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By assigning economic value to the manatee, the costs and benefits associated with conserving and protecting them and their habitat can more effectively compete in the marketplace. Just as the Endangered Species Act assigned value to social benefits or Eleanor Ostrom demonstrated how governing the commons could turn public goods into private ones, assessing the measurable benefits of a resource makes both environmental and economic sense. The manatee’s charisma, combined with a recognized economic value, has helped us maintain a better relationship with the species and moved the manatee and its habitat to the frontlines of Florida’s conservation agenda. Their increased numbers and expanding human fan base have made them the face for improving ecosystem biodiversity and water quality, as well as encouraging better land use decisions along Florida’s rapidly developing coastline. Effective branding by well-respected institutions like Save the Manatee Club and The Ocean Conservancy has made saving the manatee a cause that transcends the local and hopefully has made co-existing with the gentle giants in their habitat something each one of us will readily choose to do.

This chapter returns to the concrete conditions required to foster growth based on the ascription of value to green capital, leading eventually to a self-reproducing, fully functional economy. The forces to be set in motion will emerge neither from spontaneous market action nor from deliberate action by planners. Instead their guiding principles will be the large-scale deployment of environmental pricing, reorientation of public support toward research and development, new choices in terms of infrastructure, and the introduction of greater intelligence into networks, as well as training, the organization of professional retraining, and social acceptance, without which a collective transition project cannot be constructed.

Chapter 8 looks at several more worries about, and objections raised to, markets and business. This chapter focuses specifically on concerns raised about how markets can induce us to misvalue things—valuing some things too highly, valuing other things not enough. Chapter 8 argues that it is not things but rather people and their choices that should be valued. It also argues that one can advocate both liberty and virtue, that is, respecting people’s right to choose while retaining the moral authority to criticize—though not interfere with—their choices. It argues that working for wages is not plausibly similar to slavery and hence, contrary to some critics’ claims, should not be described as such. Finally, the chapter discusses tragedies of the commons and explores the ways that honorable business might address and mitigate some, if not all, of them.

This chapter points out the problems with distorted conceptions of ‘co-production’ that treats it merely as a tool to get users to play a designated part in service provision. It contrasts these approaches with the practices advocated by Elinor Ostrom, which transform communities from being passive recipients of pre-determined services from remote public agencies, into active co-producers of policies and services that more closely reflect their needs. Drawing on a range of research findings and case examples, lessons are put forward on how co-production should be carried out in practice, what can be done to overcome the main obstacles, and how it can help to strengthen communities in terms of resilience, inclusiveness, equality, and satisfaction with public service outcomes.

This chapter considers the spatial dimensions of ecological governance. It explains that space is of central concern to rational ecological governance and discusses Elinor Ostrom's opinion that ecosystem-based governance is one of congruence between a natural ecosystem and the unit of governance for that system. This chapter analyses ideas on ecosystem management in order to formulate operational criteria for evaluating Sweden's performance in terms of spatially rational ecological governance. It also argues that the idea of nested enterprises does imply that multi-faceted interests and uses of shared natural resources can be organised into a proper response to problems of ecological governance.

The Falklands War was a reminder that naval conflict could mean massive restrictions on the use of the oceans. Meanwhile, few Western countries ratified the Convention in the decade after it was finalized. With the Convention stalled, the United States conducted “freedom of navigation” operations to ensure that countries did not claim more of the oceans than Washington thought legal. US operations led to a clash with Libya and a confrontation with the Soviet Union. Other countries focused on sharpening claims to islands, which could give governments rights to nearby waters. At the same time, pressure grew on countries to grapple with overfishing. The costs of unrestricted high-seas fishing became evident in the Bering Sea, where a multinational fleet exhausted fish stocks. The thawing of the Cold War led to diplomatic breakthroughs on both high-seas fishing and seabed mining, paving the way for large-scale ratifications of the Convention.

This chapter seeks to make sense of motivating and justificatory reasons as different sorts of answers to “why” questions. The chapter uses the related problems of overpopulation and the irrationality of voting to first, examine the tragedy of the commons; second, to explore a response to causal impotence objections; and third, to establish the right as the justified. It also distinguishes between justification as a status and justification as a process.

Francisco Seijo draws on Niccolò Machiavelli to take issue with contemporary greens who argue that radical decentralization – in the form of eco-anarchism or bioregionalism – is most conducive to ecological sustainability. Machiavelli sees changing fortune as destabilizing the conditions for peaceful coexistence among small polities and providing an impetus for political expansion. Drawing on lessons from Machiavelli’s account of Rome, Seijo argues that the challenges of security and large-scale ecological problems make a loose, federative partnership between a large central government and its constituent smaller polities superior to radical decentralization. However, Seijo rejects Machiavelli’s emphasis on expansion as violating notions of ecological limits and ultimately finds a federative model in Elinor Ostrom’s call for multi-level governance of common pool resources.

This chapter examines the history of commons with examples from India, Mongolia and England. Different approaches to the commons from Garrett Hardin, ElinorOstrom and Marx are discussed. The relationship between property rights and ecological sustainability is outlined.

This chapter examines the social management of ‘nature’ and the commons using Ostrom’s theorisation of common resourse management. It examines Brazil’s Fundos do Pasto, communally managed pastureland, and, using Ostrom’s approach, shows how better environmental outcomes are achieved using solidarity-based pasture management approaches. This is contrasted with the approach of those who, misreading Hardin, argue that private ownership is the only way to avoid a tragedy of the (unmanaged) commons.

