World Citizen Theory

Tag: Polycentric Governance

  • Elinor Ostrom and the Case for Polycentric Government

    Why more than one center of political authority can sometimes govern better than one

    Imagine a large metropolitan area.

    One government manages the entire region.

    It controls roads, policing, water, schools, parks, waste, transit, housing, and environmental regulation.

    The structure looks simple.

    One territory.

    One government.

    One chain of command.

    Now imagine another city-region.

    Municipalities govern some local matters.

    A regional body manages rail transport.

    Several communities cooperate over water.

    National institutions protect basic rights.

    Other agencies handle problems that cross local boundaries.

    At first glance, the second system looks messier.

    But is it necessarily worse?

    Elinor Ostrom spent much of her career questioning the assumption that good government must always mean one dominant center.

    In 2009, she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. She was especially famous for showing that shared resources do not inevitably collapse into a “tragedy of the commons.” Under some conditions, people can build durable institutions to govern shared resources themselves.

    That broader research led to an important institutional idea:

    polycentric government.

    What Does Polycentric Mean?

    The term predates Ostrom’s later work.

    In 1961, Vincent Ostrom, Charles Tiebout, and Robert Warren used the idea of a polycentric political system to describe metropolitan government with multiple formally independent centers of decision-making.

    The important word is not simply many.

    A system containing many institutions can be chaotic.

    Polycentricity asks whether those institutions can interact through stable relationships—sometimes independently, sometimes competitively, sometimes cooperatively, and sometimes through common mechanisms for resolving conflict.

    Elinor Ostrom later developed this research tradition across a much wider range of problems.

    Her Nobel lecture was titled Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems.

    The title captures the larger point.

    We do not always have to choose between:

    the market

    and

    one centralized state.

    Human beings can create institutions at different scales.

    A Groundwater Basin in Southern California

    One of Ostrom’s earliest major research projects concerned groundwater in Southern California.

    Her 1965 doctoral dissertation studied the West Coastal Basin, where groundwater overuse and saltwater intrusion threatened the resource.

    The response was not simply to create one new central authority.

    Water users formed associations.

    Courts helped redefine and allocate pumping rights.

    Special districts were created.

    Public agencies coordinated groundwater replenishment and protection against saltwater intrusion.

    Different institutions handled different parts of the problem.

    The basin did not fit neatly into one institutional box.

    The problem required cooperation, adjudication, monitoring, and collective investment.

    The solution emerged through several connected institutions rather than one all-purpose authority.

    This is an early example of the intuition that became central to Ostrom’s work:

    complex problems may require several centers of authority working together.

    Different Problems Need Different Scales

    Centralization has an obvious appeal.

    If several governments deal with one metropolitan area, why not merge them?

    Sometimes that is exactly what should happen.

    But a neighborhood park, a regional railway, and a watershed do not necessarily need the same governing area.

    Some functions depend heavily on local knowledge.

    Others benefit from scale.

    Some cross political boundaries.

    The question is not how to eliminate overlapping authority.

    It is:

    Which arrangement fits this particular problem?

    What Ostrom Learned from Policing

    Metropolitan policing provided another important test.

    In the 1970s, Ostrom and her colleagues studied police services at a time when consolidation was often assumed to be more efficient.

    Their findings complicated that assumption.

    Routine police services did not necessarily improve simply because departments became larger.

    Smaller providers could sometimes perform effectively where local knowledge and proximity mattered.

    At the same time, specialized functions—such as laboratories, communications, training, and other technical services—could benefit from larger-scale organization.

    The lesson was not that small government is always better.

    It was more precise:

    some functions benefit from scale, while others do not.

    Many Centers Does Not Mean No Order

    The word polycentric can sound like a polite word for fragmentation.

    That is not the idea.

    A collection of governments that cannot coordinate, cannot resolve conflicts, duplicate everything, and hide responsibility from residents may perform badly.

    Polycentricity works only if the centers form a system.

    They may cooperate.

    They may contract with one another.

    They may compete in some areas.

    They may share information.

    They may use courts or other common mechanisms to resolve disputes.

    In Governing the Commons, Ostrom identified nested enterprises as one design principle for larger common-pool resource systems: governance can be organized in several connected layers rather than through one flat authority.

    Multiple levels do not have to mean disorder.

    Polycentricity is not the absence of structure.

    It is a different structure.

    From Polycentricity to the World Citizen Framework

    In “Why Territory Still Matters in a World Citizen Society,” I argued that some public authority must remain territorially grounded.

    Polycentric government asks a different question:

    Must all public functions belong to the same center of authority?

    The World Citizen framework answers no.

