She wrote or coauthored several books, including Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990), Understanding Institutional Diversity (2005), Linking the Formal and Informal Economy: Concepts and Policies (2006), and Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice (2007).
The more important question concerns the evolution of institutions.
Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, see here 43.
Constitutions and commitment: the evolution of institutions governing public choice in seventeenth-century England.
In her classic work Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Ostrom shows that under certain conditions, when communities are given the right to self-organise they can democratically govern themselves to preserve the environment.
Perhaps the celebrated economists Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman and Elinor Ostrom believe their work is usefully discussed alongside evolutionary biology — Ms. Ostrom did subtitle a book "The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Actions" — but Mr. Wilson is a bit hasty in claiming them for his project.
This paper surveys alternative approaches to the emergence and evolution of institutions.
As a whole, the results suggest that the channels of influence from Diasporas on the evolution of institutions are heterogeneous across the types of institutions.
We consider a model of multilevel selection and the evolution of institutions that distribute power in the form of influence in a group's collective interactions with other groups.
Ostrom's landmark 1990 book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, explains how these principles play out in different contexts among farmers in Valencia, Spain, who have managed water-irrigation canals for nearly 1,000 years, among Swiss villagers, who have sustainably managed alpine grazing meadows for centuries, and many others.
The combined evidence highlights the technical and institutional requirements for project success and points to two important areas of research in the scale-up of any small-scale irrigation strategy: the risk behavior of water users, and the evolution of institutions that either support or obstruct project replication over space and time.