This chapter examines dinosaur paleobiology and the interpretations of dinosaur evolution. It argues that dinosaur paleontologists were among the first to reach the evolutionary high table and provides a summary of the many exciting discoveries made in recent decades. This chapter also highlights the importance of the works of several paleontologists including Edwin Colbert, John Ostrom, and Robert Bakker in revolutionizing the thinking about dinosaurs.

This chapter places spectrum in the four-fold classification of economic goods—private goods, commons goods, toll goods, and pure public goods. It identifies spectrum as a toll good and examines whether the classification would change in the presence of technological development that allows greater sharing of spectrum. The nature of spectrum as an economic good opens up a series of questions that challenge our traditional view of market-oriented societies based upon private property. The feasibility of non-exclusive use, the associated challenges, and the immense benefits that can be gained by society upon a wise resolution of the conundrums, is addressed in this chapter.

Issues about corruption and other forms of bad government have become central in the social sciences. An unresolved question is how countries can solve the issue of transformation from systemic corruption to the quality of government. Based on Elinor Ostrom’s theory of common pool resource appropriation, a new theoretical model for explaining this type of institutional change is developed. Sweden during the nineteenth century is used as an illustration by showing how the country made a transition from being largely patrimonial, nepotistic, and corrupt to a modern, Weberian, efficient, and impartial state structure. In addition to the “national trauma” of losing a major war, this chapter stresses the importance of three additional factors in Sweden: previous changes in courts and the legal system; recognition of the problem by the main contemporary political actors; and the new liberal ideology that made an important impact on the Swedish political scene.

A catastrophic event changes things fundamentally; a disaster simply exceeds the capacity of local resources to deal with the situation. Global climate change is the principal threat of catastrophe in the world; mitigation has failed; mitigation of worse effects and adaptation are now the priorities. Success in managing stratospheric ozone depletion suggests that progress can be achieved through international agreements. The balance between population and available resources is a central issue in sustainability. The “tragedy of the commons” is an important metaphor for unsustainable development that results when the sum of incremental individual benefit exceeds the capacity of the resource but there are few incentives to stop over-utilizing it. The capacity to manage disasters is essential for the resilience needed for sustainability.

By 1992, overfishing along the South American coast prompted a large migration to Galápagos of fishers, middlemen, and buyers, who began a “gold rush” harvest of brown sea cucumbers (a spiny marine organism) for the lucrative Asian market. Attempts to regulate that harvest by the government of Ecuador and the Galápagos National Park Service provoked more than a decade of protests and violence, which were only curbed when fishers were given an effective role in decision-making. But because the brown sea cucumber requires a minimum density for reproduction—an example of the Allee effect—it proved too challenging for the first participatory management system, which failed, but it led to a simpler system that continues successfully today. Galápagos is proving to be a showcase not simply for genetic evolution but also for the cultural evolution of new forms of governance, ideally including sustainability that it can then model for the world.

Chapter 4 documents the conceptual territory at the interface of public administration and public choice and puts the Ostromian contribution in an interpretive context that anchors it in the intellectual history of public administration. Identifying areas of convergence and affinities between the two intellectual domains, it charts the ground opened by the Ostroms’ work, an ambitious attempt to blend the two traditions and to create a conceptual framework for a distinctive type of public administration: democratic public administration. The seeing-like-a-state perspective in public administration is openly challenged by the seeing-like-a-citizen alternative, in a field that was anyway trying to unshackle itself from the inherent statism of its Wilsonian progressive legacy.

Chapter 6 elaborates the conceptual framework and the apparatus emerging from the Ostroms’ efforts, especially the pivotal notion of polycentricity, as a unifying and organizing framework or principle for governance theorizing. First, it explicitly articulates the elements of a theory of value heterogeneity as a foundational component of the entire approach. Then it proceeds to clarify a technical ambiguity in the construction of the co-production model that connects the domain of individual subjective values with the domain of institutions and social order. Third, in light of first two points, the discussion reconsiders the issue of polycentricity, the capstone of the Ostromian system. The chapter advances a fresh elaboration of the notion of polycentrism, seem as a solution both to the co-production problem and to the problems of social choice in conditions of deep heterogeneity, emphasizing several critical features that pertain to its positive-analytical dimension.

Chapter 7 focuses on the problems of metropolitan governance, one of the first domains in which the polycentrism theoretical lenses were applied. The example of the police services is used as an overture, as the chapter revisits the field and the literature fifty years after the Ostroms engaged in the “metropolitan reform debate” and launched their program. From a normative standpoint, the underlying thesis is that, even when government is involved in the production of public services, the most efficient form of organization is not hierarchical but polycentric. The chapter uses the example of police services to illustrate. This is also one of the first domains in which the polycentrism theoretical lens was applied. The chapter elaborates this approach and presents new insights. The public choice institutionalist, polycentricity-based perspective gets thus to be applied, illustrated, and expounded at a concrete, applied level.

Chapter 8 explores the issue of independent regulatory agencies. Independent regulatory agencies are seen as a serious challenge to democratic administration. They are government organizations of unelected officials, they often resist even mild audit attempts and they are very vulnerable to corruption, rent-seeking, regulatory capture and revolving door problems. The chapter notes first why independent regulatory agencies may nonetheless respond to a genuine need, namely they are one way of addressing “common-pool regulatory problems”, i.e. controversial but hard to be decentralized problems. Then the chapter presents an approach leading to a better understanding of the independent regulatory agencies’ operations and to their possible improvement. An in-depth look questions thus the conventional wisdom regarding IRAs and their functioning in the larger architecture of contemporary governance systems.