Ostrom's Eight Design Principles

Elinor Ostrom's eight design principles for long-running community governance of shared resources, derived from more than 800 case studies and published in Governing the Commons (1990).

What the book is, and what it argues

Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action is Elinor Ostrom's 1990 synthesis of forty years of comparative case studies of how human communities sustain shared resources without either privatization or state control. The central argument is simple and was, when she made it, against the consensus of the field: communities of users can and do govern shared resources successfully over long periods of time, and the long-running cases share a small set of recurring institutional features. She names eight of them. The eight design principles are the operational core of the book.

The book is built for both practitioners and scholars. Chapter 3, where the eight principles are first derived from the long-enduring case studies, is operational and is what most working community-builders read first. Chapters 1 and 2, which set up the theoretical context, are denser and respond to economists Ostrom was arguing with at the time, including Garrett Hardin and Mancur Olson. The case studies that produce the framework cover Swiss alpine meadows, Japanese mountain commons, Spanish huertas irrigation, Filipino zanjeras, Turkish coastal fisheries, and California groundwater basins.

Its role in the field is foundational. Governing the Commons was the empirical answer to Hardin's 1968 essay The Tragedy of the Commons, which had asserted, on the basis of a thought experiment with no case data, that shared resources inevitably collapse without privatization or state enforcement. Ostrom showed, with hundreds of cases, that this claim is empirically wrong. In 2009 she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics, awarded for the body of work this book consolidated. The principles are still the most cited framework in the commons literature thirty-five years later.

Bibliographic details: Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, 1990. Cambridge Studies in the Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions series. 280 pages. ISBN 0-521-40599-8 (paperback). Translated into more than fifteen languages including German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Mandarin.

FROM THE FIELD

From the field. Almost no one in the ToGather archive has cited Ostrom by name. The mapping is mine, written down in a 2026 reading brief that asked whether her framework should enter the archive as scaffolding, foil, or background. The honest answer is foil. The communities in the archive describe their governance in their own vocabulary first. Ostrom's vocabulary fits five of them clearly, breaks against one of them in a useful way, and turns out to be silent on a register that runs through at least three. The book belongs in the Library because the question her framework asks is the question every community-builder eventually has to answer, even if the answer they reach is not hers.

The author and the lineage she wrote from

Elinor Ostrom (1933 to 2012) was an American political scientist who taught at Indiana University Bloomington for nearly her entire career. She co-founded, with her husband Vincent Ostrom, the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana, which became the institutional home for the body of comparative research that produced Governing the Commons. She trained a generation of commons scholars there. The Workshop, renamed the Ostrom Workshop after her death, still operates and still maintains the largest public archive of commons case studies in the world.

Her method, before the theory, was case-collection. She and a network of collaborators built the Common-Pool Resources database, a systematic coding of more than 800 cases of community resource governance across irrigation systems, fisheries, forests, grazing lands, and groundwater basins. The eight principles were inductive: they appeared as patterns across the long-enduring cases when she compared them with the failed cases. She was a comparative empiricist before she was a theorist. The theoretical synthesis came after the data.

The intellectual lineage she wrote from runs through public choice economics (her PhD advisor was Vincent Ostrom, a public choice theorist), through the New Institutional Economics of Douglass North and Oliver Williamson, and through the early collective-action theory of Mancur Olson. She pushed against all three of these traditions while drawing from their vocabulary. She also drew from a different stream: ecological anthropology, particularly the comparative work on irrigation systems and pastoral commons that anthropologists had been documenting for decades without economists paying attention. Bringing those two literatures into one room was part of what made the book consequential.

The reception controversy is worth naming. When the book came out, much of the economics mainstream did not take it seriously. Hardin's tragedy framing was orthodoxy. Ostrom's claim that the orthodoxy was empirically wrong took fifteen years to land. The Nobel Committee's 2009 decision to honor her surprised both economists (who often did not know her work) and political scientists (who often did not consider her an economist). The honor was a correction, not a coronation. By the time it arrived she had spent two decades building a research network that was already producing the next generation of work.

The structure of the book

The book runs six chapters across roughly 280 pages. The internal logic is empirical first, theoretical second.

