on what you have. I’m very kind of interested in people like the kind of Marxist philosopher also not a million miles away from Ostrum, and the Jewish Dutch philosopher Spinoza. And they’re kind of saying, quite often there are things which have symbolic currency, and you know, not belittling plastics as a problem. But what you have is a range of environmental problems and some of them you have very strong images and they become mobilised and there are others that may be far more important ecologically, which are not easily mobilised by politicians. So I, you know, we got to be careful of that. But I think with it being very specific, that what happens is politicians and lobbyists come up with some solutions, but you need to look in very detail very specifically about whether the solutions work or not. So if we’re looking at, you know, the production of plastic, the kind of Ostrum approach would be to say, you know, we might theorise why this the waste looking at kind of environmental conditions because ocean currents come in, as well as human psychology. And then what we might do is like case studies, where you reduce the amount of plastic, and then you see what works and what doesn’t work. And then you come up with some design features, and then you develop policy. So what she’s about is having a method. She’s not about there’s one approach that works in all circumstances, but it’s to kind of say there’s a problem of plastic waste. How do we, you know, look at maybe kind of formal, quite abstract models, the production of plastic waste, then we kind of look at people’s attempted solutions. And we quite often know that people come up with policies, and they’re completely ineffective. So I think that, you know, a very specific case study of what works and what doesn’t work. So of course, she did that with commons and looked at where commons are working and why they weren’t working, came up with design features, and then they hopefully help us conserve the commons more effectively.
Irena Schneider
I was interested in the parallel you draw between Elinor Ostrom and John Dewey — what’s the connection there?
Derek Wall
Well, I’ve got this, I can never pronounce his name but is it Powell? Because that’s very much his insights. And in you know, his wonderful research on the Ostrums. What he’s doing is looking at what they can tell us in terms of governance, and I think his scholarships in many ways. He’s coming from the opposite spectrum from me, I’m on the kind of left of the greens. And he’s a kind of high IQ scholar. But I kind of find with his work, you know, it goes well beyond, you know, again markets and states and looks at all sorts of kinds of approaches. And he’s kind of saying both her and Vincent with their Ostrum kind of approach. They’ve got a kind of whole social philosophy that we’re very concerned with methodology, you know, the philosophy of social science. So, what she’s kind of doing is saying, there’s a practical problem and the practical problem is, how do we go from the commons, you know, we can’t just privatise them or nationalise them. If we do that it is very easy, but we can’t get away from the more difficult problem of governance. And then she’s looking at how we do that. And what she’s doing is actually having some quite sophisticated philosophy to back this up.
So what Powell is doing in his book is to say, what are the kind of philosophical underpinnings of this? And okay, and when they write, they’re referencing economists like JP Cannon who’s very interesting, high IQ to a lesser extent, Tocqueville to a, you know, large extent, you know, Jane Jacobs to a little bit, and they don’t reference jewellery very much. But what Powell is saying is that you have this pragmatic approach, which is kind of in the air, but you know, they’re drawing on, you know, American philosophical and political traditions that may be quite distant from us now, and but you know, would be very apparent in the 40s and 50s and 60s, so, um, what you’ve got from my understanding of Julian, I’m definitely not a Jewish scholar. It’s not about identifying universal philosophical truths and concepts at work in real time and space, that, you know, without being completely banal, what you’re interested in, is the effect of the philosophy. And if the effect, if it has a practical beneficial effect that is closer to the truth, you know, it’s not the idea that human beings are what some human beings think are God that we can know everything. So in that sense, jewellery, you know, might be seen as the opposite of his acts as kind of progressive and people who might challenge that, you know, there’s a certain kind of scepticism in air. And he’s also somebody who is a kind of very much a kind of social reformer. So what’s interesting with the Ostrums is quite often they’ll be seen as on the right and like well claimed themselves as being on the right as well, but they’re dealing with lots of kinds of things that were on the left like ecology, diversity, multiculturalism, direct democracy. So the kind of chewy thing is one of the kind of practical effects rather than, you know, concepts for all time and space. It’s socially progressive. It’s maybe quite kind of heterodox and diverse that there’s not going to be one method where of course this might be challenged is my understanding is jewellery. You know, it’s kind of quite optimistic and statist, and so on. I’m not kind of a theory scholar. So that might be different. But there are certainly some kinds of parallels.
