Beyond the democratic state: anti-authoritarian interventions in democratic theory

II.
Governance without Government
: Potentials and Challenges
Governance refers to the “constellation of authoritative rules, institutions, and practices 
by means of which any collectivity manages its affairs” (Ruggie 2004, 504). This definition is 
intentionally broad and can refer to a number of different ways a collectivity might regulate the 
behavior of its members and coordinate their activities: from a harsh legal code, to the “invisible 
hand” of the market, to the rule by the 
demos
, to a set of norms. Thus, under this definition, 
governance is an absolutely unavoidable issue in any human community, whether that 
community is governed by an authoritarian dictator, representative democracy, laissez-faire 
capitalism, or informal methods of social approval and condemnation. My concern in this 
chapter regards, specifically, the potential for self-governance. By this, I mean the notion of a 
collectivity managing their affairs without an actor external to the collectivity itself – i.e. without 
a state or an otherwise external coercive body utilizing violence or coercion as a means for 
ensuring compliance. In this sense, self-governance refers to “the capacity to get things done 

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without the legal competence to command that they be done” (Lipschutz 1999, 102, citing 
Ernst-Otto Czempiel), or governance without government. 
In developing an account of self-governance, I begin with Ostrom’s work on the 
governance of “the commons,” or common-pool resources (CPRs).
31
Though, I am interested in 
self-governance beyond CPRs, her work is a good jumping off point because she has 
demonstrated convincingly that self-governance can work well in certain contexts. She argues: 
Neither the state nor the market is uniformly successful in enabling individuals to 
sustain long-term, productive use of natural resource systems. Further, 
communities of individuals have relied on institutions resembling neither the state 
nor the market to govern some resource systems with reasonable degrees of 
success over long periods of time (Ostrom 1990, 1). 
Because neither of the two dominant forms of centralized power in the world today – rule by the 
state and rule by capital – always work well, and because they raise a variety of normative 
problems, Ostrom develops a theory of “self-organizing and self-governing forms of collective 
action” (
ibid
25). Focusing on the context of CPRs, she argues that there are three central 
problems any system of self-governance must address are: 1) supplying new institutions (or basic 
rules), 2) establishing credible commitments, and 3) mutual monitoring (
ibid
. 42-45).
The first problem requires that – in the absence of a state bureaucracy or private actor – a 
group of people must overcome the collective action problem (Olson 1965) and work together to 
develop some common norms and/or institutions. Her case studies of successful self-governance 
of CPRs – including a fishery in Turkey, communal meadows and forests in Switzerland and 
Japan, and irrigation systems in Spain and the Philippines – provide empirical grounds for 
identifying the enabling conditions for overcoming collective action problems. Communities are 
most likely to overcome the collective action problem in a situation in which: 1) individuals have 
31
“The term ‘common-pool resource’ refers to a natural or man-made resource system that is sufficiently large as to 
make it costly (but not impossible) to exclude potential beneficiaries from obtaining benefits from its use” (Ostrom 
1990, 30). 

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low discount rates (they plan to stay in the area and use the resource indefinitely); 2) there is 
relative equality among the users, such that they are likely to be impacted in similar ways; 3) 
individuals are significantly invested in or dependent upon the resource for their livelihood or 
overall economic well-being; and 4) there are local leaders that cannot simply develop private 
solutions, but must instead organize for common solutions. As I suggest shortly, all of these 
conditions become much more problematic for issues of global self-governance. 
Regarding the second two problems of credible commitment and mutual monitoring, 
Ostrom finds that successful examples of self-governance develop institutions or rules that link 
commitment and monitoring – mutual monitoring, in other words, provides both private benefits 
for the monitor and collective benefits for others (
ibid
, 59). More specifically, institutions can be 
structured so that each individual has an incentive to monitor the others and report infractions.
The advantage of mutual monitoring over state-based monitoring is that users can have a direct 
incentive to prevent others from “over-harvesting” whereas state agents may lack the incentive to 
do so (and may actually have an incentive to accept bribes). The case of fisheries in Alanya, 
Turkey and communal forests in Japan provide good illustrations of successful mutual 
monitoring. In the Alanya fishery, there are better and worse fishing locations and competition 
for the best spots had increased production costs for individuals (because of uncertainty 
regarding their harvesting potential on any given day) and resulted in conflict between fishers.
To remedy this problem, a list of all the eligible, licensed fishers is prepared each September.
Each fisher is then assigned a particular fishing spot at which to begin fishing. From that day 
forward, each fisher moves to the adjacent fishing location, ensuring that everyone has the 
advantage to sometimes fish at the best spots, while reducing the costly competition and conflict 
of each person trying to get the best spot every day. Ingeniously, the “process of monitoring and 

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enforcing the system is…accomplished by the fishers themselves as a by-product of the incentive 
created by the rotation system…Cheating on the system will be observed by the very fishers who 
have rights to be in the best spots and will be willing to defend their rights...” while the other 
fishers “will want to ensure that their own rights will not be usurped on the days when they are 
assigned good spots” (
ibid
19-20). Similarly, in Japan’s communal meadows, local peasants rely 
on the common lands for valuable forest products, such as timber and thatch for roofing and 
weaving. Each household, therefore, would have an incentive to go into the commons and take 
as many resources from it as they could use – behavior that, if it were generalized, would over-
exploit the common resource. As such, another clever method of mutual monitoring is enforced.
People are only allowed to enter specific forest zones on appointed days. During that day, 
people can harvest as much as they want, but the haul is all grouped together and divided evenly 
into clusters. Each household is then assigned one cluster on the basis of a lottery (
ibid
. 67).
This system incentivizes cooperative work, while creating institutions that make stealing difficult 
if not impossible. 
Ostrom’s work is ground-breaking because it shows that – and how – successful self-
organization and self-governance are possible. However, Ostrom’s framework, alone, is 
insufficient for the task at hand, which involves the possibilities of self-organization and self-
governance on a much larger scale and in much more pluralistic contexts. Indeed, she carefully 
limits the cases she seeks to explain. For one, Ostrom examines relatively small-scale CPRs 
where the number of users ranges from 50 to 15,000 persons, such as fisheries, grazing areas, 
groundwater basins, irrigation systems and communal forests. Moreover, she identifies four 
conditions that specify when groups are likely to overcome the collective action problem and 
develop institutions of self governance (I have mentioned these previously but restate them here 

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for emphasis): Individuals have