Graduated sanctions
Responding to a first breach differently from a fifth. One of Ostrom's design principles, and the answer to a rule with no stated consequence.
A conflict process that has never been used is a document, not a practice. Ask when it was last triggered, by whom, and what changed as a result — and ask whether somebody who is not on the board could start it. If the answer to that last question takes a while, that is the answer.
Graduated sanctions means a community’s response to a broken agreement scales with how serious and how repeated the breach is. A first lapse gets a conversation; a persistent pattern gets something with more weight behind it.
The idea comes from Elinor Ostrom’s study of common-pool resources — irrigation systems, fisheries, forests, some managed successfully for centuries — published as Governing the Commons in 1990, work that won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2009. Graduated sanctions is one of eight design principles she found in the systems that lasted.
Why communities need it
Most communities have the opposite: a rule with no stated consequence at all. That is a preference rather than a rule, and every member works out which is which inside a year.
What tends to fill the gap is worse than either extreme. With nothing written, a group either does nothing for years and then overreacts, or it applies whatever response the most annoyed person can push through. Both feel arbitrary to the person on the receiving end, and both teach everyone else that raising a breach is not worth the trouble.
What a scale looks like
A workable ladder is short and stated in advance: a private conversation, then a conversation with a third person present, then a written note on the record, then a defined consequence — a suspended right, a charge, a required process — and at the far end, the grounds on which a community may ask somebody to leave.
The point is not severity. It is predictability: everyone can see where they are on the ladder and what the next step would be.
Sources & further reading
- 1 Ostrom, E. — Governing the Commons (1990) — the eight design principles and the evidence behind them
- 2 Conflict, power and repair — what a repair process must be able to conclude
Written by EcoHubs members, with AI assistance for drafting and editing, and reviewed by a person before publication. Facts are checked against the sources listed; anything we could not verify is marked. How this is written
Related terms
The agreed route a conflict takes. The test is not which method a community uses but whether someone who is not in charge can start it.
The written rules a community has consented to. Distinct from values: agreements say what happens, and what follows when it does not.
In consensus, an objection serious enough to stop a proposal. Healthy systems define narrowly who may block and on what grounds.