Trained in political science atUCLA, Ostrom was a faculty member atIndiana University Bloomington for 47 years. Beginning in the 1960s, Ostrom was involved in resource management policy and created a research center, theWorkshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, which attracted scientists from different disciplines from around the world. Working and teaching at her center was created on the principle of a workshop, rather than a university with lectures and a strict hierarchy. Late in her career, she held an affiliation withArizona State University.
Ostrom studied the interaction of people and ecosystems for many years and showed that the use of exhaustible resources by groups of people (communities, cooperatives, trusts, trade unions) can be rational and prevent depletion of the resource without eitherstate intervention ormarkets withprivate property.[6]
Elinor Claire Awan was born inLos Angeles, California as the only child of Leah Hopkins, a musician, and Adrian Awan, a set designer.[7][8] Her parents separated early in her life, and Elinor lived with her mother most of the time.[9] She attended aProtestant church with her mother and often spent weekends with her father's Jewish family.[7][10] Growing up in the post-Depression era to divorced artisans, Ostrom described herself as a "poor kid."[9][11] Her major recreational activity was swimming, where she eventually joined a swimming team and swam competitively until she started teaching swimming to earn funds to help put herself through college.[12]
Ostrom grew up across the street fromBeverly Hills High School, which she attended, graduating in 1951.[13] She regarded this as fortunate, for the school had a very high rate of college admission. During Ostrom's junior year, she was encouraged to join the debate team. Learning debate tactics had an important impact on her ways of thinking. It allowed her to realize there are two sides to public policy and it is imperative to have quality arguments for both sides.[12] As a high school student, Elinor Ostrom had been discouraged from studyingtrigonometry, as girls without top marks inalgebra andgeometry were not allowed to take the subject. No one in her immediate family had any college experience, but seeing that 90% of students in her high school attended college, she saw it as the "normal" thing to do.[12] Her mother did not wish for her to attend college, seeing no reason for it.[13]
She attended UCLA, receiving a B.A. with honors inpolitical science atUCLA in 1954.[14] By attending multiple summer sessions and extra classes throughout semesters, she was able to graduate in three years. She worked at the library,dime store and bookstore in order to pay her fees which were $50 per semester.[12] After graduation, she had trouble finding a job because employers presumed that she was only looking for jobs as a teacher or secretary. She began a job as an export clerk after taking a correspondence course forshorthand, which she later found to be helpful when taking notes in face-to-face interviews on research projects. After a year, she obtained a position as assistant personnel manager in a business firm that had never before hired a woman in anything but a secretarial position. This job inspired her to think about attending graduate-level courses and eventually applying for a research assistantship and admission to a Ph.D. program.[12]
Lacking anymath from her undergraduate education andtrigonometry from high school, she was consequently rejected for aneconomics Ph.D. program at UCLA.[15] She was admitted to UCLA's graduate program inpolitical science, where she was awarded an M.A. in 1962 and a Ph.D. in 1965.[14] The teams of graduate students she was involved with were analyzing the political economic effects of a group of groundwater basins in Southern California. Specifically, Ostrom was assigned to look at the West Basin. She found it is very difficult to manage a common-pool resource when it is used between individuals.[12] The locals were pumping too much groundwater and salt water seeped into the basin. Ostrom was impressed with how people from conflicting and overlapping jurisdictions who depended on that source found incentives to settle contradictions and solve the problem. She made the study of this collaboration the topic of her dissertation, laying the foundation for the study of "shared resources".