Irena Schneider
Let’s talk a little bit more about the relationship between Eleanor and Vincent. How did he influence her work?
Derek Wall
Well, I think it’s interesting in terms of biographies and careers, because I can think of another thing we have to talk about is kind of feminism. And the way you know, for so long, she was marginalised, and, you know, then, you know, became such an important figure. And yet another perspective is the way that academia is much more methodologically individualist than anything, and we’re always looking for an industry scholar. And, you know, their approach, as I say, in a sense was kind of collectivist, they weren’t really concerned about their personal biographies and career. They very much work together and work with others. So his approach, I think, is generally seen as being more theoretical, versus seen as being more empirical. I think there’s debates around what he would do. As far as I know, from reading his scholarship, we people seem to say all this is very difficult to read a scholarship, I think, is quite straightforward. And I really wish people would read more of it. I think he’s very interesting, what he’s drawing on is traditions of, you know, the American Constitution, the American Revolution, you know, kind of Republicanism in a radical sense, not in a kind of Trump sense, but in the idea of kind of city states and self government. You know, the more interesting bits of classical liberalism. So you think of the American Revolution of 1776. And then the construction of the American Constitution and checks and balances, and Tom Paine, and not my area, but he’s very much I think, built on those kinds of things to talk about self governance, diversity. And it’s maybe, you know, both of them were quite heterodox figures, but it might be seen that he’s coming from some quite mainstream traditions in American constitutional law and politics. But he’s then saying, what does that apply to local government? How does that apply to maintaining forests? So, though I said he was maybe more concerned with constitutions then, you know, kind of empirical work, you know, he was doing work on water basins, and so on from very early on.
Her work, I think kind of draws on that and goes beyond it. So her particular emphasis maybe’s more the problem solving, that you have this problem or you have got land which is common, you’ve got resources, which are common. So if you’re coming from a kind of liberal market based, you can’t just have people owning them individually because people can’t own rivers. So how do you actually maintain those ecologically, so maybe a bit more than Vincent and she’s kind of posing it as a problem. I’ve heard quite often that one of the kinds of slogans they liked on their keywords was contestation, and they believed in strong debates, and I’ve read that they had very strongly called it contestation. I’d really love to know what they disagreed about.
Irena Schneider
It seems that Vincent for my understanding was very much concerned with what is it that helps us maintain a self governing citizenry and he is concerned about local agency and people maintaining their democracy. And do you think that there was perhaps some kind of confirmation bias in Ostrom’s s empirical work in the sense and that she was trying to demonstrate outcomes that are specifically favourable to building a self governing citizenry, or was her empirical work a lot more mixed in terms of the outcomes that she found?
Derek Wall
Um, I think that’s a very good question. Because, you know, we all when we do our research, are in danger of confirming our unconscious biases, you know, that ideology is always to some to a large extent unconscious. And you wonder whether the more sophisticated your method is, and the more diverse your method is, the more sophisticated your defensive ideology is. So I think there’s always a risk of that. So there’s definitely a risk of that and there’s suspicion and we must always have some degree of hermeneutics of suspicion. But I do think that she is kind of escaping purely ideological approaches, in that what we tended to have with commons is a prime approach, which is, you know, kind of bluntly ideological, that you have Garrett Harding saying, you know, the formal models prove that it’s impossible for human beings to cooperate. Therefore, what we need is kind of a very totalitarian structure. And what she’s doing is then engaging with the kind of formal models, looking at the assumptions, and then building a bit more in, so I guess that might involve some unconscious bias to what you already believe. But I think that what she’s doing is at least engaging with the kind of models in quite a direct way. And then that may open up space for other alternatives. And you know, one of the things which I think all serious kind of Ostrum scholars whether on the left like me or people who see themselves on the right beyond or whatever would say is what’s absolutely key in their work is policy interest and diversity. And that what you have to do, what you have to be aware of is that you actually need a diversity, which you’re not then going to this necessarily kind of turn into some in sort of a galleon sense of some kind of new consensus, but you need to be constantly engaging with views you might disagree with, with other theoretical contexts, because that’s maybe a way of not removing the problem of, you know, pre conscious ideology. But it’s a way maybe that we might begin to think about challenging it.
