Diagnosing Water Governance in Southeast Sulawesi: Application of Ostrom's Design Principles for Policy Reform

During the last three decades, many studies have provided empirical support for the relevance of the design principles (DPs) proposed by Elinor Ostrom as a way to examine and improve the robustness of common property resource (CPR) institutional arrangements. Amid this support, a question has emerged regarding the DPs' relevance to the analysis of complex, large‐scale CPR systems—especially those involving the management of large, interconnected water resource systems. Ostrom's last principle, her nested enterprises principle, requires large and closely connected resource governance arrangements to be organized in multiple nested layers. In this paper, we argue that by putting Ostrom's nested enterprises principle first, rather than last, in the list of her eight principles and then developing an appropriate set of nested administrative arrangements before attempting to apply her other seven principles. We test our argument in Southeast Sulawesi Province, Indonesia. The resultant regional narrative produces five new recommendations for consideration.