Commentary on Richard Wagner's “Self-governance, polycentrism, and federalism: Recurring themes in Vincent Ostrom's scholarly oeuvre”

The role of multi-actor governance in aligning farm modernization and sustainable rural development

“…De Vries, 2000;Hooghe and Marks, 2003;McGinnis, 2005;Pahl-Wostl, 2009) and supports territorial development reconnecting agriculture and rural development (Bryson et al, 2006). But there are disadvantages too, such as a lack of capacity and authority to make this work, the potentially high costs involved and the danger of ending up with fragmented and inconsistent policies (Benz and Eberlein, 1999;Herzberg, 2005;McGinnis, 2005;Meynen and Doornbos, 2004;Wiskerke et al, 2003).…”

Considerations on Governing Heritage as a Commons Resource

“…Higher level authorities would coordinate responses to problems, resolve differences among lower levels participants, and work toward the benefi ts of large scale that are only available when multiple small-scale units collaborate. Ostrom, in the principles we will discuss later, originally called these "nested" structures of governance but came later in her career (Ostrom 2010a , b ) to focus on the concept of polycentric governance systems, a specialty of her husband and collaborator, Vincent Ostrom (Herzberg 2005 ;Wagner 2005 ). Polycentric systems consist of multiple centers of authority, such as a federal system of government, that share power in a partially hierarchical, partially coequal, and often competitive context.…”