CONCEPT
Collective-Choice Arrangements
Ostrom's third design principle — the people affected by governance rules should participate in making and modifying them — grounded not in democratic aspiration but in the empirical finding that such arrangements consistently outperform rules imposed from outside the community of users.
The third design principle holds that those affected by governance rules should participate in making and modifying those rules. Ostrom's framing is striking: the principle is not advanced as a democratic aspiration grafted onto a technocratic framework but as an empirical finding. Governance arrangements in which the governed participate in rule-making outperform arrangements in which they do not, across a wide range of institutional contexts and resource types. The reasons are structural rather than moral.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Participants have informational advantages — they know things about the resource and the community that external rule-makers cannot know. They have implementation advantages — rules they helped design are rules they understand, reducing the gap between rules-in-form and rules-in-use. And they have motivational advantages — rules they participated in making are rules they have a stake in maintaining, increasing voluntary compliance and reducing enforcement costs.
The current exclusion of