Norms Alone Do Not Govern

Grisel opens by revisiting the central claims of the private governance literature. Building on the work of Robert Ellickson, Elinor Ostrom, and others, this tradition emphasized the capacity of close-knit groups to resolve disputes and sustain cooperation through informal norms, reputational sanctions, and decentralized monitoring. These scholars showed that communities can often achieve efficient outcomes without state law or formal institutions—a powerful corrective to overly legalistic accounts of order.

Yet Grisel demonstrates that the Prud’homie does not fit this model. In Marseille, norms were neither universally shared nor self-enforcing. They did not provide clear guidance in the face of new fishing technologies, ecological pressures, or growing commercialization. As he writes: “The normative background shared by the fishers did not provide ready-made answers… Without the rule-making activities of the Prud’homie, the fishers were left to discuss their compliance with social norms ad infinitum” (151).

Norms required interpretation, stabilization, and adaptation through institutional means. The Prud’homie’s emergence in the fifteenth century thus illustrates a fundamental point: private governance requires organization. Norms do not govern themselves.

Private Orders and Political Authority: a History of Co-Adaptation

Grisel’s second major intervention is his critique of the state-dependence thesis. According to this view, private governance succeeds only when the state provides the “right” balance of recognition and restraint. But the Prud’homie’s eight-century history contradicts this. The institution survived because it adapted to each political regime. Under the monarchy, it secured royal charters that formalized its jurisdiction; under Napoleonic rule, it became a semi-official administrative body; under republican governments, it negotiated reforms that preserved aspects of its authority.

Grisel captures this dynamic succinctly: “State support becomes a function of the capacity of private orders to govern (and not the other way around)” (137). Private governance succeeded not because the state calibrated its involvement but because the Prud’homie forged durable relationships with changing authorities. This insight destabilizes both autonomy-based and state-centric theories.

The Limits of Private Governance

Grisel’s analysis of the Prud’homie’s decline is among the book’s most striking contributions, and it becomes even more persuasive when read alongside his account of its internal organization. For centuries, the Prud’homie endured not because its social norms were unusually robust, but because it developed institutional mechanisms that translated those norms into recognizable procedures. Its legitimacy rested on a blend of tradition and organizational form: regular elections, participatory meetings, transparent deliberation, and rule-based decision-making. These practices made the Prud’homie both responsive to local fishers and credible to political authorities. Long before modern administrative law, it operated as a quasi-public institution whose internal processes—public hearings, electoral accountability, and structured sanctions—stabilized expectations and coordinated behavior.

Yet these very strengths exposed the institution’s limits when the political environment transformed. As European integration reshaped the governance of fisheries, authority shifted from localized administrative arrangements to complex, multilevel institutions operating at national and supranational scales. The Prud’homie’s deeply rooted procedures, finely attuned to local knowledge and community expectations, no longer aligned with the scientific, technocratic, and jurisdictionally expansive frameworks that structured EU fisheries management. What had once been a source of resilience—its groundedness in local practice—became a barrier to adaptation.

The Prud’homie did not decline because its norms eroded or because the French state overwhelmed it. Its authority became illegible in a new political order. Private governance, Grisel argues, has inherent limits: institutions endure only when their organizational repertoires can evolve alongside shifting political and administrative orders. The Prud’homie’s history, therefore, reveals an institution that defies neat categorization as “private” or “public,” “informal” or “formal.” Its authority emerged from—and ultimately depended on—the evolving interplay between internal organization and external political relationships.

Social Norms 1.0: Achievements and Blind Spots

The early private-ordering literature demonstrated that communities can often solve collective action problems without formal law, but it did so by portraying normative environments as relatively coherent, bounded, and self-contained. Robert Ellickson’s (Reference Ellickson1991) Order without Law famously showed how Shasta County ranchers relied on informal norms of reciprocity and reputation—rather than tort law—to resolve cattle trespass disputes, suggesting that legal rules matter little when social expectations are strong. Elinor Ostrom’s (Reference Ostrom1990) work on irrigation systems and fisheries similarly revealed how communities can construct intricate rule systems—often more adaptive than state regulation—to govern common-pool resources, provided they share stable membership, clear boundaries, and mechanisms for mutual monitoring. Carol Rose’s (Reference Rose1986) “The Comedy of the Commons” added a crucial conceptual layer by showing that certain resources—paths, markets, waterways, and other inherently public spaces—can be governed effectively through customary norms that generate positive-sum interactions, rather than the tragic overuse predicted by classical theories. Her work highlighted the generative and inclusive dimensions of customary ordering, reinforcing the view that informal governance can be efficient, stable, and socially embedded.

