I try to present the problems the water producers faced, as they saw them, and the steps they took to solve them in the political environment they faced.
Elinor Ostrom (p. 127; emphasis added)The intellectual trap in relying entirely on models to provide the foundations for policy analysis is that scholars then presume that they are omniscient observers able to comprehend the essentials of how complex, dynamic systems work by creating stylized descriptions of some aspects of those systems.
Elinor Ostrom (p. 215)What leads to research in the social sciences that is valued by the wider community beyond the confines of a single discipline? Elinor Ostrom's career has combined myriad personal and institutional factors, leading to the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics: her involvement in the high school debate team to overcome stuttering; her refusal to accept the behaviors prescribed for women, leading her to attend graduate school (Mervis and Travis Reference Mervis and Travis2009, 658); the absence of a nepotism rule at Indiana that allowed her to obtain employment despite being married to Vincent Ostrom, who was already appointed there (Zagorski Reference Zagorski2006); the Ostroms' 1973 cofounding of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, and the development of its experimental laboratory; the interdisciplinary orientation she further developed at Bielefeld's Center for Interdisciplinary Research; her ability to bring people and ideas together, knitting them into productive research agendas; and so on. In this essay, I want to focus on an aspect of her work potentially less well known to her political science colleagues: the fact that she conducted extensive fieldwork for her 628-page dissertation, “Public Entrepreneurship: A Case Study in Groundwater Management” (Reference Ostrom1965) and for her later research on policing (Ostrom, Parks, and Whitaker Reference Ostrom, Parks and Whitaker1978).
Why single out this aspect of Ostrom's career? Evidently, this fieldwork experience has been meaningful to her. She used it in her pathbreaking book, Governing the Commons (hereafter GTC); she also mentioned it, now two decades later, in her Stockholm acceptance speech. Moreover, even as she has argued for the usefulness of experimental methods, she continues to describe herself as “an avid field researcher for the past 35 years” (Reference Ostrom1998, 17). It seems appropriate, then, to examine what I call her “fieldwork sensibility”—how fieldwork has affected her approach to theorizing and research generally but, also, the silences and tensions associated with her use of the term.
A Fieldwork Sensibility
Fieldwork at the beginning of a research career can have lasting effects on a scholar's approach to the research enterprise (Pader Reference Pader, Yanow and Schwartz-Shea2006, 162). Fieldwork confronts scholars with the messiness of ordinary life: It can upset carefully laid-out research designs (Shehata Reference Shehata2009), smash theoretical expectations (Zirakzadeh Reference Zirakzadeh and Schatz2009), and force individuals to reexamine their personal “comfort zones.” Field observation obliges researchers to reflect on and analyze their own sensemaking processes (Pachirat Reference Pachirat and Schatz2009), to directly confront the multiple and ambiguous ways in which others interpret events (e.g., Yanow Reference Yanow1996), and to use multiple forms of evidence to craft a trustworthy research narrative (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow Reference Schwartz-Shea, Yanow, Ybema, Yanow, Wels and Kamsteeg2009). Through such experiences one can develop a fieldwork sensibility: a curiosity about others' views, an appreciation of the complexity of experience and evidence and the limits of a priori theorizing, and a respect for the ways in which “ordinary” people engage with their worlds.
This sensibility is evident in numerous places in GTC. Ostrom evinces a curiosity about actors' own views that is not what one normally associates with game theory. Many game theorists impute motives to actors (e.g., “Assume bureaucrats are budget-maximizers”), assume actors' myopic self-interest, and rarely attend to the question of how real-world actors “see” their situation. Together, these practices make talking to people seem unnecessary and uninteresting; indeed, face-to-face communication is characterized as “cheap talk” (Reference OstromNobel Lecture, minute 21:14). In contrast, Ostrom argues forcefully that to “analyze an institutional-choice situation, one needs to view it from the perspective of the individual making choices about future operational rules” (pp. 192–93; emphasis added).
