“Challenged the conventional wisdom by demonstrating how local property can be successfully managed by local commons without any regulation by central authorities or privatization.”Her work described the necessity for power and decision-making rights to be dispersed rather than centralized under one authority. In an essay, Ostrom wrote,
“Research has repeatedly demonstrated that order and high performance are more likely to be achieved in effective, local public economies established within broader national systems where large, medium, and small governmental and nongovernmental enterprises engage in diverse cooperative as well as competitive relationships (see Frey and Eichenberger 1996).”The most important element of Ostrom’s work is the separation of power via competition and diversity of decision-making rights. Systems become corrupted and incompetent when powerful interests of any kind obtain a monopoly on power. Ostrom is quoted in a book in which she says,
“While all institutions are subject to takeover by opportunistic individuals and to the potential for perverse dynamics, a political system that has multiple centers of power at differing scales provides more opportunities to innovate and to intervene so as to correct maldistribution of authority and outcomes. Thus polycentric systems are more likely than monocentric systems to provide incentives leading to self-organized, self-correcting institutional change.”Efficient systems of political organization are often polycentric because they are able to incorporate diverse interests, empower those closest to the problem, encourage competition among interests, and prevent the domination of individual interests.
