Elinor Ostrom

• 1. Introduction

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  Elinor Ostrom was born in Los Angeles in 1933, and she died on the 12th of June 2012, the same day her last article was published. The two events arriving together say something true about her. "Green from the Grassroots" appeared in Project Syndicate while she lay dying at IU Health Bloomington Hospital. She had sent e-mail messages to at least two different sets of coauthors the day before. Her husband Vincent died seventeen days after she did.

  Ostrom spent her career dismantling one of economics' most entrenched assumptions: that people sharing a common resource will inevitably destroy it. The Nobel Committee in Stockholm awarded her its prize in Economic Sciences in 2009, calling her work a demonstration that common property could be successfully managed by the very groups using it. She was the first woman to win that prize. What she proved, and how she proved it, is a story about fieldwork, about swimming pools and groundwater basins, about herders in Africa and lobstermen in Maine, and about an unusual institution in Bloomington, Indiana, that she ran for nearly five decades.

• 2. A Poor Kid from Beverly Hills

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  Beverly Hills High School sits across the street from where Ostrom grew up. She attended it, graduating in 1951, and called that proximity fortunate. Ninety percent of its students went on to college, and she came to see enrollment as the normal next step, even though no one in her immediate family had any college experience at all.

  Her parents had divorced early. Her mother Leah Hopkins was a musician, her father Adrian Awan a set designer. She lived mostly with her mother and spent weekends with her father's Jewish family, attending a Protestant church during the week. She described herself as a "poor kid" growing up in the post-Depression era to divorced artisans. As a high school student she was actively discouraged from studying trigonometry; girls without top marks in algebra and geometry were barred from the course.

  Swimming was her main recreation. She eventually joined a team, competed, and then shifted to teaching swimming to pay her way through university. At UCLA she worked at a library, a dime store, and a bookstore to cover fees of fifty dollars per semester. By packing in summer sessions and extra classes, she finished her undergraduate degree in political science in three years instead of four, earning her B.A. with honors in 1954.

  After graduation, employers assumed she was looking only for teaching or secretarial work. She took a correspondence course in shorthand and began as an export clerk, a skill she later found useful when taking notes during field interviews. After a year she moved to an assistant personnel manager role at a firm that had never placed a woman in anything but a secretarial position, and that experience planted the idea of graduate school.

• 3. The Groundwater That Started Everything

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  UCLA's economics department rejected Ostrom's application to its doctoral program because she lacked the required mathematics, including the trigonometry she had been steered away from in high school. She was admitted to the political science doctoral program instead, and the research assignment she received there set the course of the rest of her life.

  Graduate teams in the program were analyzing the political and economic effects of a group of groundwater basins in Southern California. Ostrom was assigned the West Basin. Locals were pumping too much groundwater, and salt water was seeping in. What struck her was not the damage but the response: people from conflicting and overlapping jurisdictions who all depended on the same water supply found ways to create incentives, settle contradictions, and solve the problem without a single authority dictating the outcome. She made that collaboration the subject of her dissertation.

  That question of how communities self-organize around shared resources became the spine of her career. The dominant framework in economics at the time predicted they would fail. Garrett Hardin had given that prediction a name in 1968, publishing a paper in the journal Science titled "The Tragedy of the Commons." Hardin argued that each herdsman sharing common grazing land would rationally increase his own herd, and the collective result would deplete or destroy the land. Ostrom believed the tragedy was not inevitable. If herders chose to cooperate, to monitor each other and enforce shared rules, the outcome could be different. Her job was to show that this was not merely possible in theory but was already happening in practice.

• 4. The Workshop

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  In 1965, Vincent Ostrom accepted a political science professorship at Indiana University Bloomington, and Elinor joined the faculty as a visiting assistant professor. Her first course was an evening class on American government. They had left UCLA after a conflict with the Bureau of Governmental Research over a 1961 article that Vincent had co-authored with Charles Tiebout and Robert Warren, which advised against centralizing metropolitan areas and favored polycentrism instead.