Irena Schneider
But it still seems to me that polycentricity does have some weaknesses. What happens when localities come up with bad rule systems, or even oppressive ones? Shouldn’t we create a even playing ground for everybody and monitor experimentation in policy making at the local level.
Derek Wall
I’m not a radical anti status, I’m not a libertarian, I have probably have quite a bit more sympathy for the state and a lot of people listening to this. But I think the whole problem with that is what happens when states mess up. You know that there seems to be that, it’s kind of posed that if you have lots of diversity and do things this way they could go wrong. And then you need some higher authority to kind of step in, you know, but states are products of human action, and they go wrong as well. And I think if you’re theorising things at the state level, that doesn’t presuppose the state is more likely to get it right than local communities. So that kind of throws up difficulties and dangers. You know, that it’s always who judges because whoever judges is a product of social forces that may end up with them doing things which are wrong. Like it’s I’m not a radical libertarian, and maybe, you know, the states with monopoly violence and being coercive, I’ve gotten a lot more power to damage things. And, you know, again, I’m not a higher Kimball, I think we have to acknowledge that there’s a knowledge problem. And that states might be removed from knowledge at different levels. So to kind of take us through that maybe homostatist, she would say, and yet we can’t solve climate change purely at a local level, she would say, we need these kinds of global agreements. And you know, people might be quite surprised by that. Because on the left, we would say, well, the global agreements are very much about kind of carbon trading, which of course you wouldn’t criticise as being, you know, that isn’t the panacea. That’s just one mechanism. And then people on the right would say, even if this problem of climate change, this is giving you know, global governance power, which is so destructive. But she would say we do need global agreements. But you have to have a polycentric system in that you need, you know, kind of regional level, European level. And she talked about the importance of cities. She talked about the importance of communities, she talks about the importance of individuals. And if you’re kicking out the policy entities, even if you’re somebody who’s very, very focused on the study, you’re not going to have policies which are effective, because the policies are entirely abstract and formal, if you project them at a nation state level or a global level, is how they actually play out on a local level.
So one of the things I think the first time I came across, Oxfam’s name was in a document called Who is Common Future, which was published in 1993, which you can find online. So it’s kind of people like Nicholas Hilliard. This was like a critique of the Rio global conferences, global environmental conference, and everybody from Fidel Castro, who is a Marxist, very serious approach to ecology. And I’m not challenging that to kind of corporations was saying, you know, there’s this real conference, and there’s a process and whose common future is very much kind of criticising this from a kind of left extreme perspective, and saying, we have to look at things on the ground and we have to look at local communities. And that if you have policies, however, well meaning that are imposed from the centre, quite often those can be very damaging to the ecological efforts of local communities.
Irena Schneider
What about the social justice implications of the author’s work? Does accepting a polycentric order also mean that we should be open to accepting a diversity of approaches to redistributing welfare?
Derek Wall
I think I’d come at it from a slightly different direction than where I am critical of her work. And I think what’s nice about her work is being very open to criticism. I think what both her and Vincent kind of found difficult was for a lot of time, people just see this as either left field or right field, they just couldn’t engage with it. And I think they really liked, you know, people would come and be really critical of it, engage with it, they’d like that. And I think where I would come towards it, because you might have, you know, see myself in many ways as a Marxist that might be unusual, is that what they weren’t doing was looking at things at a more macro level, and looking at the kind of structural forces. So though, it’s, it’s difficult to, you know, define analytically social class. There are, you know, class forces that lead to kinds of concentrations of power and wealth. And you know, that there’s not anything happening purely at a micro level. There’s various macro levels. And I think that I would say that, you know, we need that kind of assistance now as well. What you quite often end up with is that with that kind of analysis, though, is kind of misplaced scientism, and dogmatism and social engineering, but that’s where I would have a kind of critique. I wouldn’t kind of kind of pose it if you’ve got this community in that community. But I kind of pose it in that kind of difficult issue.
