Synthesizing evidence in sustainability science through harmonized experiments: Community monitoring in common pool resources

Over 30 y ago, Elinor Ostrom published Governing the Commons (1), a demonstration by counterexample that the successful management of common pool resources requires neither individual private property rights nor central government control. Her contribution and subsequent research identify more than a dozen institutional features, or “design principles,” purported to make successful community-based, common pool resource management more likely (2, 3). Examples of these features include clearly defined group and resource boundaries, graduated sanctions, conflictresolution mechanisms, enabling policy environments, and accountable monitoring systems. But after decades of theoretical and empirical studies, little is known about whether external interventions can enhance these features where they are weak or absent, or whether enhancing these features individually—rather than collectively—causes resource conditions to improve (4). These questions have long been identified as important for advancing sustainability science and practice (5). In this Special Feature on “Sustaining the Commons,” the authors try to answer these questions by developing and testing mechanism-based theories of institutions in complex socio-ecological systems. The Special Feature makes three contributions to advancing sustainability science. It offers an exemplar of multiteam, harmonized research to accelerate the accumulation of generalizable knowledge in sustainability science. In addition, it sheds light on the causal relationship between community monitoring and common pool resource outcomes, a relationship that has long been of interest in the sustainability science literature (1, 6, 7). Finally, it offers a theoretically informed approach to guide synthesis of research findings from diverse contexts. Through these contributions, the Special Feature aims to stimulate discussion and debate among different communities of scholarship and practice in sustainability science. These communities include researchers and practitioners interested in common pool resource governance, adaptive management, comanagement and decentralization, citizen science, and democratic accountability, as well as those interested in applying new approaches for empirical research on causal relationships in complex systems. The Special Feature comprises six, coordinated country-level studies (8–13) and a metaanalysis of these studies (14). Accompanying these empirical contributions are two perspectives essays authored by scholars outside of the coordinated research project (15, 16). This introductory article first discusses how multisite, harmonized approaches can advance sustainability science. We then turn to the multifaceted, multimechanism construct of “community monitoring” and the role it plays in four different sustainability science literatures on citizen science, adaptive management, common pool resources, and democratic accountability. By highlighting its role in these different literatures and how the empirical studies included in the Special Feature take the insights of these literatures into account, we hope for greater cross-fertilization across these literatures. Finally, we examine challenges to developing generalizable knowledge about the role of institutions in complex social-ecological systems and show how mechanismbased tests of theories can help generate and synthesize empirical evidence in sustainability science.