If common-property institutions do not survive, Ostrom said, their absence will lead to an even greater acceleration of the destruction of natural resources. This is because it is difficult to exclude potential beneficiaries from them. If left as open-access resources where everyone is able to appropriate the resources freely, they will soon fail from overuse. The successful systems that have evolved to maintain and regulate such facilities have established some form of property rights to these systems that are complex and change over time. Each operates under different rules adapted to local conditions.
Users have rapid access to low-cost, local arenas to resolve conflicts.
The rights of users to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external government authorities. That is, the government cannot weaken the local community's authority by overturning local rules. For example, the rules needed to govern the allocation of water among farmers on a single, small channel would not be the same as those needed to govern distribution among three major branches of a large irrigation system. Ostrom is involved in developing a large data base for comparing resource institutions. For example, data has been incorporated from 150 case studies of irrigation systems in Nepal.