Irena Schneider
But can you elaborate on that? If there are really big, deep structural inequalities in society that are, frankly, too big for any individual, any one person to overcome? Is the state necessarily the only entity or authority that is capable of tackling problems at that scale?
Derek Wall
I don’t think so. I think the interesting thing is, um, you know, it’s rare that you’re going to get creative interplay between people who come from any kind of Marxist tradition and people who would come from, you know, kind of libertarian traditions. But you know, the way I would oppose it and maybe it’s inadequate is you have kind of structural forces and social class and macro issues of power. But within Marxist traditions, there’s a criticism of the states. Now, of course, the irony is whenever you’ve had things labelled as Marxists, and they’ve then ended up with strongly centralised states, and maybe, you know, there’s kind of a huge problem there. If you look at a lot of classical Marxism, you know, from after kind of Marx died in 1883, towards the First World War, you have kind of Marxist traditions which are entirely scientific and positivistic.
But the kind of Marxist approach is to say, you have to contest and challenge power structures, but you have to recognise that the state is a product of those power structures. So that may leave us with a kind of void and a problem. But it’s certainly not on the left purely that you, you know, on the left, and on the far left, it’s not that the state is seen as something which is a black box. You know, if you look at the kind of theorists like Louis Alphas who are very controversial Marxist philosophers who I kind of find a lot of inspiration from, he would say, one of the things that really went wrong with 20th century Marxism is they didn’t theorise the state. So I would say in a kind of Ostrum sense that what you’re doing is posing things as problems. And there is a problem of power. And, you know, you have to kind of deal with conservative concentrations of power. But if you’re dealing with concentrations of power, people need to kind of get together to challenge those and you can then create new structures of power. So I think the weakness of having, you know, purely methodologically individualistic approach is you cannot theorise structures are a kind of higher level. And I think if you just ignore those kinds of structural factors, they are a lot more dangerous. So I think the fact that they haven’t done that is a problem.
But then on the other hand in other ways, they’re very attentive to power. So they would look at a micro level people’s interactions and trust and negotiation. They’d also be aware, you know, if you look at Vincent Ostrum’s work, that it was kind of pro revolutions, but he would say, you know, the kind of following that the French Revolution kind of went wrong in the American Revolution kind of went less wrong. And he was interested in, you know, African anti colonial figures. But he was aware that if you have a revolution that involves violence and certain structures, and you can then re import things which are kind of very oppressive. There’s, I mean, one of the tragedies with his stuff is that a lot of his stuff was kind of written as, um, you know, notes and in conversations, not all published in books, but there’s the international Digital Library of the commons that he and LMS set up. And in that there’s like a very nice critique that he has overland in. And he’s kind of saying, well, I agree with Marxists when they would say they want to wither away from the state. And then he would criticise Lenin and this would go beyond the kind of standard Cold War scepticism and actually say, Well, if you’re going to have a revolution and have social change, you have to think about the kind of institutions that follow. If you’re not thinking about the kind of institutions that follow, almost inevitably you’re going to end up with something which is suppressive.
Irena Schneider
Let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about your political background. It’s interesting, you’ve tackled a lot of these challenges in the Green Party, how do you translate such complex ideas from the academy into policy?
Derek Wall
I think just getting people to think about her work is really difficult. And, um, you know, I think in some ways I mean this this kind of couple of differences come in two stages to it so um, what I’ve been trying to do is kind of get more people to engage with her work you know, so I it is a sort of kind of political prog political academic project, you know, wrote my, the sustainable economics of an Ostrum as a kind of PhD sighs, hundred thousand word expensive rambling tome, but I felt that it was just so important to to write that, you know, certainly not as the last word because other people have very different interpretations because that’s another sort of extra meta, kind of above this work. So I think other people, you know, do other books on that. And then I thought it was important to write something more kind of popular, accessible. So the Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals, it’s very much addressed to a kind of green left audience. So it’s kind of thinking of people in the Green Party and Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, and it’s been really nice to actually have feedback from John McDonnell, who you know, is the Labour Party, Shadow Chancellor is kind of seen as very much a sort of a Marxist figure or a kind of extreme figure that he, you know, he loved the book, and he was very interested in, you know, how you would approach things in terms of kind of diversity and pragmatism and so on.