For example, after an extended discussion of the incentives of those bargaining to build a new institutional mechanism to govern the West Basin's groundwater commons, she analyzes the logic of one holdout, the city of Hawthorne. The city continued to pump more water than it had been allotted under the agreement, saving itself money and spreading those costs across other users. “From the perspective of Hawthorne's leaders, however, the problem seemed different,” she writes (p. 120). Her research revealed that for city leaders, “the problem” was not the threat to the common-pool resource, but whether public water resources should be diverted to private, industry use. Making sense of Hawthorne's choices required contextualized attention to the understandings and values its leaders articulated, rather than simply labeling the city a free rider to maintain a narrative consistent with game theory.
Ostrom's attitude toward theorizing likewise reveals a sensibility shared by many field researchers. She states that “knowledge accrues by the continual process of moving back and forth from empirical observation to serious efforts at theoretical formulation” (p. xvi). This language is reminiscent of another Nobel-winning woman, geneticist Barbara McClintock, who would follow a seedling through its life span based on the need to “listen to the material” (Keller Reference Keller1983, 162). This close attention to details in the field led McClintock to challenge what she saw as the too-general claim of James Watson and Francis Crick about a “master molecule.” In contrast, her in-depth field observations produced a view of genetic organization as more complex and as interdependent with the environment. Ostrom, too, challenged simple models, admonishing “many [academics for their] strong preferences for tight analytical models that will yield clear predictions” (p. 184), calling, instead, for a “somewhat different orientation toward the theoretical endeavor” (p. 191). Models play a role in her view, but they “do not tell the analyst how to discover the structure of the situation in order to conduct an analysis” (p. 191). Time in the field is essential for understanding actors' own assessments of their problems, so that theory is developed in a more “organic” way.
Assessment of theory is also affected by this approach to theory development. Although Ostrom does not explicitly reject parsimony as a theoretical standard, the word is not found in the primary text of GTC, and she characterizes the simple models of state control and privatization as “metaphors” that can lead to harmful policies (pp. 23, 184; see also Reference Ostrom1998, 16). While an appreciation for complexity is central to the Ostroms' call for a polycentric approach to governing, that theoretical approach ties back to her dissertation and subsequent field research on policing. These continued field experiences sensitized her to the need for time- and place-specific information and to the costs of acquiring such information, making her question the simplicity of standard game-theoretic and economic models with their assumptions of perfect information.
Finally, her field experiences made her question Garrett Hardin's (Reference Hardin1968) presumption that individuals are “trapped” and “helpless.” Her own field research and her assessments (in GTC) of others' case studies demonstrate the ways in which individuals work, actively, to find solutions to the common-pool resource problems they face. Her historical perspective on common-pool resources (see, especially, Chapter 3) led Ostrom to appreciate the ingenuity of ordinary people as they concocted organizational and institutional solutions that fit their times and their circumstances (even if their solutions were not “optimal” by game-theoretic standards). Her observation that engineers presumed “that local farmers had little to offer” called into question the scientific knowledge of “experts” who use simplified models and dismiss the concerns and knowledge of situated actors (p. 181). These field experiences led her to theorize on the basis of a respect for ordinary people that goes beyond classic game-theoretic assumptions of “choice” to a deeper appreciation for the way in which actor “agency” implies the capacity not only to assess a situation's incentives but also to diagnose how those structures might be changed.
Silences and Tensions
Ostrom's field sensibility played a significant role in the research for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize. Having watched people solving their own problems early in her career, she was neither satisfied with the portrait of “helplessness” in Hardin's (Reference Hardin1968) tragedy of the commons nor seduced by the parsimonious elegance of game-theoretic models that promise easy policy leverage on real-world problems. As she moved into other phases of her career, she arguably retained a memory of the persistence of such individuals as Carl Fossette, who identified a problem in the California Water Basins and worked for years to fix it (pp. 234–35 n. 28).
Still, Ostrom never explicitly defined “field research” in GTC. In “Analyzing Institutional Change,” the chapter based on the dissertation, the character of the detail in the text and endnotes indicates extensive archival research (p. 232 n. 16), although only one interview is explicitly cited (p. 235 n. 30). The dissertation abstract includes only a brief statement about “documentary materials,” while in its preface she thanks 13 agency heads and technical and legal experts who assisted her (qualifying in today's terms as elite or expert interview evidence). My inference is that she means what many in political science mean by the term “field research”: visiting a specific site to obtain relevant documents and speak with key actors in order to explore the history and evolution of the relevant issues. Chapter endnotes and the scale of the dissertation make clear that she immersed herself in the rich details of the field over a considerable period of time, obtaining a familiarity with the issues that may have rivaled that of many situational actors.