  In 1973, the Ostroms founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. The name was deliberate. It was built on the model of a workshop rather than a lecture hall; there was no strict hierarchy. Scholars from economics, political science, and other fields were gathered there to collaborate on how institutional arrangements in different ecological and social settings shaped behavior and outcomes. Students in the Workshop were given shares in a notional common and asked to manage them. When they were allowed to discuss strategy before acting, their rate of return more than doubled.

  The goal was not to send researchers around the world collecting data independently. It was to build a network of scholars who already lived in particular places and already had deep interests in the conditions there. Ostrom held faculty at Indiana University Bloomington for 47 years. She was appointed Professor of Political Science in 1974, served as department head from 1980 to 1984, held the Arthur F. Bentley Chair of Political Science, and was named Distinguished Professor in 2010. Late in her career she also held an affiliation with Arizona State University.

  Funding for the Workshop's work came from sources including the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Ostrom and her husband had no children of their own. They used personal funds as well as grants to support international students and visiting researchers. As she explained in a 2010 interview, the absence of family financial obligations meant she was never focused on salary the way colleagues with large families had to be.

• 5. Governing the Commons

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  Ostrom's most influential book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, appeared in 1990. She described her partnership with Vincent in its dedication as "love and contestation." The book won the Harold and Margaret Sprout Award in 1992.

  Its core argument drew on fieldwork Ostrom conducted across several continents. Irrigation systems in Spain and the Philippines, mountain villages in Switzerland and Japan, fisheries in Nova Scotia and Indonesia, pastures managed by local communities in Africa, irrigation systems in villages of western Nepal including the Dang Deukhuri region: these were the cases she examined. Across all of them she looked for evidence that communities could manage shared resources sustainably without either state control or private property regimes.

  From that research she derived eight design principles present in long-enduring common pool resource institutions. Those principles addressed how communities define who has access to a resource, how rules are matched to local conditions, how users participate in modifying those rules, how compliance is monitored, and how sanctions are graduated to fit violations. The principles were later modified and expanded by Ostrom and her co-researchers to include factors such as effective communication, internal trust, and the character of the resource system as a whole.

  Ostrom and her colleagues also built what they called the Social-Ecological Systems framework, a comprehensive structure within which research on common pool resources and collective self-governance continued to develop. Her institutional approach to public policy, known as the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, came to be regarded as a distinct school within public choice theory.

• 6. The Nobel and Its Aftermath

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  In 2009, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Ostrom the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. She shared the ten-million Swedish kronor prize, equivalent to roughly 990,000 euros or 1.44 million dollars, with Oliver E. Williamson of the University of California, Berkeley. The Academy cited her "analysis of economic governance, especially the commons," and stated that her research had brought the topic "from the fringe to the forefront of scientific attention."

  Some observers found the joint award surprising. Others read it as a direct response to the free-market inefficiencies exposed by the 2008 financial crisis. The Academy's statement was precise: her work teaches "novel lessons about the deep mechanisms that sustain cooperation in human societies."

  As she had done with earlier monetary prizes, Ostrom donated her share of the Nobel award to the Workshop. Her Indiana colleague Michael McGinnis noted after her death that this donation was by far the largest of the many academic prize funds the Ostroms had given the center over the years.

  Her recognition before and after the Nobel reflected a career spanning many fields. In 1999 she became the first woman to receive the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science. In 2004 she received the John J. Carty Award from the National Academy of Sciences. In 2008 she became the first woman to win the William H. Riker Prize in political science. She was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society, and she served as president of both the American Political Science Association and the Public Choice Society. Time magazine named her one of its 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2012.

  Ostrom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in October 2011. She gave the Hayek Lecture at the Institute of Economic Affairs just eleven weeks before her death. She died at 6:40 a.m. on the 12th of June 2012. In July 2019, Indiana University Bloomington announced that a statue of Ostrom would be placed outside the building housing its political science department, as part of the university's Bridging the Visibility Gap initiative.