Lisa Bernstein’s studies of diamond dealers (Reference Bernstein1992) and cotton merchants (Reference Bernstein2001) likewise documented how merchant communities rely on reputation, repeat play, and extralegal arbitration to enforce contracts more efficiently than courts. Barak Richman (Reference Richman2017) extended this insight to ethnic commercial networks where cultural homogeneity and dense social ties deter opportunism. Lior Strahilevitz (Reference Strahilevitz2003) broadened the scope of the literature by analyzing how norms operate in “loose-knit groups,” showing that informal governance can extend “off the ranch” and beyond small, close-knit communities. David Skarbek (Reference Skarbek2014), in turn, demonstrated how prison gangs develop highly structured quasi-legal systems—including constitutions, adjudication, and enforcement—when formal state institutions fail to provide credible order.

Together, these scholars mapped a rich landscape of informal governance, but they did so by focusing on communities whose internal cohesion and relative insulation enabled norms to function as stable, self-contained systems.

It is also important to highlight research that pointed toward the direction of co-evolution. Richard McAdams (Reference McAdams2015) and many others have studied the law’s various effects on social norms. Dan Kahan (Reference Kahan2000) investigates how legal interventions must be calibrated to avoid backlash and to facilitate norm change by working with, rather than against, the prevailing normative environment. Robert Cooter (Reference Cooter2000) examines three effects of social norms on law: expression, deterrence, and internalization. Parchomovsky and Siegelman (Reference Parchomovsky and Siegelman2004) examine the political economy of community governance and the tensions between communal preferences and state-driven redevelopment efforts. Rick Brooks and Carol Rose’s (Reference Brooks and Rose2013) emphasize how racially motivated restrictive covenants operated at the intersection of private norms and public enforcement, illustrating that the boundary between private regulation and state authority is porous and contested. Together, these scholars examine the interactions between law and social norms in different contexts. Their work foreshadowed what I call social norms 2.0, but they did not fully theorize the dynamic, recursive, and institutionally embedded processes that Grisel and I identify—processes in which norms, legal rules, and political authority continually reshape one another.

When Political Authority Matters: France and China in Comparison

Both Grisel’s and my research show why the assumption that communities govern primarily through internally generated norms is inadequate. In Marseille, the Prud’homie’s authority did not arise from a self-contained normative order but from its ability to forge relationships with successive political regimes over eight centuries. Under the monarchy, it secured royal charters that recognized its jurisdiction; during the Napoleonic era, it adapted to a centralized administrative state by emphasizing its technical expertise in fisheries management; and under the Republic, it negotiated reforms that preserved aspects of its authority. Throughout these shifts, the Prud’homie’s legitimacy rested on a dual foundation: the community’s recognition of its organizational processes and the state’s acknowledgment of its governance capacity. Its internal procedures—elections, open deliberations, and rule-making—allowed it to present itself as a credible quasi-public institution long before the emergence of modern administrative law.

The Prud’homie’s decline illustrates this embeddedness in reverse. The institution did not fail because fishers abandoned their norms or because national authorities suppressed it. Rather, its localized rules and practices became ill-suited to a new governance scale. When fisheries regulation shifted to the multilevel European Union, the Prud’homie’s context-specific knowledge, informal procedures, and community-based legitimacy did not translate into the technocratic, data-driven, and standardized frameworks of EU governance. Its authority became illegible within this new order. The Prud’homie’s history, therefore, shows that private governance succeeds only when it remains aligned with an evolving political environment.