    A territorial community can govern local matters while regional, rights-protecting, environmental, or security institutions exercise defined powers in other domains.

    The key distinction is between functional authority and general supremacy.

    A common institution may need binding power within its assigned function without acquiring authority over everything else.

    A regional transport authority can govern a metropolitan railway without governing local schools.

    A common rights tribunal can bind political communities on protected rights without deciding their local budgets.

    An environmental institution can regulate a shared river without becoming the general government of every community along it.

    For the World Citizen framework, this adds a constitutional condition to polycentricity:

    powers must remain bounded.

    The aim is:

    strong institutions with bounded mandates.

    Polycentricity Creates a Democratic Problem Too

    There is a serious objection.

    If many institutions govern different functions, how does an ordinary resident know who is responsible?

    Suppose a rail project fails.

    Was the problem caused by the city?

    The regional transport authority?

    The national government?

    A funding body?

    A regulator?

    Complexity can weaken democracy if responsibility becomes impossible to trace.

    People cannot exercise meaningful political voice if they do not know which institution made a decision.

    A polycentric order therefore requires unusually strong transparency.

    Residents need to know who makes the rule, who funds the service, who delivers it, who reviews the decision, and who can change the allocation of power.

    And Ostrom’s work does not imply that more centers are always better.

    Institutional arrangements still have to be judged by how well they solve the problems they are meant to solve.

    Many Centers Can Produce Many Forms of Domination

    There is another danger.

    Decentralization can protect local self-government.

    It can also protect local domination.

    A local community may discriminate.

    A regional institution may become unaccountable.

    A powerful common body may expand beyond its original mandate.

    Polycentricity by itself does not solve these problems.

    That is why the World Citizen framework requires every center of authority to remain bounded by basic rights and by rules defining its powers.

    Local autonomy does not override basic rights.

    Shared institutions do not acquire unlimited powers merely because coordination is useful.

    No center receives a blank cheque.

    How Should Power Be Allocated?

    There is no permanent formula saying local is always better or central is always better.

    A practical rule is to place each function at the level that can govern it effectively while preserving as much meaningful self-government as possible.

    The questions are concrete.

    Can one community solve the problem without imposing major costs on others?

    Does the function require economies of scale?

    Does it depend on local knowledge?

    Does it cross territorial boundaries?

    Would fragmentation make the service unusable?

    Would centralization make government too distant or concentrate unnecessary power?

    The correct answer may change as technology, population, and infrastructure change.

    A polycentric system therefore needs rules for reallocating authority when circumstances change.

    Conclusion

    Polycentric government begins with a refusal of a simple assumption:

    one society does not necessarily require one center of authority for every public function.

    Some problems are local.

    Some are regional.

    Some cross national borders.

    Some need institutions operating at several levels at once.

    Ostrom’s research—from groundwater to policing to shared resources—shows why institutional diversity deserves to be taken seriously.

    For the World Citizen framework, polycentricity also requires constitutional discipline.

    Power must be strong enough to perform its assigned function.

    But it must not silently expand into general supremacy.

    The principle can be stated simply:

    Many centers. Bounded powers. Shared rules.

    Political communities can govern themselves.

    They can also cooperate.

    Common institutions can be strong without becoming generally supreme.

    The alternative to concentrating political power in one center is not disorder.

    It can be a political order in which authority has more than one center.

    Notes

    Elinor Ostrom received the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.” She was the first woman to receive the prize in economics. Her major book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990), examined how communities can create durable institutions for governing common-pool resources without assuming that privatization or centralized state control is always necessary.

    Ostrom’s 1965 doctoral dissertation, Public Entrepreneurship: A Case Study in Ground Water Basin Management, examined institutional responses to groundwater problems in Southern California’s West Coastal Basin.

    The concept of a polycentric political system was developed in Vincent Ostrom, Charles M. Tiebout, and Robert Warren, “The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas: A Theoretical Inquiry,” American Political Science Review 55, no. 4 (1961): 831–842. Elinor Ostrom later extended this tradition across metropolitan services, common-pool resources, and governance at multiple scales. See Elinor Ostrom, “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems,” American Economic Review 100, no. 3 (2010): 641–672.

    The World Citizen framework develops its own constitutional principles beyond Ostrom’s work. In The World Citizen Society, territorial communities retain protected spheres of self-government, wider institutions receive defined rather than general powers, and all centers remain bounded by common rights. The book calls its function-based allocation principle Functional Subsidiarity and summarizes the broader structure as protected self-rule + functionally justified shared rule + enumerated common powers + common rights floors.

    Further Reading

    For why territorial government remains necessary even in a more mobile political order, see “Why Territory Still Matters in a World Citizen Society.”

