Browse case studies header
There follows a list of case studies in the SES Library.
Title | Type |
|---|---|
Tarahumara Gentiles agriculture, Sierra Madres, northwest Mexico | Case |
| The resource under consideration here is arable land. Arable land is a common pool resource in this case. On the dimensions of subtractability and excludability defined by Ostrom (2005), land is highly subtractble, but it is difficult to exclude resource users from land that is not continuously cultivated. In essence, cultivating a parcel of land means that there is less available land in the system; however, it is very difficult to exclude people from obtaining sufficient land for their... | 09 Aug 2016 |
Tasucu Bay Coastal Fishery, Turkey | Case |
| The coastal fishery in Tasucu Bay is located near the small port town of Tasucu in Mersin Province, Turkey. The original case, which spans from 1976-1978, catalogues 140 fishermen and 90 small inboard boats; the resource unit is demersal fish. It is a relatively simple CPR because there is only one user group of small boat fishermen. All of the fishermen belong to the local cooperative. The cooperative has successfully controlled access to the CPR by fighting off competing users. It provides... | 09 Aug 2016 |
Teleconnected vulnerabilities of Mexican and Vietnamese coffee systems | Case |
| The case study of smallholder coffee producers’ vulnerability in Mexico and Vietnam was published in the journal Environmental Science and Policy in 2008. The authors Hallie Eakin, Alexanda Winkels and Jan Sendzimir explore cross-scale linkages and teleconnectons in the Mexican and Vietnamese coffee systems. This case study is an addition to the SES library and was entered in 2013 by Ashwina Mahanti at Arizona State University. The original case study illustrates that vulnerability in a... | 09 Aug 2016 |
Ten - Dakh Branch watercourse irrigation, Punjab province, Pakistan | Case |
| This case was part of the original CPR database developed in the 1980s by Edella Schlager and Shui Yan Tang at Indiana University. The resource appropriated from Watercourse Ten-Dakh Branch is water for irrigation. Based on an intensive survey of ten improved watercourses in Punjab, this study shows the inadequacy of present forms of social organization of watercourses for insuring their adequate maintenance. The study suggests the following sociological characteristics as conducive to good... | 09 Aug 2016 |
The Alaskan Pollock Fishery, Bering Sea, USA | Case |
| The Alaskan Pollock fishery has been described as a management success, largery attributed to the adoption of ITQs, with allocations to catchers, processers, and to Alaskan communities. The processor-fisher relationship seems key to the current success at reducing effort in the fishery. Quota is split among catcher-vessels (45%), catcher processer vessels (36%), motherships (9%), and community development quota groups (10%). There is a much smaller number of boats fishing than before... | 09 Aug 2016 |
The Amphoe Choke Chai Water User Association, Isan region, northeastern Thailand | Case |
| The resource appropriated from A Chaek in Amphoe Choke Chai is water for irrigation. The Lam Pra Plerng Irrigation Project was constructed by Thailand's Royal Irrigation Department, which organized four water user associations (WUAs) in the project area. Each WUA is divided into “chaeks” (a chaek is an area served by a common farm turn-out). One or two common irrigators serve each chaek. The common irrigator is paid by the RID and is responsible for arranging water distribution and maintenance... | 09 Aug 2016 |
The application of commons theory on marine resource management | Case |
| This case was part of a study to determine whether the institutional design principles of Ostrom were, in fact, related to "governance success" by Cox et al. In that analysis, this case was not included in the end. | 09 Aug 2016 |
The Cantareira Water Supply System and Local Efforts for Sustainable Agriculture in Nazaré Paulista, State of São Paulo, Brazil | Case |
| This case is based on field work done as part of ASU's Global Development Research Program in alignment with local organizations actively capacitating local small to medium-scale agriculturalists, and mitigating biodiversity and water shortages. Research focused on the municapity of Nazaré Paulista, but extended to the adjacent municipalities that fall under the Bragança area of São Paulo State and the respective watershed. Between 2014-2016, the region experienced a major drought that brought... | 04 Dec 2018 |
The coupled dynamics of human socio-economic choice and lake water system: the interaction of two sources of nonlinearity | Case |
| Suzuki & Iwasa (2009) study a mathematical model for the coupled dynamics of human socio-economic choice and lake water system. In the model, many players choose one of the two options: a cooperative and costly option with low phosphorus discharge, and an economical option with high phosphorus discharge. The choice is affected by an economic cost, a social concern about water pollution, and a conformist tendency. The pollution level in the lake is determined by total phosphorus discharge by... | 09 Aug 2016 |
The Emergence and Resilience of Self-organized Governance | Case |
| This case focuses on the theory of self-organized governance. It is based on developing a formal mathematical model of generalized interactions in the CIS framework. | 12 Mar 2020 |
The Evolution of Social Norms in Common Property Resource Use | Case |
| The problem of extracting commonly owned renewable resources is examined within an evolutionary-game-theoretic framework. It is shown that cooperative behavior guided by norms of restraint and punishment may be stable in a well-defined sense against invasion by narrowly self-interested behavior. The resource-stock dynamics are integrated with the evolutionary-game dynamics. Effects of changes in prices, technology, and social cohesion on extraction behavior and the long-run stock are analyzed.... | 09 Aug 2016 |
The Goulburn Broken Catchment irrigation system, northern Victoria, Australia | Case |
| The GB catchment covers 2.1 million hectares in the Murray-Darling Basin in Australia. Aboriginal people lived in the catchment for millennia before colonization around 1830. The upper, mountainous area of the catchment (900 000 ha) is more than 50% forested. The mid catchment (1 million ha) of riverine plains, low slopes and foothills has less than 20% of native vegetation cover remaining, which is highly fragmented, and the rest is used for dryland cropping and grazing. The Shepparton... | 09 Aug 2016 |
The Hohokam Cultural Sequence (Irrigation and Foraging), Sonoran Desert, greater Phoenix basin, Arizona, USA | Case |
| The Hohokam is a Native American cilivilization that emerged and occupied the present day Phoenix Basin area and its outer bounds for a thousand years. The archeological records indicate that the Hohokam society evolved into a complex irrigation society and reached its peak in levels of population, social institutions, and irrigation infrastructure by the 11th century.Perplexingly though, the Hohokam society subsequently declined and collapsed by the mid 14th century. As they declined, the... | 09 Aug 2016 |
The inevitability of surprise in agroecosystems | Case |
| Many critical transformations of ecosystems contain advanced signals of their imminence, but it is also true that many critical transformations can be shown to contain no such signal, at least with the sorts of data normally available to field workers. This paper explores some generalized theoretical structures and distinguishes between those that may provide a signal that could be used to predict a critical transformation and those that, by their very nature, do not provide such a clue. I... | 09 Aug 2016 |
The Innovation Commons: The Nanotechnology Innovation Network, Phoenix, AZ | Case |
| The nanotechnology innovation network of Metropolitan Phoenix ranks among the top thirty across US cities focused on nanotechnology development. The present case examines the structure of the innovation network, consisting of approximately 400 diverse organizations, between 2011 and 2012. The commons dilemma revolves around managing future risks and benefits from nanotechnology development; the resource is a heterogenous mix of natural and human-made infrastructures. | 09 Aug 2016 |