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Lecturer(s)
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Course content
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Class 1: Introduction to Public Choice and the Bloomington School of Political Economy Class 2: Governing the Commons Class 3: Taxonomies of Goods, Institutions, and Organisations Class 4: Polycentric Governance Class 5: Polycentric Approaches to Policy Class 6: Institutions and Property Class 7: Institutional Analysis: The IAD Framework Class 8: Institutional Analysis: The SES Framework Class 9: Institutional Analysis: Long-Enduring, Self-Organized, and Self-Governed CPRs Class 10: From governing the environmental commons to Governing Knowledge Commons: The economics of sharing
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Learning activities and teaching methods
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Lecture, Dialogic Lecture (Discussion, Dialog, Brainstorming)
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Learning outcomes
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This module examines how can fallible human beings sustain large numbers of small, medium sized and large-scale self-governing entities as well as ecological systems in private and public spheres at multiple levels of analysis. Some of the questions we will examine are as follows: * How can we develop and apply institutional analysis to diverse policy arenas including urban public goods, water and forestry resources, intellectual property rights, and indeed, the governance of markets? * How can we develop a framework for understanding behaviour that is structured and that generates outcomes at multiple levels of analysis? * What do we mean when we say that institutions enable and/or constrain effective problem solving and innovation? We will learn that a self-governing entity is one whose members participate in continued production, reproduction, and transformation of the constitutional and collective-choice rules in use; we will see that individuals who engage one another in efforts to build mutually beneficial social relationships are capable of devising ingenious ways of relating constructively with one another; and we will learn that individuals who are organized in many small groups nested in larger structures -- a polycentric system -- may find ways of exiting from some settings and joining others to seek remedies from overlapping groups that may reduce asymmetries within smaller units. We will view self-governing entities as fragile social artifacts that individuals may be able to constitute and reconstitute over time and find out to what kind of disturbances is a self-organized system of governance robust. To do so, we will distinguish between frameworks for analysis such as * the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD), * the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC), or * the Socio Economic Systems (SES) framework These framerowrks are compatible with different theories (e.g., public choice, game theory) while accommodating various analytical models and assumptions about the structure of the situations facing individuals (such as the model of rational economic agent).
Successful students will: * See that markets and states are not dichotomous entities; * Understand how polycentric systems of governance operate; * Learn to apply basic elements of game theory as one of the theories consistent with the IAD framework; * Recognize core problems that individuals repeatedly face in a wide diversity of settings such as those involved in providing and regulating the use and provision of public goods, common pool resources, as well as shared and contribution goods; * Conduct institutional analysis of a social dilemma of interest related (but not exclusive to) human behaviour in a rule-ordered setting at a local, regional, national, or international domain.
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Prerequisites
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unspecified
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Assessment methods and criteria
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Essay, Student performance, Written exam
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Recommended literature
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McGinnis, M. D. Polycentricity and Local Public Economies: Readings from the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. University of Michigan Press..
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Ostrom, E. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press..
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