Elinor Ostrom is the closest thing to an academic patron saint of both the co-living communities and the blockchain law and policy groups that I have been a part of. She remains the only woman to have won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and her work has been foundational in correcting, via rigorous empirical work, earlier assumptions that only strong, leviathan-like top-down authority can prevent tragedies of the commons.
Her work dispelled the notion that government was necessarily the best venue for managing the commons. Rather, she brought renewed focus on:
- The power of civil society
- Social norms
- Voluntary collective action of citizens to solve problems
Long before interdisciplinary effort was the norm, Ostrom brought together scholars from across disciplines and all creative fields.
Held from June 19 to 21, 2019, in Bloomington, Indiana, only once every five years, since its inauguration in 1994, the Workshop on the Ostrom Workshop is the gathering of researchers, students, and alumni of Ostrom and her network of aligned scholars. When the opportunity came along to join the gathering, with my fellow Embassy Network envoy and student of Ostrom, Jessy-Kate Schingler, I leapt!
Below are some of the research threads that I have continued to pursue off the back of attending this fantastic gathering, and which I will be developing in collaboration with some of the researchers and scholars I met at WOW 6.
Polycentric governance is a concept articulated in the work of Elinor Ostrom. The scholarship around Ostrom’s work has expanded and applied her design principles for coordinating emergent collective action around the governance and management of “common-pool resources”. Within the context of applying and extending these concepts and principles to the multilateral governance of data and knowledge — how we coordinate the governance of various “digital commons”, at the community, regional, platform, nation-state, and international level — my work now focuses on establishing a legal and academic framework for using distributed ledger technologies, such as blockchains, to provide guardrails and enablement for the increasing application of A.I., IoT, and other data and knowledge-intensive technologies and systems across our rapidly digitizing enterprises and societies.
In the coming digital future, understanding and shaping the regulation and governance of data and information flows will be one of the most crucial activities for policy-makers, regulators, lawyers, and legal engineers: A key opportunity for the future is the ability for industries, platforms, ecosystems, and communities to self-regulate, or integrate into regulatory frameworks in smarter, more transparent ways, for example, by offering “functional equivalence” such that technology systems can deliver the same (or better) policy outcomes as existing legal and regulatory mechanisms.
My research and teaching also offers an exposition of existing and upcoming potential use cases for how Legal Engineering, as the applied counterpart to the emerging field of Computational Law, can play a key role in developing practical steps and methodologies, such as functional equivalence. We can look to existing pre-blockchain precedents and pattern languages for how legal frameworks and regulatory regimes have established multi-party systems to deliver business and policy outcomes.
My work includes advising on critical areas where coordination and protection of the ‘common good’ are increasingly necessary: data governance and privacy; financial services regulation; the management of IoT and sensor networks in the context of compliance and cybersecurity risks; and the application of emerging, decentralized organizational forms, such as “Distributed Autonomous Organizations”, to coordinate actions and data-sharing at multiple levels with respect to common global goals, such as ecological preservation and climate action.