Chapter 1: Reflections on the Commons. Sets up the puzzle. Walks through Hardin's tragedy argument, Olson's logic of collective action, and the prisoner's dilemma framing of common-pool resource problems. Argues, against all three, that the empirical record contradicts the prediction that commons must collapse. Compares the Leviathan and privatization solutions and finds both incomplete.

Chapter 2: An Institutional Approach to the Study of Self-Organization and Self-Governance in CPR Situations. Defines the analytical vocabulary. Common-pool resource (CPR), appropriator, provider, producer. Institutional rules: operational, collective-choice, constitutional. The chapter is dense and worth bookmarking; the rest of the book uses these terms as load-bearing. Closes on the problems of supply, credible commitment, and mutual monitoring.

Chapter 3: Analyzing Long-Enduring, Self-Organized, and Self-Governed CPRs. The case-study chapter that produces the eight principles. Swiss high-mountain meadows in Törbel (continuously governed since the 1200s), three Japanese village commons, Spanish huertas (the Tribunal de las Aguas in Valencia still meets weekly at the Cathedral door), and Philippine zanjeras (water user associations on Luzon island). The chapter concludes with the section Similarities among enduring, self-governing CPR institutions. This is where the eight design principles first appear, derived inductively from the cases. Most practitioners read this chapter as their entry point.

Chapter 4: Analyzing Institutional Change. A second case-study chapter, this one about CPRs in transition. California groundwater basins under decades of negotiated water-rights litigation. The chapter is more legal-economic in register than the others.

Chapter 5: Analyzing Institutional Failures and Frailties. Where the long-enduring cases in Chapter 3 worked, the cases here failed. Two Turkish inshore fisheries, a Sri Lankan irrigation tank system, and a Nova Scotian inshore fishery. The chapter is what makes the framework testable. Communities can read it as a diagnostic for their own near-collapses.

Chapter 6: A Framework for Analysis of Institutional Choice in CPR Situations. The synthesis chapter. Builds the institutional analysis framework that sits underneath the eight principles, addresses how appropriators evaluate benefits and costs, and points forward to the research program Ostrom would spend the next twenty years on. The framework she develops here became the basis of Understanding Institutional Diversity (2005).

For practitioners, Chapter 3 is the operational entry point. Chapters 1, 2, and 6 are the theoretical scaffolding. Chapters 4 and 5 are the cases. Reading Chapter 3 first, then jumping to Chapter 5 to see what failure looks like, gives a working community-builder the spine of the book in roughly four hours.

Core arguments, in the author's own words

Five passages that carry the weight of the book.

"What one can observe in the world, however, is that neither the state nor the market is uniformly successful in enabling individuals to sustain long-term, productive use of natural resource systems. Further, communities of individuals have relied on institutions resembling neither the state nor the market to govern some resource systems with reasonable degrees of success over long periods of time."

Governing the Commons, Chapter 1.

This is the opening claim, in the early pages of the book. It does the work of clearing space for everything that follows. The orthodox view said only the state and the market could solve the commons problem. Ostrom's empirical answer, immediately, is that the orthodox view is wrong. The rest of the book is the case data.

"Instead of presuming that optimal institutional solutions can be designed easily and imposed at low cost by external authorities, I argue that 'getting the institutions right' is a difficult, time-consuming, conflict-invoking process."

Governing the Commons, Chapter 1.

The honesty of this sentence is what made the book practitioner-useful. Ostrom is not selling a designable solution. She is naming a hard process. Communities in the ToGather archive who are six years into building governance and still arguing about it would recognize what she is describing.

"More than 90 percent of the appropriators who participate in long-enduring, self-governed CPRs design at least minimal rules-in-use to define who is allowed to use the resource, the time and place at which it can be used, the technology to be used, and the quantity of resources that can be appropriated."

Governing the Commons, Chapter 3.

This is the empirical foundation under Principle 1 (clearly defined boundaries) and Principle 2 (congruence with local conditions). The number is the point. Long-running commons almost always make their boundaries explicit, and they almost always tune their rules to specific local conditions rather than importing generic templates.