So, kind of just trying to kind of popularise this stuff, which I think a lot of us are doing in different ways, whether we’re coming from a more liberal, left or green, you know, it’s really important. Um, but I think we’re in a kind of diverse way, the kind of second stage that all of us tend to do as human beings, whether academics or not, is to kind of capture things in a slogan. So there’s a kind of Commons movement, you know, which is good. So you got a commons movement, where people are talking about imaginative forms of collective ownership, you know, looking at copy, right, and, you know, kind of protection of property in ways which, you know, creates more access. You’ve got cross movement, gross routes, movements, trying to kind of apply this in places like the city of Barcelona, it’s kind of big on Latin American left. But what uh, you know, these people are not all doing this, but there’s a danger that her work is seen very much as we’re going to bring in the commons. And you know, when you look at her work, there’s great diversity. And, you know, if I was going to kind of distil one thing where I kind of came in looking at his stuff was, Hey, this is the commons. Where I am now is I think what’s most interesting is about her kind of general methods. So I think the kind of subtleties of what she was up to, could be lost. You know, and if we look at, you know, kind of Marxism and Marx is another example, you’ve got kind of quite subtle projects that then get distilled to very simple slogans. So I haven’t got to kind of neat how I’ve affected that kind of policy with this. But I think having, um, you know, the more we kind of get people to explore her ideas, we got to be aware that the danger is there explored in a very kind of closed one dimensional way.
Irena Schneider
So there are no clear policy implications here?
Derek Wall
I think there are policy implications. But it’s not things which are reduced to one slogan. I mean, I got my kind of 13 rules, right?
Irena Schneider
Tell us about the 13 rules.
Derek Wall
So what I thought would be quite fun would be to have 13 because it’s a nice kind of witchy number. And to kind of come up with a few things that I would read from what she looked at, to kind of get people thinking in a more kind of Ostrum way. And so you know, one of them is to be specific. And with policymaking, it’s to be general, you know, that if you want to solve things like climate change, and problems with plastics and promote, you know, greater democratic engagement, you need to be really, really specific. You need to look at what works and what doesn’t work, how it plays out at different levels. Another one is institutions. So, you know, we know that you know, but some people’s institutions are invisible. You know, I wonder whether it’s just me, but I have a kind of prejudice that in Britain institutions are particularly kind of missing. But what we have is a kind of formal liberal democracy. And but we have, you know, a state, which is very paternalistic. And you know, in Britain, you know, think people are not really used to the idea of governance, that actually having self governance and participation seems a very, very long way from what we do in Britain. And that it’s very much we have like paternalistic states. And then it does things we don’t like, and we moan about them, such as the idea that there are institutions that work all sorts of different levels, and you could build them up in different ways and have different facts. You know, I wonder whether it’s something perhaps peculiarly ignored by the British, maybe not, but um, you know, I think the very notion of an institution, you know, is kind of a set of roles, and then we could redesign the roles and change the roles and get different outcomes is very different. You know, when you’re talking about the state, the idea that it’s not really an institution that you’ve got kind of one blanket solution. And that, you know, even if you’re very pro state, it’s kind of how might we redesign the state have different rules, see what happens?
Irena Schneider
Right. Let’s take a little bit more about a pragmatic challenge to the Ostrum’s that investors are coming to a country and they see this vast constellation of rule systems on the ground, it looks like utter chaos. Doesn’t this undermine the rule of law and the underlying pragmatism of the system’s framework?
