The Deeper Inquiry

The use of narrative case studies to test institutional designs has a methodological foundation in the social sciences that is worth making explicit, because the move from architectural argument to dramatized scenario is sometimes mistaken for a softening of rigor when it is in fact a sharpening of it. The case study method, as developed by Robert Yin (Case Study Research, 1984) and refined in the qualitative methods tradition, rests on the recognition that some properties of complex systems are only observable in operation — that the interaction effects between a system's components cannot be reasoned about adequately from the components in isolation. An architecture's components may each be sound and their interaction nonetheless produce failure. The dramatized scenario is a way of observing the interaction.

The conflict resolution literature provides the specific grounding for the water disagreement's facilitated process. The distinction between positional bargaining and interest-based negotiation, developed by Roger Fisher and William Ury in Getting to Yes (1981) and extended throughout the subsequent mediation literature, underlies the chapter's claim that surfacing what a disagreement is actually about is prior to resolving it. The deeper grounding is in the restorative justice tradition — the work of Howard Zehr (Changing Lenses, 1990) and the practitioners who have developed restorative process in community settings — which establishes that processes aimed at restoring relationship produce more durable resolutions than processes aimed at determining winners, precisely because they address the relational substrate that adversarial processes damage.

The literature on commons governance returns here with specific operational relevance. Ostrom's design principle of graduated sanctions and her principle of conflict-resolution mechanisms that are low-cost and locally accessible both describe features that the water decision instantiates: the automatic reversion threshold is a graduated sanction, and the facilitated process is a low-cost local conflict-resolution mechanism. The chapter is, in this sense, a dramatization of Ostrom's empirical findings about what allows commons-governing communities to persist.