Ostrom was informed by fieldwork, both her own and that of others. During her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles, she spent years studying the water wars and pumping races going on in the 1950s in her own dry backyard. In contrast to the prevailing rational-economic predictions ofMalthusianism and thetragedy of the commons, she showed cases where humans were not trapped and helpless amid diminishing supplies. In her bookGoverning the Commons, she draws on studies of irrigation systems inSpain and thePhilippines, mountain villages inSwitzerland andJapan, and fisheries inNova Scotia andIndonesia.[16]
In 1961,Vincent Ostrom, Charles Tiebout, and Robert Warren published "The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas," which would go on to be an influential article and introduced themes that would be central to the Ostroms' work.[13][17] However, the article aggravated a conflict with UCLA's Bureau of Governmental Research because, counter to the Bureau's interests, it advised against centralization of metropolitan areas in favor ofpolycentrism. This conflict prompted the Ostroms to leave UCLA.[13] They moved toBloomington, Indiana, in 1965, when Vincent accepted a political science professorship at Indiana University.[18] She joined the faculty as a visiting assistant professor. The first course she taught was an evening class on American government.[7][19]
"In an article by the same name published in the journal Science, Hardin theorized that if each herdsman sharing a piece of common grazing land made the individually rational economic decision of increasing the number of cattle he keeps on the land, the collective effect would deplete or destroy the commons. In other words, multiple individuals—acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest—will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen. Ostrom believes that the "tragedy" in such situations isn't inevitable, as Hardin thought. Instead, if the herders decide to cooperate with one another, monitoring each other's use of the land and enforcing rules for managing it, they can avoid the tragedy."[20]
Garrett Hardin believes that the most important aspect that we need to realize today is the need to abandon the principle of shared resources in reproduction. A possible alternative to thetragedy of the commons (shared needs) was described in Elinor Ostrom's bookGoverning the Commons. Based on her fieldwork, the book demonstrates that there are practical algorithms for the collective use of a limited common resource, which solve the many issues with both government/regulation driven solutions and market-based ones.
In 1973, Ostrom and her husband founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University.[22] Examining the use ofcollective action,trust, andcooperation in the management ofcommon pool resources (CPR), her institutional approach to public policy, known as theInstitutional analysis and development framework (IAD), has been considered sufficiently distinct to be thought of as a separate school ofpublic choice theory.[23] She authored many books in the fields oforganizational theory,political science, andpublic administration. Elinor Ostrom was a dedicated scholar until the very end of her life. Indeed, on the day before she died, she sent e-mail messages to at least two different sets of coauthors about papers that she was writing with them. She was the chief scientific advisor for the International Council for Science (ICSU) Planet Under Pressure meeting in London in March, andJohan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre wrote that
"Lin, up until the very end, was heavily involved in our preparations for the Nobel laureate dialogues on global sustainability we will be hosting in Rio 17th and 18th of June during the UN Rio+20 Earth Summit. In the end, she decided she could not come in person, but was contributing sharp, enthusiastically charged, inputs, in the way only she could."[24][25]
It was long unanimously held among economists that natural resources that were collectively used by their users would be over-exploited and destroyed in the long-term. Elinor Ostrom disproved this idea by conducting field studies on how people in small, local communities manage shared natural resources, such as pastures, fishing waters and forests. She showed that when natural resources are jointly used by their users, in time, rules are established for how these are to be cared for and they become used in a way that is both economically and ecologically sustainable.[26]
Ostrom was appointed Professor of Political Science in 1974. She was the head of the department from 1980 to 1984, and then held the Arthur F. Bentley Chair of Political Science[27] She was appointed Distinguished Professor in 2010 and held a partial appointment in theSchool of Public and Environmental Affairs.
She was senior research director of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Distinguished Professor and Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science in the College of Arts and Sciences, and professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs.[28] The Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis was meant to utilize diverse scholars throughout economics, political science, and other fields to collaborate and attempt to understand how institutional arrangements in a diverse set of ecological and social economic political settings affected behavior and outcomes. The goal was not to fly around the world collecting data, rather it is to create a network of scholars who live in particular areas of the world and had strong interests in forest conditions and forest policy conducted the studies.[29]
Ostrom has been involved in international activities throughout her long and productive career. She had experience in Kenya, Nepal and Nigeria, and also made research trips to Australia,Bolivia,India, Indonesia, Mexico,Philippines,Poland andZimbabwe. During workshops and research grants, she and her husband supported many international students, and visited researchers and policymakers. They did not have children of their own and used personal funds and efforts to receive grants to help others. In a 2010 interview, Ostrom noted that because they had no family to support, "I was not ever concerned about salary, so that's never been an issue for me. For some colleagues who have big families, and all the rest, it's a major issue."[30]
Ostrom was a founding member and first president of theIASC (International Association for the Study of the Commons).[31] She was a lead researcher for the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program (SANREM CRSP), managed byVirginia Tech and funded byUSAID.[32] Beginning in 2008, she and her husbandVincent Ostrom advised the journalTransnational Corporations Review.[33]
Ostrom's early work emphasized the role of public choice on decisions influencing the production of public goods and services.[34] Among her better known works in this area is her study on the polycentricity of police functions inIndianapolis.[35] Caring for the commons had to be a multiple task, organised from the ground up and shaped to cultural norms. It had to be discussed face to face, and based on trust. Dr. Ostrom, besides poring over satellite data and quizzing lobstermen herself, enjoyed employing game theory to try to predict the behaviour of people faced with limited resources. In her Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University—set up with her husband Vincent, a political scientist, in 1973—her students were given shares in a national common. When they discussed what they should do before they did it, their rate of return from their "investments" more than doubled. Her later, and more famous, work focused on how humans interact withecosystems to maintain long-term sustainable resource yields. Common pool resources include many forests, fisheries, oil fields, grazing lands, and irrigation systems. She conducted her field studies on the management of pasture by locals inAfrica and irrigation systems management in villages of westernNepal (e.g.,Dang Deukhuri). Her work has considered how societies have developed diverseinstitutional arrangements formanaging natural resources and avoidingecosystem collapse in many cases, even though some arrangements have failed to prevent resource exhaustion. Her work emphasized the multifaceted nature of human–ecosystem interaction and argues against any singular "panacea" for individualsocial-ecological system problems.[36]
"Design principles illustrated by long-enduring CPR (Common Pool Resource) institutions"
InGoverning the Commons, Ostrom summarized eight design principles that were present in the sustainable common pool resource institutions she studied:[37][38]
Clearly defined boundaries: Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself.
Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions: Appropriation rules restricting time, place, technology, and/or quantity of resource units are related to local labor, material, and/or money.
Collective-choice arrangements: Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rules.
Monitoring: Monitors, who actively audit CPR conditions and appropriator behavior, are accountable to the appropriators or are the appropriators.
Graduated sanctions: Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offense) by other appropriators, by officials accountable to these appropriators, or by both.
Conflict-resolution mechanisms: Appropriators and their officials have rapid access to low-cost local arenas to resolve conflicts among appropriators or between appropriators and officials.
Minimal recognition of rights to organize: The rights of appropriators to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external governmental authorities.
For CPRs that fire parts of larger systems:
Nested enterprises: Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.
These principles have since been slightly modified and expanded to include a number of additional variables believed to affect the success ofself-organized governance systems, including effective communication,internal trust andreciprocity, and the nature of the resource system as a whole.[39]
Ostrom and her many co-researchers have developed a comprehensive "Social-Ecological Systems (SES) framework", within which much of the still-evolving theory of common-pool resources and collectiveself-governance is now located.[40]
According to theNorwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research, "Ostrom cautioned against single governmental units at global level to solve the collective action problem of coordinating work againstenvironmental destruction. Partly, this is due to their complexity, and partly to the diversity of actors involved. Her proposal was that of a polycentric approach, where key management decisions should be made as close to the scene of events and the actors involved as possible." Ostrom helped disprove the idea held by economists that natural resources would be over-used and destroyed in the long run. Elinor Ostrom disproved this idea by conducting field studies on how people in small, local communities manage shared natural resources, such as pastures, fishing waters in Maine and Indonesia, and forests in Nepal. She showed that when natural resources are jointly managed by their users, in time, rules are established for how these are to be cared for and used in a way that is both economically and ecologically sustainable.[41]
Ostrom's law is anadage that represents how Elinor Ostrom's works ineconomics challenge previous theoretical frameworks and assumptions aboutproperty, especially thecommons. Ostrom's detailed analyses of functional examples of the commons create an alternative view of the arrangement ofresources that are both practically and theoretically possible. Thiseponymous law is stated succinctly by Lee Anne Fennell as:
A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory.[42]
Her postgraduate seminar was led byVincent Ostrom, an associate professor of political science, 14 years her senior, whom she married in 1963. This marked the beginning of a lifelong partnership named "love and contestation," as Ostrom put it in her dedication to her seminal 1990 book,Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action.[20]
Ostrom's book "Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action" was awarded the Harold & Margaret Sprout Award in 1992.[46] Ostrom was awarded the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award for Political Economy in 1998. Her presented paper, on "The Comparative Study of Public Economies",[47] was followed by a discussion amongKenneth Arrow,Thomas Schelling, andAmartya Sen. She was awarded theJohn J. Carty Award from theNational Academy of Sciences in 2004,[48] and, in 2005, received the James Madison Award by the American Political Science Association. In 2008, she became the first woman to receive theWilliam H. Riker Prize in political science; and, the following year, she received the Tisch Civic Engagement Research Prize from theJonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service atTufts University. In 2010, theUtne Reader magazine included Ostrom as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World".[49] She was named one ofTime magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World" in 2012.