"Without monitoring, there can be no credible commitment; without credible commitment, there is no reason to propose new rules."

Governing the Commons, Chapter 2.

The dependency chain underneath Principles 4 and 5 (monitoring and graduated sanctions). Ostrom's argument is that rules without enforcement are not rules. Communities that draft beautiful charters and then never check whether anyone follows them are not, in her vocabulary, governing.

"What we have ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of real involvement of the people involved as opposed to just having somebody in Washington decide for them."

Ostrom's Nobel Prize Lecture, 2009.

Not from the book, from the Nobel lecture nineteen years later. She kept making this point for forty years. The eight principles are the operational answer; the political claim underneath them is that real involvement of the people involved is the only mechanism that produces durable governance.

A note on editions: page numbers above refer to the 1990 Cambridge University Press edition, which is still in print and remains the standard reference. There has been no revised edition. The 2015 paperback reissue retains the original pagination.

Communities and movements drawing on this book

Honest framing first. Almost no community in the ToGather archive cited Ostrom by name in their interviews. The mapping below is the book's framework against the archive material, not the archive material citing the book. Where I quote interviewees, they are speaking in their own vocabulary; where I name a principle, that is my reading of how their practice sits inside her framework.

Kibbutz Samar (Negev, Israel-Palestine, founded 1976, ~30 to 50 residents)

Samar runs collective choice (Principle 3) under structural stress. The community sits on top of a kibbutz movement framework whose rules were designed for a different era and on top of an intentional-community model the current members are still inventing. Eileen Mascot's interview describes thirty-five years of negotiating between those two layers. Nir Menachem and Uriel describe the same negotiation from inside the work of the carpentry shop and the community economy. Yaniv's quote, used elsewhere in the archive, names what they are protecting: "room for things creates peace and freedom." Samar is what Principle 3 looks like when the rules people are participating in modifying are themselves contradictory at the level of the legal frame.

Tamera (Alentejo, Portugal, founded 1995, ~170 residents)

Tamera's Forum practice is Principle 6 (accessible conflict resolution) taken further than Ostrom's irrigation systems ever required. Sabine Lichtenfels, Tamera's co-founder and the practice's most experienced facilitator, describes the practice as a way of making suppressed material sayable. Bori calls it "one of our social technologies." Joshua Gottenko calls it "the strongest tool we have." Ostrom's framework recognizes the role of cheap, accessible, local conflict-resolution mechanisms; what it does not have a vocabulary for is what Forum does to the body of the speaker. The shelf the practice sits on is Ostromian. The practice itself goes somewhere her framework was not built to follow.

ADM Amsterdam (Netherlands, squat 1997 to 2019, post-eviction collective ongoing)

ADM is Principle 7 (minimal recognition of rights to organize) made the entire story. Daan's interview describes eleven years inside a squat that operated because external authorities chose, for two decades, not to override self-organization. The interview is titled Eleven Years Without Rent: Daan on Anarchy as Organization. The whole structure of the community depended on a tolerated gap in state enforcement. When that tolerance ended in 2019, the eviction was not just a property dispute; it was the collapse of the institutional condition that made the commons possible. ADM is also a useful counter-case to the idea that Principle 7 is sufficient. The right to organize was protected for two decades. Internal governance was nonetheless captured at times by what the community called underground power. Ostrom's framework names the necessary condition. It does not, by itself, name the sufficient one.

Auroville (Tamil Nadu, India, founded 1968, ~3,300 residents)

Auroville is Principle 8 (nested enterprises) live and visibly malfunctioning. The community has multiple governance layers running simultaneously: working groups, Working Committee, Auroville International Advisory Council, Auroville Foundation, and the Government of India through the Ministry of Education. Peter's interview and Renana's interview both describe the 2021 to 2026 period in which the outer governance layer attempted to override the inner one. The Auroville Charter (1968) entry in this Library covers the legal-document side of that crisis. Read alongside Ostrom's Principle 8, Auroville is a case in which nested governance was structurally present and did not protect against capture. It is one of the richest current test cases of Principle 8 in any community archive.

