Published as:"The Nature of Common-Pool Resource Problems," Rationality and Society 2(3), July 1990, 335-358."A large, multidisciplinary literature focuses on the problems occurring when multiple individuals concurrently use common-pool resources such as fisheries, grazing areas, airsheds, oil...

"What makes social-ecological systems robust? In this paper we look at the institutional configurations that affect the interactions among resources, resource users, public infrastructure providers, and public infrastructures. We propose a framework that helps to identify potential...

Subsequently published as:"Incorporating Motivational Heterogeneity into Game Theoretic Models of Collective Action." Public Choice, 117, 2003, 295-315."Understanding cooperation in the context of social dilemma games is fundamental to understanding how alternative institutional arrangements may...

"In many fields, policymakers seem to have an increasing preference for simple, large, non- redundant systems of analysis and governance. To address this question, we examine several arenas in which scholars have studied the costs and benefits of different levels of redundancy, including:...

"The experiments reported in this paper provide strong evidence for the power of face-to-face communication in a repeated common-pool resource environment where decisions are made privately. When communication was provided as a 'costless' institution, players successfully used the opportunity...

"Social-ecological systems are complex adaptive systems where social and biophysical agents are interacting at multiple temporal and spatial scales. The main challenge for the study of governance of social-ecological systems is improving our understanding of the conditions under which...

"In this paper we utilize Ostrom's (2007) diagnostic framework for socio-ecological systems to examine the factors that contribute to social responses to disturbances in a set of five Indiana, USA intentional communities over a fifteen year time frame. We argue that the concept of robustness is...