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102 Nat'l Civic Rev. 2 (2013)

handle is hein.journals/natmnr102 and id is 1 raw text is: Elinor Ostrom, the first and only woman to have won the No- bel Prize in economics, died in June 2012 of pancreatic can- cer. According to the obituary in the New York Times, her achievement was all the more remarkable because she was not an economist. She is sometimes described as a political economist, but her actual degrees were in political science. Best known for her book Governing the Commons, Ostrom was one of the pioneers who developed the institutional analysis and design framework of social scientific inquiry. Much of her work focused on the governance of common pool resources, such as fisheries, forests, and irrigation systems. What she discovered in her years of fieldwork and analysis was quite hopeful that un- der certain circumstances, self-regulating, less-than-formal in- stitutional arrangements could be successful in preserving pre- cious and exhaustible common resources. Ostrom's work was in part an answer to Garrett Hardin's famous essay The Tragedy of the Commons, which used the metaphor of a grazing pasture. If too many people used the pasture and used it too intensively, the grazing resource would be depleted. Before Ostrom, it was widely accepted that there were essentially two ways of addressing this challenge. One was for government to regulate the resource. The other was private ownership and use. But Ostrom's fieldwork suggested that resources held in common could be managed wisely if the people who used those resources worked together to establish strict rules on use and an effective means of enforcement. She developed a set of principles that were in place in those instances in which users had avoided the tragedy of the commons; among them were clear, locally under- stood boundaries between users and nonusers; rules of appropri- ation and use that are congruent with local conditions; collec- tive choice arrangements (participation) in making and changing rules; monitoring of users and resources; conflict resolution mechanisms; and recognition of local rights by authorities. The fiscal plight of Southern California communities may not be perfectly analogous to that of a fishery or a forest, but sim- ilar questions arise about who benefits and who uses the finite resource of public funding for local services. Local services are such that certain groups may benefit more than others from their provision, so those groups might agitate to maintain or increase spending levels on those services. But in the long run, every- one suffers if the local government or district is not financially viable. long period of time. Some have come from long-term economic trends for example, the historical loss of industrial jobs of the state's smokestack regions. Others have been the result of con- scious political decisions, notably Proposition 13, the tax lim- iting amendment passed in the late 1970s, and the California General Assembly's decision in 2011 to eliminate local redevel- opment agencies. Different localities have responded to these external realities in different ways, each with varying degrees of success or fail- ure. By looking at these cases, we hope to learn more about the conditions that are present when communities achieve suc- cess in managing fiscal challenges and when they don't. We also hope to learn what strategies leaders have adopted in communities that have managed to address the issue of fiscal sustainability. Currently in its third year, the Southern California Fiscal Sus- tainability Research Project is a joint effort by the National Civic League, the University of Southern California, and the University of San Francisco. So far the researchers have looked at nine dif- ferent local government jurisdictions five cities, two counties, and two school districts. Four of those case studies were pub- lished last year in volume 101:1 of the National Civic Review, and four more are featured in the current issue: San Bernardino County, the cities of South Gate and Santa Ana, and the El Ran- cho Unified School District. We are publishing these case investigations knowing that they are part of a work in progress and that more insights and ob- servations will come during 2013, the third year of the project. In the meantime, we would like to thank the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation for its support for the fis- cal sustainability research that informs the four case studies in this issue of the National Civic Review. Hardin, G. 1968. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, December 13. http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/ art_tragedy_of_thecommons. html. Rampell, C. 2012. Elinor Ostrom, Winner of Nobel in Eco- nomics, Dies at 78. New York Times, June 12. http://www .nytimes.com/2012/06/13/business/elinor-ostrom-winner-of -nobel-in-economics-dies-at-78.htm I. Michael McGrath Southern California makes a good region for study, because Editor it has been dealing with a range of financial challenges for a ©2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) 2 National Civic Review * DOI: 10.1002/ncr.21116 * Spring 2013 A Publication of the National Civic League

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