Ananda Kalyani (central northern Portugal, founded 1990s, ~30 residents)

Ananda Kalyani operates in a register that Ostrom's framework does not speak. Anandeshvarii's interview and Parkash's account (Parkash interview) describe a community where governance happens through spiritual discipline. The governance mechanism is devotional, not institutional. Decisions are made through practices that look more like prayer than like collective choice. Ostrom's eight principles assume a secular institutional frame. Ananda Kalyani is a useful foil precisely because it shows where her vocabulary runs out. Not every commons is governed through committee.

Movement card: the contemporary commons movement

Books often shape movements rather than single communities. Ostrom's framework has shaped a recognizable contemporary movement that names itself the commoning movement, organized around the work of David Bollier, the P2P Foundation (Michel Bauwens), the Commons Network, and a wider research community at the Ostrom Workshop and across affiliated centers in Berlin, Bologna, and Bangalore. The Community Land Trust movement (Burlington Community Land Trust, the Champlain Housing Trust, the South East London Community Land Trust) operationalizes Principle 7 at the level of housing. The platform cooperative movement, organized around scholars like Trebor Scholz, applies the framework to digital commons. None of these movements existed in 1990. All of them now exist partly because of the book.

FROM THE FIELD

From the field. A pattern across the five archive cases above. Where the eight principles fit, they fit cleanly. Where they break, they break in three places. The first is when the conditions for collective choice (Principle 3) are themselves contradictory at the institutional frame, as at Samar. The second is when the right to organize (Principle 7) is protected from the outside but governance is captured from the inside, as at ADM. The third is when the governance mechanism is in a different register entirely, as at Ananda Kalyani. None of these breaks invalidate the framework. They name where the framework ends.

How to read this book

Reading guidance. Six steps.

1. Start with Chapter 3. If you only have an evening, read Chapter 3. The four long-enduring case studies (Swiss meadows, Japanese village commons, Spanish huertas, Filipino zanjeras) are there, and the chapter closes with the section that derives the eight design principles from them. The chapter is what most working community-builders take from the book in the first pass.

2. The hard chapter is Chapter 2. The institutional vocabulary is dense and the prose is academic. If you are a practitioner reading this for community work, you can skim Chapter 2 on the first pass and return to it once you have read the case studies. The vocabulary will cost less the second time.

3. The pairing is David Bollier's Think Like a Commoner (New Society Publishers, 2014). Bollier extends Ostrom's framework into intentional communities, digital commons, and contemporary commoning practice. Where Ostrom's cases are mostly natural-resource commons, Bollier's are mostly the cases working community-builders care about. Read them alongside each other.

4. The companion practice is Sociocracy 3.0. Sociocracy 3.0 is a contemporary pattern library for community decision-making that, without naming Ostrom, operationalizes Principles 3 (collective choice), 4 (monitoring), and 8 (nested governance). The mapping is exact enough that S3 can be read as a procedural translation of the relevant Ostromian principles into a contemporary community-organizational form.

5. The discussion partner is Garrett Hardin's The Tragedy of the Commons (Science, 1968). Hardin's essay is short, available free, and is the orthodoxy Ostrom is arguing against. Read it after Chapter 1 of Governing the Commons. The two together compress the foundational argument of the field into roughly fifty pages of reading.

6. The next step is Wilson, Ostrom, and Cox, "Generalizing the Core Design Principles for the Efficacy of Groups" (Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2013). This is the paper Ostrom co-authored three years before her death that extends the eight principles beyond natural-resource commons to any group context. It is the bridge between her 1990 work and contemporary applications to intentional communities, online platforms, and worker cooperatives. Open-access, available through the Ostrom Workshop website.

Living examples and entry points for community builders

The principles are thirty-five years old. They have not aged into theory. They have aged into infrastructure.

The Zanjera irrigation communities in the Philippines, which Ostrom studied directly, still operate under communally negotiated water rights going back centuries. The irrigation systems of the Huerta de Valencia in Spain, where the Tribunal de las Aguas has held continuous sessions since at least the 10th century, meet the same morning they always meet. The Maine lobster industry, which appeared near collapse in the 1970s, rebuilt itself through informal territorial norms that marine ecologists did not recognize as governance but that satisfied all eight principles. These are not historical footnotes. They are working systems.

