Overlapping authorities can manage commons effectively.
Ostrom's finding that overlapping, competing jurisdictions often outperform consolidated ones — contradicting the metropolitan reform consensus that smaller police and water districts should be merged.
In practice
- A valley whose water is run by seven small associations that argue with each other has fuller reservoirs than the next valley with one authority.
- A firm with two teams whose remits overlap catches problems that a single clean boundary would have dropped between.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works