    For the full institutional treatment, see Toshiyuki Nishimura, The World Citizen Society: Political Freedom, Democratic Choice, and the Institutions of a New Society, especially Chapter 7 on the territorial division of political power.

    Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990).

    Elinor Ostrom, “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems,” American Economic Review 100, no. 3 (2010): 641–672.

    Elinor Ostrom, “A Long Polycentric Journey,” Annual Review of Political Science 13 (2010): 1–23.

  • Why Territory Still Matters in a World Citizen Society

    Political membership can become more mobile without making political authority territory-free

    Imagine a busy intersection.

    Cars approach from four directions.

    Pedestrians cross.

    A bus stops nearby.

    Shops line the street.

    Now imagine that every person at the intersection belongs to a different political network.

    One driver follows one traffic code.

    Another follows another.

    A third recognizes a different police authority.

    The problem becomes obvious.

    Some rules cannot depend only on which political network a person has chosen.

    They have to apply to everyone in the same place.

    This is why a World Citizen Society does not require the disappearance of territory.

    Political membership can become more mobile.

    Political authority cannot become entirely placeless.

    Territory and Membership Are Different Questions

    The World Citizen framework challenges the idea that nationality acquired at birth should permanently determine political membership.

    But that does not mean rejecting territorial government.

    Two questions need to be separated.

    Who belongs to the political community?

    And:

    Where does a political authority exercise its ordinary jurisdiction?

    The framework changes the first more radically than the second.

    Ordinary political membership moves toward durable residence rather than inherited nationality.

    But many public rules still need a territorial field of application.

    The central distinction is:

    Territory defines the ordinary jurisdiction. Residence defines the ordinary route toward membership.

    Some Problems Attach to Place

    Many public problems are inseparable from physical location.

    Everyone using the same road needs to know which traffic rule applies.

    A building on one parcel affects neighboring properties.

    A factory may pollute the surrounding air or water.

    Roads, sewage systems, parks, emergency services, policing, housing rules, and much infrastructure concern people occupying the same physical space.

    These problems cannot be solved simply by allowing each individual to select a different governing authority.

    Place creates shared problems.

    Shared problems sometimes require common territorial rules.

    That does not make every public function territorial.

    It establishes a narrower point:

    some public authority must remain territorially grounded.

    Can Politics Begin Online?

    Recent proposals make the challenge clearer.

    Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State begins from digitally organized communities rather than a conventional contiguous territory.

    But the final model is not literally territory-free.

    A network state is eventually supposed to acquire an archipelago of physical territories distributed across different places and seek political recognition.

    That is revealing.

    A political community may begin online.

    Its members may be geographically dispersed.

    Its organization may be digital-first.

    But once it deals with housing, land, roads, physical security, infrastructure, and relations with surrounding governments, place reappears.

    Even a cloud-first political community eventually confronts physical territory.

    Another proposal, Bruno Frey and Reiner Eichenberger’s Functional, Overlapping and Competing Jurisdictions, or FOCJ, asks why every public function must be bundled into one territorial government.

    Different functions may be handled by overlapping jurisdictions.

    That insight is useful.

    But it does not follow that every function can be detached from territory.

    Traffic law, land regulation, policing, and other coercive rules still require clarity about which authority governs a particular place.

    Functional government can supplement territorial government.

    It cannot make every public function voluntary.

    Territory Does Not Mean Birthright Membership

    Territorial government can remain even when inherited membership becomes less important.

    A person may move from one territorial community to another.

    They may enter lawfully.

    They may establish durable residence.

    Over time, residence can become the basis of equal political membership.

    Territory therefore remains relatively stable while membership becomes more open to change.

    A community can govern a territory without claiming that equal membership in that community must be inherited through ancestry or birthplace.

    The place remains.

    The people who may become members need not be permanently fixed by birth.

    Territory Gives Democracy a Practical Object

    Territory also gives democratic accountability something concrete to govern.

    Residents need to know which institutions are responsible for the streets they use, construction rules, emergency services, schools, public spaces, and local environmental conditions.

    If responsibility is divided among too many overlapping bodies, it can become difficult to know who is answerable when something fails.

    A territorial political community therefore needs more than elections.

    It needs meaningful authority.

    It needs administrative capacity.

    And it needs resources appropriate to its responsibilities.

    Otherwise self-government exists mainly on paper.

    But Territory Can Also Exclude

    There is an opposite danger.

    Territorial authority can itself become an instrument of exclusion.

    Imagine that a community formally accepts freedom of movement.

    It does not close an immigration checkpoint.

