A Polycentric Approach for Coping with Climate Change

By Elinor Ostrom. 2009

811 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper proposes an alternative approach to addressing the complex problems of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions. The author, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, argues that single policies adopted only at a global scale are unlikely to generate sufficient trust among citizens and firms so that collective action can take place in a comprehensive and transparent manner that will effectively reduce global warming. Furthermore, simply recommending a single governmental unit to solve global collective action problems is inherently weak because of free-rider problems. For example, the Carbon Development Mechanism (CDM) can be gamed in ways that hike up prices of natural resources and in some cases can lead to further natural resource exploitation. Some flaws are also noticeable in the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD) program. Both the CDM and REDD are vulnerable to the free-rider problem. As an alternative, the paper proposes a polycentric approach at various levels with active oversight of local, regional, and national stakeholders. Efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions are a classic collective action problem that is best addressed at multiple scales and levels. Given the slowness and conflict involved in achieving a global solution to climate change, recognizing the potential for building a more effective way of reducing green house gas emissions at multiple levels is an important step forward. A polycentric approach has the main advantage of encouraging experimental efforts at multiple levels, leading to the development of methods for assessing the benefits and costs of particular strategies adopted in one type of ecosystem and compared to results obtained in other ecosystems. Building a strong commitment to find ways of reducing individual emissions is an important element for coping with this problem, and having others also take responsibility can be more effectively undertaken in small- to medium-scale governance units that are linked together through information networks and monitoring at all levels. This paper was prepared as a background paper for the 2010 World Development Report on Climate Change.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ffd5f9a738c35be7d5d9336ccfc76c919b1d844f

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Citations in the corpus

Individual Adaptation to Climate Change: The Role of Information and Perceived Risk (2010, background): “Ostrom (2009) is another contribution to the discussion of individual mitigation.”
The Indian Sundarban Mangrove Forests: History, Utilization, Conservation Strategies and Local Perception (2015, neutral): “This is why a polycentric approach [67] might be better suited for the Sundarbans as it proposes the development of methods for assessing the benefits and costs of particular strategies.”
Kindred spirits or intergovernmental competition? The innovation and diffusion of energy policies in the American states (1990–2008) (2014, background): “Nevertheless, Ostrom (2009) does not address the conditions that lead to diffusion of successful policy experiments across a political landscape.”
Carbon pricing in climate policy: seven reasons, complementary instruments, and political economy considerations (2017, background): “Even though many people would like to contribute at a personal cost to a more responsible use of the natural environment, such cooperative behavior frequently depends on the perception of what others will do.(40) The fact that an individual action alone has a negligible impact tends to discourage mo”
What determines urban households' willingness to pay for CO2 emission reductions in Turkey: A contingent valuation survey (2011, background): “Last but not the least, Ostrom (2009), recalling that efforts to deal with the global warming are hampered by a classic collectiveaction problem, recently claimed that single policies or single institutional units may not be sufficient to overcome the problem arising from lack of general trust in…”
Advantages of a polycentric approach to climate change policy (2015, background): “My own contribution is to make manifest the dynamic process of trust-reinforcement by (1) directly incorporating communication as a variable affecting trust, (2) describing a direct feedback from the level of cooperation to reputation, and (3) describing another direct feedback from ‘net benefit’ to”
Governing global problems under uncertainty: making bottom-up climate policy work (2017, background): “…high, and actors, unsure of what outcomes are possible, are unable to specify reliably their own interest nor understand with precision the interests of others, experimentation and learning are better means of advancing (Axelrod 1984; Camerer 2003; Victor 2009; Ostrom 2009; De Búrca et al. 2014).”
Cause and response: vulnerability and climate in the Anthropocene (2014, background): “They do not just organically or ‘naturally’ emerge from the polycentric ether (à la Ostrom 2009).”
A Polycentric Approach to Global Climate Governance (2017, background): “Whereas these systematized features can be found scattered across publications by Ostrom and colleagues (Dietz et al. 2003; Ostrom 2009; Ostrom 2010a; Ostrom 2010b; Ostrom 2012) with different emphases, we have also drawn on the closely related economic literature on environmental federalism (Dalmaz”
Welfare systems without economic growth: A review of the challenges and next steps for the field (2021, background): “Indeed, given this risk of free-riders, there is a strong case that polycentric governance structures, involving cooperation between actors at the local, regional and national levels, will be necessary to effectively manage welfare for all within ecological limits (Ostrom, 2009).”
Experiences of host communities with carbon market projects: towards multi-level climate justice (2014, background): “For instance, relying solely on an effective and fair international solution for climate change could delay action, and might anyway not work well alone without adequate efforts at lower geographical scales (Ostrom, 2009; Paavola, 2011).”
Hard and soft paths for climate change adaptation (2011, background): “The recent Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom (2009, 2010) has argued that polycentric interventions are in fact needed that blend local and national scales of action with regional and global ones to address climate change; see Sovacool (2011) for the application of Ostrom’s ideas to energy policy and pla”
Effectiveness, earmarking and labeling: testing the acceptability of carbon taxes with survey data (2017, background): “As suggested by Ostrom (2009), individuals may be willing to contribute to a public good such as climate change mitigation if they expect others doing the same, and this in spite of the global public good property of climate change.”