Large-N comparative studies have helped common pool resource scholars gain general insights into the factors that influence collective action and governance outcomes. However, these studies are often limited by missing data, and suffer from the methodological limitation that important information is lost when we reduce textual information to quantitative data. This study was motivated by nine case studies that appeared to be inconsistent with the expectation that the presence of Ostrom’s Design Principles increases the likelihood of successful common pool resource governance. These cases highlight the limitations of coding and analyzing Large-N case studies.

We examine two issues: 1) the challenge of missing data and 2) potential approaches that rely on context (which is often lost in the coding process) to address inconsistencies between empirical observations theoretical predictions. For the latter, we conduct a post-hoc qualitative analysis of a large-N comparative study to explore 2 types of inconsistencies: 1) cases where evidence for nearly all design principles was found, but available evidence led to the assessment that the CPR system was unsuccessful and 2) cases where the CPR system was deemed successful despite finding limited or no evidence for design principles. We describe inherent challenges to large-N comparative analysis to coding complex and dynamically changing common pool resource systems for the presence or absence of design principles and the determination of “success”. Finally, we illustrate how, in some cases, our qualitative analysis revealed that the identity of absent design principles explained inconsistencies hence de-facto reconciling such apparent inconsistencies with theoretical predictions. This analysis demonstrates the value of combining quantitative and qualitative analysis, and using mixed-methods approaches iteratively to build comprehensive methodological and theoretical approaches to understanding common pool resource governance in a dynamically changing context.

Marine harvesters face significant livelihood challenges due to the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems, and due to economic fluctuations that influence their incomes. In this study, we demonstrate vulnerability as a product of the interactions among marine harvesters, government and buyers. We combined Elinor Ostrom's attention to the influence of institutions on resource exploitation, with political ecology's attention to perceptions of agency, and the contribution of justice and equity to measuring the success of institutions. We demonstrate the benefits of this approach by examining the multi-species fishery of Barrington, Nova Scotia. We conducted 31 semi-structured interviews and 113 surveys in the summer of 2012 with buyers, harvesters, and local experts. We used Ostrom's SES framework to pinpoint system elements that were salient to respondents, with attention to household vulnerability outcomes.

Based on an analysis of these themes, we outline three processes affecting vulnerability outcomes: 1) Harvesters preferred individual over collective action due to low procedural justice and social cohesion in decision-making, 2) agents with greater political and economic power gained control over fishing access-rights while others became more dependent on lobster, and 3) economic and ecological conditions, combined with increased dependence, incentivized harvesters to catch more lobsters as prices declined. The case suggests that actors sense of control over their resource base and perception of justice in the process of institutional design may be as significant in vulnerability as the exogenous drivers of change that affect livelihood outcomes. We suggest interventions that may improve these interactions among government, harvesters and buyers, and improve the livelihoods in coastal communities.

The insights in Governing the Commons have provided foundational ideas for commons research in the past 23 years. However, the cases that Elinor Ostrom analyzed have been exposed to new social, economic, and ecological disturbances. What has happened to these cases since the 1980s? We reevaluated one of Ostrom’s case studies, the lobster and groundfishery of Port Lameron, Southwest Nova Scotia (SWNS). Ostrom suggested that the self-governance of this fishery was fragile because the government did not recognize the rights of resource users to organize their own rules. In the Maine lobster fishery, however, the government formalized customary rules and decentralized power to fishing ports. We applied the concepts of feedback, governance mismatches, and the robustness of social-ecological systems to understand the pathway of institutional change in Port Lameron. We revisited the case of Port Lameron using marine harvesters’ accounts collected from participant observation, informal interviews and surveys, and literature on fisheries policy and ecology in SWNS and Maine. We found that the government’s failure to recognize the customary rights of harvesters to organize has weakened feedback between the operational level, where resource users interact with the resource, and the collective-choice level, where agents develop rules to influence the behavior of resource users. This has precipitated governance mismatches, which have led harvesters to believe that the decision-making process is detrimental to their livelihoods. Thus, harvesters rarely participate in decision making and resist regulatory change. In Maine, harvesters can influence decisions through participation, but there is a trade-off. With higher influence in decisions, captains have co-opted the decision-making process. Nevertheless, we suggest that the fisheries of SWNS are more vulnerable to social-ecological change because of weaker feedbacks than in Maine. Finally, we have discussed the potential benefits of polycentricity to both fisheries.