Coherence as a Commons: Why Inter-Institutional Alignment Erodes Rather Than Accumulates

Abstract

Public agencies charged with attracting and retaining investment routinely proliferate coordination devices — joint committees, one-stop shops, framework conventions, digital platforms — and just as routinely fail to deliver the seamless institutional experience these devices promise. The dominant explanations attribute the shortfall to design flaws or to insufficient political will. This article proposes a different diagnosis. Drawing on Ostrom’s institutional analysis and extending it, as Hess and Ostrom did for knowledge, to an intangible resource, it argues that the coherence investors encounter across institutions is neither an organisational capability nor an aggregate of individual performances, but a common-pool resource of a peculiar kind: collectively produced, appropriable by none, freely enjoyed by all who did not contribute, and — this is the analytical payoff — subject to erosion rather than depletion.

The distinction matters. A depleted commons is one that has been over-harvested; an eroded commons is one that has not been maintained. Coherence is not consumed by use: it decays through neglect. Three provisioning dimensions are specified — collective participation, shared appropriation, and institutional learning — and the argument is advanced that the third is systematically the weakest, for reasons internal to how public agencies are evaluated. Where learning is absent, coherence is regenerated from scratch at every transaction, which is precisely what makes it appear to work while never accumulating.

The article contributes a vocabulary and a set of diagnostic questions to a literature on collaborative governance that has theorised the conditions of collaboration extensively and its durability hardly at all. It also returns something to commons scholarship: an intangible, institutionally produced resource whose tragedy is not the crowd but the amnesia.

Keywords: commons; collaborative governance; institutional coherence; erosion; institutional learning; Ostrom.

Received Date: February 25, 2024

Accepted Date: March 12, 2024

Published Date: April 17, 2024

Available Online at: https://www.ijsrisjournal.com/index.php/ojsfiles/article/view/786