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Governing the Commons is not part of the modern "canon" in the subfield of comparative politics. This is both an awkward truth and an unfortunate one, because Elinor Ostrom's study offers comparativists of all sorts a long list of insights on a range of core issues.
The awkward truth about the book's salience requires some immediate specification to avoid a misunderstanding. This study has certainly found a broad and appreciative readership among students of politics in general. It would not be in its twenty-second printing were this not the case. Nor would it have been awarded prizes by the International Studies Association or the Public Policy Section of the American Political Science Association.1 But the book seems to have been framed as a work in public choice and public policy, rather than as a work in comparative politics per se. Most of its reviews were in public policy and economics journals. Most of its reviewers were economists or public policy specialists, and most of the major journals of the subfield (most notably World Politics and Comparative Politics) failed to review the book at all. According to a systematic study of comparative politics reading lists published in 2003, very few top graduate programs had included it on their general examinations' reading lists more than a decade after its publication. The list of the 30 works most often assigned did include other books with seemingly similar approaches to similar topics: The Logic of Collective Action by Mancur Olson (1971) and Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance by Douglass North (1990) were both denoted as "canonical."2 Governing the Commons certainly did not go unread or unrecognized, but in comparative politics per se, it lacked the visibility of other texts.
In certain respects, these facts are not surprising. The book's policy focus is explicit from beginning to end, and Ostrom is not, after all, a member of a comparative politics faculty. It is possible that the book was not intended for a broad comparative politics audience. But it is very likely that it was neglected because it makes no reference to many of the institutions that comparativists (rightly or wrongly) take seriously. Ostrom calls eloquently for attention to context (as I...