‘We can do it better’: barriers to the integration of selfgovernance principles in existing governance practices in a Dutch initiative for community rural development

With the increasing notion that the governance of natural resources issues is too complex to be solved by mere topdown government, the interest in the selfgovernance of natural resources by communities is growing. Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom brings forward a whole series of useful suggestions to foster selfgovernance with her design principles for common pool resource (CPR) management. We applied these principles to a selfgovernance initiative by a farmers’ association in the Dutch Northern Frisian Woodlands (NFW). Participatory observation, a series of interviews and workshops showed that despite the undisputed usefulness of Ostrom’s principles, the assumptions underlying the principles may not fit all contexts and, hence, may not always aid to create selfgovernance arrangements in contexts in which existing governing structures and process dynamics constrain the initiative. The paper concludes with a series of additional principles concerning the politics of selfgovernance and process management and that we feel help to effectively realize selfgovernance in constraining contexts.