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Ringa Raudla
This article discusses the insights that Elinor Ostrom’s work on common-pool resources and governing the commons can provide for the literature on fiscal commons. Institutional approaches to public finance often employ the metaphor of ‘budgetary commons’. Although intuitively appealing, the notion of budgetary commons faces the danger of becoming a catch-all term that is simply taken as a starting point for an inquiry, without scrutinising the fit between the metaphor and the actual setting. In addressing this shortcoming, the literature on budgetary commons can learn from Elinor Ostrom and the analytical approaches she has advocated in her research on natural commons. This article brings out insights from Ostrom’s work that would be particularly useful for institutional analysis of budgeting. It shows that institutional approaches to public finance can draw on Ostrom’s work with regard to the general approach for examining institutional configurations and their evolution over time, the analytical structures she uses for conceptualising the problems occurring on the commons, the desire to understand institutional complexity in real-life settings, and her scepticism of over-simplified models that are often used for describing and understanding the problems of common-pool resources.