    But it adopts housing and land-use rules that make it extremely difficult for newcomers to live there.

    Entry remains legally possible.

    Practical settlement becomes nearly impossible.

    A 2025 study by political scientist Alexander Sahn found that, during the Great Migration, greater racial diversity in non-Southern U.S. cities led cities to permit multifamily housing on less land—evidence consistent with exclusionary zoning being used to preserve racial segregation.

    That does not mean zoning itself is illegitimate.

    Communities may have genuine reasons to regulate density, safety, infrastructure, environmental impact, or land use.

    But territorial authority should not become a substitute border.

    A residence-based system of political membership cannot work if communities can recreate exclusion through unjustified barriers to housing and settlement.

    The question must remain:

    What legitimate problem does the restriction address, and is there a less restrictive way to address it?

    Territory identifies jurisdiction.

    It does not create a license for local domination.

    Some Problems Need Different Scales

    Territorial government is necessary, but no single territory fits every problem.

    A river crosses borders.

    A rail system may serve several cities.

    Pensions may need to remain portable when people move between countries.

    These are not merely theoretical possibilities.

    The Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine dates back to the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and coordinates navigation on a river crossing several political jurisdictions. It describes itself as the oldest international organization in modern history.

    The European Union offers another example.

    Its social-security coordination rules do not replace all national systems with one European welfare state. Instead, they coordinate national systems so that movement across borders does not automatically erase insurance periods or many benefit entitlements.

    The point is simple.

    The institution should match the problem.

    A river may require a river-wide institution.

    A pension system may require cross-border coordination.

    Neither example requires transferring every political function to the same higher authority.

    A Mixed Architecture

    The World Citizen framework therefore combines:

    a territorial core + functional institutions

    Territorial communities handle ordinary place-based government.

    Other institutions address problems whose geography or structure crosses those boundaries.

    This avoids two opposite mistakes.

    One is to assume that every political problem should remain local.

    The other is to assume that every cross-border problem requires moving general political authority upward.

    Neither follows.

    Political structure should follow function.

    Cross-border coordination also does not require a general world sovereign. Institutions can be given authority limited to the particular function that justifies them.

    Conclusion

    A more mobile political order does not have to become a placeless one.

    Some public problems attach to place.

    They need clear territorial authority.

    But territorial authority creates its own danger when it becomes a means of excluding outsiders or protecting inherited advantage.

    The answer is neither to abolish territory nor to treat territorial sovereignty as unlimited.

    It is to separate jurisdiction from inherited membership.

    Territory defines the ordinary jurisdiction.

    Residence defines the ordinary route toward membership.

    Beyond that territorial core, institutions can operate at the scale their functions require.

    The territory stays. Membership becomes more movable.

    The goal is not to eliminate place.

    It is to stop treating place of birth as destiny.

    Notes

    The distinction between territorial jurisdiction and residence-based political membership is developed in The World Citizen Society. The framework’s core formulation is: “Territory defines the ordinary jurisdiction. Residence defines the ordinary route toward membership.”

    Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State (2022) describes a digital-first political community that ultimately seeks an archipelago of physical territories. The example is relevant precisely because the model does not eliminate physical territory.

    Bruno S. Frey and Reiner Eichenberger develop the FOCJ model in The New Democratic Federalism for Europe: Functional, Overlapping and Competing Jurisdictions (Edward Elgar, 1999).

    Alexander Sahn, “Racial Diversity and Exclusionary Zoning: Evidence from the Great Migration,” The Journal of Politics 87, no. 4 (2025): 1302–1318. The study finds evidence consistent with exclusionary zoning being used to preserve racial segregation during the Great Migration.

    The Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine traces its institutional origins to the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and continues to coordinate Rhine navigation across states.

    EU social-security coordination provides a different example of functional cross-border institutions. National social-security systems remain distinct while common rules coordinate coverage, aggregation of relevant periods, equal treatment, and exportability of many benefits.

    For an important foundation of polycentric governance, see Vincent Ostrom, Charles M. Tiebout, and Robert Warren, “The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas: A Theoretical Inquiry,” American Political Science Review 55, no. 4 (1961): 831–842.

    Further Reading

    For the argument that borders are themselves institutions shaping opportunity, see “Thomas Piketty: Property, Borders, and the Structure of Inequality.”

    For the problem of unequal migration pressure and local capacity, see “What If Too Many People Want to Move to the Same Place?”.

    For the distinction between cosmopolitan coordination and a centralized world state, see “Kant and the Limits of Cosmopolitan Right.”

    For the full institutional design, see Toshiyuki Nishimura, The World Citizen Society: Political Freedom, Democratic Choice, and the Institutions of a New Society.