A parallel dynamic unfolds in contemporary China, though within a very different authoritarian context. In my first monograph, Chinese Small Property, I examine how a network of private and public actors sustains a market of real estate without legal titles, and how the market has evolved from the 1980s to the 2010s. My second monograph, The Authoritarian Commons, shows that successful community self-governance does not arise from society alone. It depends on a strong state capable of building and sustaining the institutional infrastructure for neighborhood governance; a strong society able to mobilize, articulate collective demands, and negotiate with state actors; and a meaningful degree of rule of law that mediates conflicts between the state and homeowners and provides a stable framework within which both sides can bargain. Only when these three conditions align do Chinese homeowners’ associations HOAs develop the capacity to govern effectively. Drawing on an in-depth investigation of the nationwide self-governance movement among hundreds of millions of urban homeowners, The Authoritarian Commons demonstrates that the prospects of community self-governance in China turn not on social norms alone but on the evolving interplay among state capacity, societal mobilization, and legal mediation.

Across Marseille and Chinese cities, a shared insight emerges: governance is a product of co-adaptation between community actors and political institutions. Private orders endure when they align their internal repertoires with the demands of the state, and they decline when political environments shift beyond what their institutional forms can accommodate.

Co-evolution as Social Norms 2.0

The deeper framework that unites Grisel’s findings with my own is what I describe as co-evolution. Co-evolution recognizes that governance arises from the continual interplay of social norms, legal institutions, and political authority. It rejects the assumption—central to social norms 1.0—that normative and legal orders can be analytically separated. Instead, it emphasizes that norms require institutions; institutions require political relationships; and political authority adapts to the capacities, strategies, and mobilizations of private actors. In both France and China, norms and law do not operate as separate systems but continually shape one another. Private orders endure when they forge effective relationships with public institutions, and they decline when those relationships break down or when political environments outgrow their organizational capacities.

This co-evolutionary approach does not deny the importance of social norms. Rather, it situates them within the broader legal and political structures that give them force. It allows us to explain why the Prud’homie thrived for centuries yet faltered in the face of the European Union; why HOAs flourish in Shanghai but remain constrained in Beijing and Shenzhen; why private orders sometimes strengthen state capacity and sometimes contest it; and why governance cannot be reduced to either norms or law alone.

In this sense, co-evolution defines the analytical horizon of social norms 2.0: a framework that foregrounds interaction, embeds normative life in a political context, and treats governance as an emergent product of recursive adaptation rather than as the triumph of either informal norms or formal law. A co-evolutionary approach highlights three interrelated dimensions of governance that the autonomy–dependence framework cannot capture.

First, co-evolution begins from the embeddedness of public and private ordering. Institutions such as the Prud’homie or Chinese HOAs do not operate outside or in opposition to the state. Their authority is constituted through their relationships with political institutions—monarchical and republican administrations in Marseille, municipal governments, street offices, and party organs in China. These relationships evolve across political transitions, administrative reforms, and shifts in state capacity.

Second, co-evolution arises from the layering and fragmentation of law and political authority. Real communities seldom inhabit a single legal hierarchy or a unified normative system. Instead, they navigate overlapping statutes, administrative directives, community bylaws, and informal norms. This multiplicity is the terrain on which governance is built. Actors strategically mobilize different layers of authority, reshaping both legal meaning and normative practice.

Third, co-evolution centers on the interactive strategies of public and private actors. Private actors deploy legal and organizational tools to strengthen their position—invoking statutory rights in Shenzhen, mobilizing residents for elections, or appealing to historical authority in Marseille. The state adapts its approach according to capacity and political priorities: Beijing restricts HOA autonomy; Shanghai constrains it through administrative competence; Shenzhen tolerates and relies on it. Governance emerges from this ongoing negotiation. As Grisel (forthcoming) perceptively notes, these dynamics are not confined to authoritarian settings; similar patterns of co-adaptation between communities and political authorities can also be found in democratic regimes.

Taken together, these components reveal why institutional outcomes cannot be deduced from either informal norms or formal law alone, and why states depend on private actors even as they seek to regulate them. Governance arises from a layered institutional environment, the public–private embeddedness of authority, and the strategic interaction between state and community actors. This dynamic, recursive process is the heart of the co-evolutionary model—and the analytical foundation of social norms 2.0.