In contemporary intentional communities, the principles appear less as explicit doctrine and more as discovered architecture. Workers at Mondragon are assigned to specific cooperatives (Principle 1: defined boundaries), receive wages scaled against a narrow ratio with the lowest earner (Principle 2: congruence), and vote on rules governing their own cooperative (Principle 3: collective choice). No one at Mondragon called this Ostromian. The structure emerged from the same pressures Ostrom was studying.

The community land trust movement applies a version of Principle 7 (recognition of rights to organize) at the level of housing policy. Organizations like the Burlington Community Land Trust (founded 1984) and the South East London Community Land Trust hold land in perpetuity, removed from the speculative market, under a governance model the community controls. The trust is the long-duration institution that Ostrom found was a prerequisite for successful commons governance.

The P2P Foundation and Commons Network in Europe have built workshops around applying the eight principles directly to community governance design. The Commons Design Workshop walks a group through each principle against their own governance document and surfaces gaps quickly. Most groups discover they have addressed Principles 1 and 3 (boundaries and collective choice) and left Principles 4 and 5 (monitoring and graduated sanctions) entirely undefined.

Entry points for community builders

Start with the Nobel lecture. Ostrom's 2009 Nobel Prize lecture, Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems, is available as a 47-minute public video and a 12,000-word published text. It is the clearest summary she gave of the full body of work, and it is more honest about limitations than the book. Begin here, before the book.

Run the checklist against your own governance documents. Take what your community has drafted, or is drafting, and go through each of the eight principles: does our document address this? Where, specifically? If you cannot point to a provision, the principle is unaddressed. Write down what that gap might cost in five years. The exercise takes two hours and surfaces more than most facilitated governance retreats.

Find your local commons. Almost every inhabited place has a functioning commons nearby: a water users' association, a community forest, a fishing territory, an irrigation system. Study it before the theory. Ostrom said this herself. What the text describes abstractly, a working irrigation board will show you concretely in a single meeting.

The Digital Library of the Commons at Indiana University, Ostrom's home institution, maintains the largest public archive of commons research freely available online. The bibliography alone is worth an afternoon.

One caution: the eight principles describe what successful long-running commons tend to have in common. They do not tell you how to build one. Designing governance to check all eight boxes is not the same as having a community that can sustain what those boxes point to. The boxes are a read-out of trust, shared history, and social infrastructure that take years to develop. Use them as diagnostics, not blueprints.

Where it has been critiqued

The eight principles have held up to thirty-five years of pressure. They have also accumulated a serious body of critique. Five lines of critique that working community-builders should know about.

The Cox, Arnold, and Tomás meta-review (2010). Michael Cox and colleagues, in A Review of Design Principles for Community-Based Natural Resource Management (Ecology and Society, 2010), reviewed ninety-one studies that empirically tested Ostrom's principles. They found broad support for most of the framework, but significantly weaker support for Principles 1 (boundaries) and 2 (congruence) than for the others. Their finding: boundaries and congruence are easier to describe than to operationalize, and the empirical record is more mixed than Ostrom's original cases suggested. The Cox revision proposes splitting the eight principles into ten with finer specifications, and is the most cited critique within the commons literature.

The descriptive-versus-prescriptive critique. Saunders, Schlager, and others have argued that Ostrom's principles describe what successful long-running commons tend to have in common, but that this is not the same as a design specification for building one. A community can satisfy all eight principles on paper and still fail. Communities that succeed do so through accumulated trust, shared history, and tacit social infrastructure that the principles read out but do not produce. The critique does not undo the framework; it limits what the framework can be used for. Diagnosis, yes. Blueprint, no.

The natural-resource ceiling. Ostrom's original 800 cases were almost entirely natural-resource commons: irrigation systems, fisheries, forests, grazing lands, groundwater. Extending the framework to intentional communities, digital commons, urban housing commons, and platform cooperatives is a stretch application that Ostrom herself acknowledged in her later work. The Wilson, Ostrom, and Cox (2013) paper attempts the extension formally, but the empirical base outside natural resources is thinner and the reception of the extension inside her field is mixed.

