King's College London

Aims 

The work of Elinor Ostrom offers an as yet unexplored way of how we think about and organise our health and social care systems. Her seminal work as a Nobel prize-winning political economist revealed how local communities are able to self-organise to sustainably manage their shared resources without the need for either state intervention or relying on the free hand of the market.

Central to her contribution, Ostrom identified 8 design principles, the presence or absence of which explained why some communities were successful but others were not. She argued that these principles might be useful to any form of shared endeavour and invited others to test that hypothesis.

We are interested in whether we can take her groundbreaking work and apply it to a contemporary shared endeavour – how to sustain health and welbeing within local communities. This has rarely been tried before, and never in the health and social care context.

This project will extend and stress test a methodological approach that our research team has already begun to develop. We have found that Ostrom’s principles belong to three different layers and stages of a collaborative process:

• Understanding and mapping the system
• Upholding values of inclusivity, diversity, and fairness
• Structuring and guiding collaboration

We propose that the principles can act as a heuristic to inform and guide (but not determine) the strategic and participatory aspects of diverse, multi-stakeholder collaborations in health and social care.

Our aim is to develop and test user-friendly, practical resources to support inclusive and effective collaboration in health and social care contexts based on Ostrom’s 8 core design principles. This project will contribute directly to the Methodological cluster, providing an innovative and evidence-based approach to collaborative working and co-design which would underpin future Better Health and Care Futures initiatives and the development of sustainable interventions.