Derek Wall
I’m probably not really worrying too much about investors, I must I’m worrying about things like climate change and so on. And I mean, what I would say maybe where you do have an issue is you have kind of a decentralised, left and a decentralised right and so on. And, and, you know, maybe there are kind of things like economies of scale that give rise to kind of corporate forces and so on. So we can’t kind of dismiss corporate investment, you know, we can’t dismiss the fact that you might need, you know, there are benefits from doing things in a list in a less right decentralised way. But I just think when we’re talking to investors, maybe you know, it’s inevitable and we got Brexit and all of the kinds of challenges with that. But, um, you know, maybe, you know, we need to get away from thinking about, you know, what can these you know, powerful economic forces gain, we really need these toward more water kind of communities want. So, you know, Vincent Ostrom would say, communities might have a huge diversity of different goals that they might have equality or ecology. And, you know, I think my challenge to a lot of people from a kind of market base is, you know, you’re talking about methodological individualism and polycentric racism and so on. But there’s a great danger that we end up with, you know, this kind of very monolithic, you know, needs of, you know, short term profit. But then maybe how we get beyond that is a problem as well. And I think one of the things I think we’d say is whether you’re on the right or the left, that people have particular objectives they want to achieve and then you get unforeseen circumstances and the free market left, the free market right tends to, you know, that seems to kind of generate neoliberalism. And then if you look at the kind of Marxist left, that’s, that seems to generate stronger states. So for any kind of ideological approach, there are very difficult questions around on foot. circumstances.
Irena Schneider
What do you think is Elinor Ostrum’s legacy in the social sciences? What sort of research programmes has she left open for the future?
Derek Wall
Um, like everything I’ve got contrary thoughts. I mean, I think what, I think is a shame is that there’s a great danger that what we do as academics is kind of have a think, look what they’ve said, interpret in different ways whereas what she invents were really about, was, um, you’ve got an era of forest, how do you maintain it? Um, you know, she was very keen on workers cooperatives, how do you make them work? So what I would like to see from the Ostrum legacy, and I think what the Ostrums were about is that you have a very kind of practical problem. And then you bring a huge factory of different kinds of methods to it. And then you know, you look at design rules. You’re kind of looking at what people do well, and you’re trusting the people, and then you’re feeding back to them. So what I think I’d like to see the most is her kind of approach applied to academic research, to education, to how things we do in British universities. I think that would be kind of really revolutionary.
And so what I’d love to do is to kind of see people saying, Well, how do we actually apply this stuff to, you know, maybe introducing more, you know, conservation and collective ownership in Britain? You know, if you’re looking at, you know, workers, cooperatives, what works, what doesn’t work. So that I think would be really great. And I think beyond that, just getting an idea of what you know, some people might call this their kind of meta theory, that all these you know, they’re their kind of challenge to kind of positivism they’re interested in the philosophy If social science concepts like policy interest, it’s really kind of getting getting people interested in that. And I think the danger is the fact that ideas always get kind of captured and homogenised. And you know, we’re abiding, you’re all but kind of 19th century in Britain, you had kind of almost like kind of Victorian green radicalism. And you have things like William Morris, and you had talk of kind of garden cities. And these things always get very domesticated and simplified. And what I think they would love, sadly neither of them are with us anymore, is the fact that people from quite diverse traditions, you know, that, um, you know, talk to people who might be more liberal, and, you know, talk to a lot of people like myself, who would be very much on the left, I talk to people involved with technology, and that there’s some quite diverse audiences interested in their work.
Irena Schneider
It seems like the key lesson they’re teaching us is to abandon dogma and embrace as much diversity as we can.
Derek Wall
And I think the best thing they’re doing is coming up with stuff, which is very kind of practical, but it’s kind of open. You know. So as you say, there’s a risk that there’s things that they’re interested in, they have a bias towards kind of decentralisation and so on. But I think what they’re trying to do is kind of open. They are trying to think about things in an analytical sense, where, you know, there’s not one fixed solution, but you’re always being challenged. You know, they are very challenging thinkers
Irena Schneider
Fantastic. It’s been a pleasure talking with you today. Derek, thank you so much for coming over.
Derek Wall
It’s been a pleasure being here.
Irena Schneider
To all our listeners: You can find more podcasts, blogs and live events on cutting edge debates and governance by following us on Facebook and Twitter. Our handle is @csgskcl. We look forward to seeing you again soon on the Governance Podcast.
