Elinor Ostrom’s seminal work and most of the empirical research on the management of common pool resources it has spawned make no more than oblique references to the democratic quality and legitimacy of CPR governance arrangements. The political nature of these arrangements – their authority to make and enforce collectively binding decisions on the allocation of resources – and the motivations of users’ compliance are rarely discussed explicitly. While Ostrom cautions that such forms of network governance between market and state are no “panacea” and need to be underpinned by “trust” to work effectively, their democratic quality and legitimacy is more often assumed than demonstrated. Yet, arguably, self-interest and coercion – highlighted by Ostrom in her discussion of institutional “design principles” and rule enforcement through monitoring and sanctions – need to be complemented by “diffuse” support anchored in social norms and values to overcome the prisoners’ dilemma of CPR governance and to ensure the stability and sustainability of these arrangements. Whereas Easton’s “specific” type of support or “output” legitimacy is grounded in self-interested evaluations of regime performance and effectiveness, “diffuse” support is usually associated with democratic legitimacy. However, while Ostrom implicitly suggests that her decentralized, relatively informal examples of CPR governance may be both democratic (participatory) and effective, political science research has identified likely trade-offs between democratic quality and effectiveness, especially in the context of non-local and multi-level regimes. This theoretical paper makes the case for a focus on democratic quality and legitimacy in research on CPR governance. It develops a conceptual framework for such a more genuinely political science (as opposed to economic and game-theoretical) approach, considers methodological implications and sketches a research program. The paper raises and tentatively answers questions such as these: How democratic and legitimate are various types of CPR governance? How can democratic quality and legitimacy be measured? How may the impact of democratic quality on legitimacy – and of legitimacy on compliance, regime stability and sustainability – be gauged? Are there trade-offs between “input” legitimacy and effectiveness in CPR governance?
