CONCEPT
Beyond Panaceas
Elinor Ostrom’s diagnostic insistence that no single institutional form works everywhere—that the search for the universal policy solution is itself a source of catastrophic governance failure, and that the alternative is not despair but careful diagnosis matched to context.
Beyond panaceas is the methodological principle at the heart of
Elinor Ostrom’s mature work: the refusal to seek, endorse, or implement any single institutional solution across contexts of genuine diversity. Ostrom arrived at the principle through a humbling empirical discovery late in her career: after years of coding cases of successful and failed
commons governance, she set out to identify which specific rules produced success—the formula, the recipe, the rules a community could adopt to guarantee a thriving commons. She could not find it. The specific rules that worked varied enormously from place to place; a rule that sustained one irrigation system would wreck another, because the conditions differed. She was forced to give up the idea that specific rules might be associated with successful cases. What she found instead, one level up, were the broader regularities she called
design principles—and even those she insisted were not a recipe but a diagnostic lens. Applied to