On the minimal recognition of rights in holonic institutions

In one aspect of her study of collective action, Ostrom proposed eight design principles for the supply of institutions for sustainable common-pool resource management. Computational logic has been used to formalise an executable specification of six of these principles for resource allocation in open multi-agent systems and networks. However, the eighth principle, nested enterprises, is structural rather than procedural, and the seventh principle, minimal recognition of rights, concerns a critical relationship between the components of that structure – not just the right to self-organise, but essentially enough (i.e. minimal) rights to self-organise. In previous work, the idea of holonic institutions has been proposed to satisfy the requirement of polycentric self-governance in complex systems of nested enterprises. This paper investigates the axiomatic specification of Ostrom’s seventh principle as a constraint on the holonic structure and sketches a testbed prototype, as a prelude to a more systematic investigation into values, conflict resolution and the trade-off between rights and powers in holonic institutions.