Going to the field gets the academic researcher out of the office and interacting with people in their own worlds, reinforcing the challenges of producing theory relevant for understanding social life. As Elinor and Vincent Ostrom observe: “In field settings, it is hard to tell where one action arena starts and another stops. Life continues in what appears to be a seamless web” (Reference Ostrom and Ostrom2004, 120). Yet the difficulty with this rather unspecified understanding of field research is its amethodological bent. Paul Sabatier observed in his 1992 review of GTC: “In most cases, the results are drawn largely from the work of a single investigator, with no discussion of the investigator's methods or of possible problems with the validity or reliability of the results. The implicit rule seems to be trust [in the case study results]” (p. 249; original emphasis).
Although Sabatier seems troubled by a single researcher or single cases, my primary concern is that Ostrom appears to assume that it is easy, self-evident, and unproblematic for a researcher to see “the problems the water producers faced, as they saw them.” As a consequence, field research ers appear as “neutral transmitters” of a singular field reality, transmitted to them in some fashion by situational participants. This bypasses such key methodological questions as how researchers proceed when participants have different views of “the problem”: How are these varying understandings to be understood? What is the researcher's role in choosing which view(s) to present? Ostrom's silence on such questions matters for what it reveals about her approach to politics. Such methodological engagements mean recognizing the constitutive dimension of political language; ignoring them eliminates a significant aspect of the political world, reducing politics to “dispute resolution.” Researchers' judgments about which field actors have “got ‘the problem’ right” are not apolitical acts. The frame of the problem is half of the political battle.
Sabatier's critique also asks for “an explanation for why so much of her previous set of [game-theoretic] categories has apparently been jettisoned. If they proved relatively useless, she should tell us” (Reference Sabatier1992, 249). Could it be that Ostrom's general framework should be understood less as a triumph of an a priori adaptation of game theory to a field setting and more as an exercise in the “grounded theorizing” (Charmaz Reference Charmaz2006; Glaser and Strauss Reference Glaser and Strauss1967) that began in sociology in the 1960s and is now flourishing in a number of fields, where attending to actors' everyday practices is understood as essential? Grounded theorizing, built up from the everyday language and experiences of the actors studied, is the epistemological opposite of a priori game theory. It bridges the classic practice–theory divide because policy solutions are “home grown,” making their communication (and possible implementation) less fraught with the kinds of difficulties that application of more abstract theory entails.
Such silences point to a number of intertwined tensions in Ostrom's research program: a tension between the universalizing assumptions of the rational-actor model and her desire to understand the perspectives of actors in the field; a tension between her preference for self-organizing systems and her policy-analytic role of advising governmental and other decision makers; and a tension between her advocacy for a “general framework” (or “behavioral approach”) for researchers and her critique of “universal solutions” (Reference Ostrom2007). Most strikingly, in her Nobel Lecture (minute 10:15), she calls for a unifying language of research. But just as Ostrom argues that universal policy solutions for the management of common-pool resources may do more harm than good because they ignore local context, so, too, a single, unifying language may foreclose or obscure for researchers those understandings and solutions created by actors in the field. Moreover, the claim of a “general framework” itself hides the absence of a single, uncontested philosophical foundation in the social sciences; rather, there are a variety of ontological “wagers” (Jackson Reference Jackson2010) that researchers can credibly make. The profound ways in which gender, race, and colonial histories factor into peoples' understandings of common-pool resource problems and solutions are “cultural diversity challenges” (Ostrom et al. Reference Ostrom, Burger, Field, Norgaard and Policansky1999, 281) that may not be readily intelligible from within the behavioral framework she offers, or which might be better understood according to altogether other epistemological and ontological presuppositions.
Ostrom's research program has been recognized in one of the most high-profile arenas available to academics. The lessons we take from her success will be varied and diverse, but the role of fieldwork in her research program should be prominent in our disciplinary discussions of that success. Congratulations to Elinor Ostrom!