In July 2019, Indiana University Bloomington announced that as part of their Bridging the Visibility Gap initiative, a statue of Ostrom would be placed outside of the building which houses the university's political science department.[51]
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Ostrom's "research brought this topic from the fringe to the forefront of scientific attention...by showing how common resources—forests,fisheries,oil fields orgrazing lands—can be managed successfully by the people who use them rather than by governments or private companies". Ostrom's work in this regard challengedconventional wisdom, showing that common resources can be successfully managed withoutgovernment regulation orprivatization.[54]
In awarding Ostrom the Nobel Prize for the Analysis of Economic Governance, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted that her work "teaches us novel lessons about the deep mechanisms that sustain cooperation in human societies." Even if Ostrom's selection (along with co-recipient Oliver Williamson of the University of California, Berkeley) seemed odd to some, others saw it as an appropriate reaction to free-market inefficiencies highlighted by the 2008 financial crisis.[20]
Ostrom was diagnosed withpancreatic cancer in October 2011.[55][56] During the final year of her life, she continued to write and lecture, giving theHayek Lecture at theInstitute of Economic Affairs just eleven weeks before her death.[9] She died at 6:40 a.m. Tuesday, June 12, 2012, at IU Health Bloomington Hospital at the age of 78.[28] On the day of her death, she published her last article, "Green from the Grassroots," inProject Syndicate.[57][58]Indiana University president Michael McRobbie wrote: "Indiana University has lost an irreplaceable and magnificent treasure with the passing of Elinor Ostrom".[59] Her Indiana colleague Michael McGinnis commented after her death that Ostrom donated her share of the $1.4 million Nobel award money to the Workshop—the biggest, by far, of several academic prizes with monetary awards that the Ostroms had given to the center over the years.[24] Her husband Vincent died 17 days later from complications related to cancer. He was 92.[60]
Ostrom, Elinor; Walker, James (2003).Trust and reciprocity: interdisciplinary lessons from experimental research. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.ISBN978-0-87154-647-0.
Gibson, Clark C.; Andersson, Krister; Ostrom, Elinor; Shivakumar, Sujai (2005).The Samaritan's Dilemma: The Political Economy of Development Aid. Oxford Scholarship Online.ISBN978-0-19-927885-5.
Ostrom, Elinor;Kanbur, Ravi; Guha-Khasnobis, Basudeb (2007).Linking the formal and informal economy: concepts and policies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.ISBN978-0-19-923729-6.
Ostrom, Elinor; Hess, Charlotte (2007).Understanding knowledge as a commons: from theory to practice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.ISBN978-0-262-51603-7.
Ostrom, Elinor; Poteete, Amy R; Janssen, Marco A (2010).Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice. Princeton: Princeton University Press.ISBN978-0-691-14604-1.
Ostrom, Elinor; Lam, Wai Fung; Pradhan, Prachanda; Shivakoti, Ganesh (2011).Improving Irrigation in Asia Sustainable Performance of an Innovative Intervention in Nepal. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.ISBN978-0-85793-826-8.
Cole, Daniel H.; Ostrom, Elinor (2011).Property in Land and Other Resources. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.ISBN978-1-55844-228-3.
Ostrom, Elinor; Chang, Christina; Pennington, Mark; Tarko, Vlad (2012).The Future of the Commons Beyond Market Failure and Government Regulation. London: The Institute of Economic Affairs.ISBN978-0-255-36653-3.
Ostrom, Elinor (2009), "Engaging with impossibilities and possibilities", inKanbur, Ravi;Basu, Kaushik (eds.),Arguments for a better world: essays in honor of Amartya Sen | Volume II: Society, institutions and development, Oxford New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 522–541,ISBN978-0-19-923997-9.
Ostrom, Elinor; Crawford, Sue E. S. (September 1995). "A grammar of institutions".American Political Science Review.89 (3):582–600.doi:10.2307/2082975.JSTOR2082975.S2CID144457898.
^Mitchell, W. C. (1988). "Virginia, Rochester, and Bloomington: Twenty-five years of public choice and political science".Public Choice.56 (2):101–119.doi:10.1007/BF00115751.S2CID153671519.
^Poteete, Janssen; Elinor Ostrom (2010).Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice. Princeton University Press.
Elinor Ostrom on Nobelprize.org including the Nobel Lecture on December 8, 2009Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems
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