Reading about the Californian drought in today’s Observer, I wondered what Elinor Ostrom would have made of it. The drying up of bore holes used in the agricultural lands of central California is discussed as a problem of simple over-use, along of course with the absence of adequate rains. Ostrom would have pointed out, though, that it is also an institutional problem. Her dissertation was on collective arrangements for managing scarce water supplies in California, and she did much subsequent work on irrigation and water management arrangements. I don’t know anything about the current institutions managing water supply, but am willing to bet they have changed a lot since the late 1940s and 50s.

Ostrom’s second main area of study was the policing of metropolitan America, something else much in the news lately that could have done with her insight. She overturned the prevailing wisdom that large, centralised police departments were most efficient. “For patrolling, if you don’t know the neighborhood, you can’t spot the early signs of problems, and if you have five or six layers of supervision, the police chief doesn’t know what’s occurring on the street,” she said. But centralisation in areas of policing like dispatch or forensic laboratories made sense to take advantage of economies of scale. Again, it would have been good to hear her analysis of what has gone wrong in those police departments that enter neighbourhoods as if they’re an occupying force.

[amazon_image id=”0521405998″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions)[/amazon_image]   [amazon_image id=”0691122385″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Understanding Institutional Diversity (Princeton Paperbacks)[/amazon_image]   [amazon_image id=”1558151680″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Crafting Institutions for Self-governing Irrigation Systems[/amazon_image]

Anybody who still thinks the importance of institutions is exaggerated should consider access to electricity: a late 19th and early 20th century technology still not available to all in many countries – even some countries that electrified many decades ago can regress in the availability of power, as power cuts and brownouts in places from California to Italy demonstrate.