Week 14 · Society, Power & Collective Action
How communities govern shared resources, and why institutional design must fit local conditions.
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Shared resources create a special problem: one person's use can affect what remains for others, while exclusion may be costly or unfair. I follow last week's diagnosis with practical institutional design—boundaries, rules, monitoring, sanctions, voice, and local knowledge. Ostrom's cases resist the abstract choice between private ownership and central control by showing the details that let communities govern.
Do not assume the only choices are private ownership and central control. Also avoid copying a successful rule without checking whether local conditions match.
Who can revise the rules when experience shows that the original design is wrong?
Start with the aims and questions so the readings have a purpose.
Use the prompt under each source to produce notes, not highlights alone.
Test the ideas through observation, analysis, or a small intervention.
Save the deliverables and check your work against the completion criteria.
Define what you are trying to understand before deciding that you have understood it.
For each governance example, identify the boundary, rule, monitoring method, sanction, and voice mechanism. Those details matter more than the label.
Core material
4 guided readings, in the order shown.
Steven A. Greenlaw, David Shapiro, Daniel MacDonald, and contributors · OpenStax
Externalities, public goods, free riding, common resources, and the economic logic of collective action.
Read the sections on common resources and the tragedy of the commons. Note where the simple tragedy model is helpful and where it is too simple.
Fred D'Agostino, Gerald Gaus, and John Thrasher · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
How political obligation, legitimacy, cooperation, and mutually acceptable rules are understood through social-contract traditions.
Read the sections on political obligation and public justification. Add legitimacy and voice to your governance notes.
Nathan Keirns and contributors · OpenStax
An accessible introduction to social stratification, class, status, mobility, and the institutional reproduction of inequality.
Read the section on social mobility and note how unequal resources affect who can comply with or shape a rule.
Elinor Ostrom · Cambridge University Press
Ostrom's empirical and institutional analysis of how communities govern common-pool resources without relying only on markets or central command.
Read chapters 5-6. Build a table of Ostrom's design principles, the problem each addresses, and the evidence that would show it is working.
7 study actions turn the reading into observable work.
Optional resources for going further after the reading plan.
An overview of strategic interaction, rational choice, equilibrium, and the limits of purely individual reasoning.
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