Polycentric governance is a crucial concept in the works of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. It is difficult to pinpoint a concrete definition of polycentric governance, as both Elinor and Vincent worked on the concept throughout their lives and the definition changed. Nevertheless, it is possible to narrow down the idea of polycentricity to the following: it is a complex form of governance with a distributed form of leadership and citizenship that protects the integrity of the system and multiple centers of decision making, where each center has a certain degree of autonomy. The idea of polycentric governance rests of the eight pillars: 1) existence of multiple decision centers; 2) autonomy of decision-making authorities; 3) different decision centers have/share overlapping jurisdictions; 4) decision centers are engaged into processes of mutual adjustment; 5) there are emergent patterns of behavior, an emergent order, that are shared across decision centers; 6) low entry and exit costs; 7) existence of an overarching system of rules, values, norms; 8) existence of means for effective coordination at all levels (whether at the level of a decision center or the system as a whole).
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Thiel, Andreas, William Blomquist, and Dustin Garrick (eds). 2019. Governing Complexity: Analyzing and Applying Polycentricity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.