CONCEPT
AI Governance (Ostromian Reading)
The regulatory, institutional, and normative arrangements governing AI development and deployment — reframed through Ostrom's framework as a polycentric governance challenge requiring coordination across multiple scales rather than the market-versus-state binary that currently dominates the debate.
AI governance, viewed through Ostrom's institutional lens, is neither a market question nor a regulatory question but a polycentric governance challenge. The current debate oscillates between advocates of market solutions (let companies compete, let innovation proceed unimpeded) and advocates of state solutions (regulate AI development, establish government oversight bodies). The oscillation reproduces the conceptual error Ostrom spent her career dismantling: the assumption that market and state exhaust the available institutional possibilities.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Ostrom's research demonstrated that between market and state lies a vast institutional landscape of self-governing arrangements, community-based management systems, polycentric governance structures, and hybrid institutional forms that combine elements of public, private, and communal governance in configurations that neither paradigm can adequately describe. The intelligence commons presents collective-action problems that Ostrom's framework illuminates with particular clarity.
Community governance has structural advantages that neither market nor state governance possesses. Informational advantages: practitioners who work with AI tools