The scale critique. The principles describe local commons. They do not, on their own, address how local commons interact with global political economies, transnational corporations, or planetary-scale resource constraints. Critics including Massimo De Angelis (in Omnia Sunt Communia, 2017) argue that local commons can be empirically successful while remaining structurally subordinate to global capitalist accumulation. The critique is sympathetic to Ostrom but insists that the framework is not a politics, only an institutional analysis.

The implementation gap, named from inside the field. David Bollier, who has done more than anyone to translate Ostrom's framework into contemporary commoning practice, says the gap directly: studying commons and building one are different activities, and the second is much harder than the first. A reading group can work through the eight principles in a weekend. A community can spend a decade trying to live them and still find the work unfinished. The framework is honest about this. The book is honest about this. Readers should be too.

More resources

Canonical primary sources

• Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Elinor Ostrom, Cambridge University Press, 1990. The book itself.
• Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems. Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize Lecture, 2009. The clearest summary Ostrom gave of her full body of work.
• Understanding Institutional Diversity. Elinor Ostrom, Princeton University Press, 2005. The book where she develops the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework that sits underneath the eight principles.
• Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice. Poteete, Janssen, and Ostrom, Princeton University Press, 2010. The methodological companion that documents how the comparative research was actually conducted.

Comparative books

• The Tragedy of the Commons. Garrett Hardin, Science, 1968. The orthodoxy Ostrom is arguing against. Ten pages, available free. Read with Chapter 1 of Governing the Commons.
• Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. David Bollier, New Society Publishers, 2014. The contemporary translation of Ostrom into commoning practice.
• Free, Fair, and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons. David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, New Society Publishers, 2019. Builds out a "commoning" practice based on Ostrom's framework, with extensive contemporary case material.
• Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism. Massimo De Angelis, Zed Books, 2017. The most serious left critique of Ostrom from inside the commons literature.

Theoretical lineage

• The Logic of Collective Action. Mancur Olson, Harvard University Press, 1965. The collective-action problem Ostrom is responding to.
• The Calculus of Consent. James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, University of Michigan Press, 1962. The public-choice foundation Vincent and Elinor Ostrom both built from.
• Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Douglass North, Cambridge University Press, 1990. The New Institutional Economics framing that runs alongside Ostrom's work, published the same year.
• The Problem of Social Cost. Ronald Coase, Journal of Law and Economics, 1960. Foundational for the institutional analysis Ostrom adapted.

Companion frameworks

• Tamera Forum. Principle 6 (accessible conflict resolution) taken further than Ostrom's framework was built to follow. Pair the two for the relational layer underneath governance.
• Sociocracy 3.0. Operationalizes Principles 3, 4, and 8 in a contemporary pattern library that does not name Ostrom but tracks her framework closely.
• The Auroville Charter (1968). A nested-governance system (Principle 8) under capture stress. The richest current case in the Library for testing Ostrom's framework against a real institutional crisis.
• The Ten Basic Principles of Mondragon. Discovered Ostromian architecture inside an industrial cooperative. Principles 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 8 all visible in the operating structure.
• Social Contract of the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Rojava). All eight principles addressed in writing across 134 articles. The most ambitious explicit commons-governance document of the past decade.

From the ToGather archive

Five interviews where the eight principles map onto the community's own practice. None of these interviewees cited Ostrom. The mapping is the framework against the archive material, not the archive material against the framework.

• Eileen Mascot (Kibbutz Samar) on thirty-five years of negotiating between two contradictory institutional frames. Principle 3 under structural stress.
• Daan (ADM Amsterdam) on eleven years of self-organization inside a tolerated gap in state enforcement. Principle 7 made the entire story, until the gap closed.
• Joshua Gottenko (Tamera) on Forum as a conflict-resolution practice that does what Ostrom's irrigation systems never had to. Principle 6 taken further than the framework was built for.
• Peter and Renana (Auroville) on five years of nested-governance crisis between the community and the Indian state. Principle 8 visibly malfunctioning.
• Anandeshvarii (Ananda Kalyani) on devotional governance, where the mechanism Ostrom names is in a different register entirely. The useful foil for the framework's silence on spiritual practice as governance form.