|**Box 4.2**<br>General Principles for Successful Commons Management|
|---|

**1.** Clearly defined boundaries—Individuals or households who have the right to withdraw resource units from the commons must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the commons itself.

**2.** Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions—Appropriation rules restricting time, place, technology, or quantity of resource units are related to local conditions and to provision rules requiring labor, material, or money.

**3.** Collective-choice arrangements—Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the rules.

**4.** Monitoring—Monitors, who actively audit the commons conditions and the behavior of the users, are accountable to the users or are users themselves.

**5.** Graduated sanctions—Users who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions, depending on the seriousness and context of the offense, by other users, by officials accountable to these users, or by both.

**6.** Conflict resolution mechanisms—Users and their officials have rapid access to low-cost local arenas to resolve conflicts among users or between users and officials.

**7.** Minimal recognition of rights to organize—The rights of users to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external governmental authorities.

**8.** For commons that are parts of larger systems (nested enterprises)—Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.

_Source:_ Ostrom 1990 dynamic environment, monitoring and testing for compliance could prove a challenge, as rules may not cover all potentially harmful behavior, and the monitoring equipment itself may not be adapted to measure and identify more complex offending behavior (Weiser and Hatfield 2005).

Collective choice arrangements would be an alternative to public sector intervention. Principles drawn from successful commons management in other fields (see Box 4.2) could be applied to the management of a spectrum commons (Buck 2002). These principles seek to empower users, as opposed to public sector entities, as the main actors in ensuring well-functioning of the commons. The public sector’s role could therefore be limited to co-managing the commons with the users: “The state . . . assigns and protects group rights, enforces restrictions on group membership, and protects boundaries from incursions by outsiders. That is, the state governs relationships between common property regimes, provides external legitimacy for the group of resource users within regimes, but does not support any particular form of governance within regimes” (Swallow and Bromley 1994). Applied to managing a spectrum commons, this would translate to the spectrum authority being responsible for establishing some basic boundaries and formulating principles for membership of localized spectrum management groups. “For most spectrum uses (i.e., all those frequencies which are not capable of long distance transmission), the local spectrum management group would be the primary source of authority and governance” (Buck 2002). In practice, in developing countries with weak governance, commons arrangements should be decentralized as much as possible.

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