Elinor Ostrom

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Elinor Ostrom
US National Academy of Sciences electee
    • Information at IDEAS / RePEc
    Academic background
    ThesisPublic Entrepreneurship: A Case Study in Ground Water Basin Management (1965)

    Elinor Claire "Lin" Ostrom (née Awan; August 7, 1933 – June 12, 2012) was an American

    the first woman to win the prize.[5]

    After graduating with a B.A. and Ph.D. in political science from

    USAID.[7] Beginning in 2008, she and her husband Vincent Ostrom advised the journal Transnational Corporations Review.[8]

    Since the 60s, Ostrom was involved in resource management policy and created a research center, 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.

    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 either state intervention or markets with private property.[9]

    Personal life and education

    Elinor Claire Awan was born in

    Protestant church with her mother and often spent weekends with her father's Jewish family.[10][13] Growing up in the post-Depression era to divorced artisans, Ostrom described herself as a "poor kid."[12][14] 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.[15]

    Ostrom grew up across the street from Beverly Hills High School, which she attended, graduating in 1951.[16] She regarded this as fortunate, for the school had a very high rate of college admittance. 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.[15] As a high school student, Elinor Ostrom had been discouraged from studying trigonometry, as girls without top marks in algebra and geometry 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.[15] Her mother did not wish for her to attend college, seeing no reason for it.[16]

    She attended UCLA, receiving a B.A. (with honors) in

    dime store and bookstore in order to pay her fees which were $50 per semester.[15]
    She married a classmate, Charles Scott, and worked at General Radio in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while Scott attended Harvard Law School.[10] They divorced several years later when Ostrom began contemplating a Ph.D.[10][18] 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 for shorthand, 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.[15]

    Lacking any math from her undergraduate education and trigonometry from high school, she was consequently rejected for an economics Ph.D. program at UCLA.[19] She was admitted to UCLA's graduate program in political science, where she was awarded an M.A. in 1962 and a Ph.D. in 1965.[17] 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.[15] 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". The postgraduate seminar was led by Vincent 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]

    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.[16][21] 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 of polycentrism. This conflict prompted the Ostroms to leave UCLA.[16] They moved to Bloomington, Indiana, in 1965, when Vincent accepted a political science professorship at Indiana University.[22] She joined the faculty as a visiting assistant professor. The first course she taught was an evening class on American government.[10][23]

    Career

    Ostrom was richly 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 of Malthusianism and the tragedy of the commons, she showed cases where humans were not trapped and helpless amid diminishing supplies. In her book Governing the Commons, she draws on studies of irrigation systems in Spain and Nepal, mountain villages in Switzerland and Japan, and fisheries in Maine and Indonesia.[24]

    Ostrom is probably best known for revisiting the so-called “

    public choice theory.[27] She authored many books in the fields of organizational theory, political science, and public 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, and Johan 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."[28][29]

    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.[30]

    Elinor 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[31]

    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.[32] 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.[33]

    Ostrom's innovative and ground-breaking research was supported by National Science Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Hynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, U.S.A.I.D., the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the National Institute of Mental Health.[34]

    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 and Zimbabwe. 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.” [34]

    Ostrom was a founding member and first president of the IASC (International Association for the Study of the Commons).[35]

    Research

    Ostrom's early work emphasized the role of public choice on decisions influencing the production of public goods and services.

    Dang Deukhuri). Her work has considered how societies have developed diverse institutional arrangements for managing natural resources and avoiding ecosystem 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 individual social-ecological system problems.[38]

    "Design principles illustrated by long-enduring CPR (Common Pool Resource) institutions"

    In Governing the Commons, Ostrom summarized eight design principles that were present in the sustainable common pool resource institutions she studied:[39][40]

    1. 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.

    2. 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.

    3. Collective-choice arrangements  

       Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rules.

    4. Monitoring  

       Monitors, who actively audit CPR conditions and appropriator behavior, are accountable to the appropriators or are the appropriators.

    5. 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.

    6. 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.

    7. 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:

    8. 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 of

    internal trust and reciprocity, and the nature of the resource system as a whole.[41]

    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 collective self-governance is now located.[42]

    Environmental protection

    According to the

    environmental 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.[43]

    Ostrom's law

    Ostrom's law is an

    eponymous law
    is stated succinctly by Lee Anne Fennell as:

    A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory.[44]

    Awards and recognition

    Ostrom was a member of the

    United States National Academy of Sciences,[23] a member of the American Philosophical Society,[45] and president of the American Political Science Association and the Public Choice Society. In 1999, she became the first woman to receive the prestigious Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science.[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",

    Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University. In 2010, the Utne Reader magazine included Ostrom as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World".[49] She was named one of Time
    magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World" in 2012.

    The International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) awarded its Honorary Fellowship to her in 2002.

    Telephone interview with Elinor Ostrom

    In 2008 she was awarded an honorary degree, doctor honoris causa, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.[50]

    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]

    Nobel Prize in Economics

    In 2009, Ostrom became the first woman to receive the

    economic governance.[52] As she had done with previous monetary prizes, Ostrom donated her award to the Workshop she helped to found.[12][53]

    Elinor Ostrom with the other 2009 Nobel laureates

    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,

    government regulation or privatization.[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]

    Death

    Ostrom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in October 2011.[55][56] During the final year of her life, she continued to write and lecture, giving the Hayek Lecture at the Institute of Economic Affairs just eleven weeks before her death.[12] She died at 6:40 a.m. Tuesday, June 12, 2012, at IU Health Bloomington Hospital at the age of 78.[32] On the day of her death, she published her last article, "Green from the Grassroots," in Project 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.[28] Her husband Vincent died 17 days later from complications related to cancer. He was 92.[60]

    Selected publications

    Books

    Chapters in books

    Journal articles

    See also

    References

    1. ^ "No Panaceas! Elinor Ostrom talks with Fran Korten". Shareable: Civic System. March 18, 2010. Archived from the original on February 16, 2011. Retrieved February 20, 2011.
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    4. ^ Aligica, Paul Dragos; Boettke, Peter (2010). "Ostrom, Elinor". The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (Online ed.).
    5. ^ "Nobel Prize Awarded Women". Retrieved October 14, 2019.
    6. ^ "Elinor Ostrom building for Nijmegen School of Management". Radboud University (in Dutch). Archived from the original on February 24, 2018. Retrieved February 3, 2018.
    7. ^ "Researcher for Virginia Tech program wins Nobel Prize". Virginia Tech. Retrieved January 2, 2011.
    8. ^ "Transnational Corporations Review". Taylor & Francis.
    9. ISBN 978-0-521-40599-7
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    10. ^ a b c d e Leonard, Mike (December 6, 2009). "Nobel winner Elinor Ostrom is a gregarious teacher who loves to solve problems". The Herald-Times. Bloomington, Indiana. Archived from the original on April 15, 2015. Retrieved April 15, 2015.
    11. ^ "Elinor Ostrom". The Telegraph. London. June 13, 2012. Archived from the original on January 12, 2022. Retrieved April 15, 2015.
    12. ^ a b c d Wall, Derek (2014). The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom: Commons, Contestation and Craft. Routledge.
    13. ^ "The story of non-economist Elinor Ostrom". The Swedish Wire. December 9, 2009. Archived from the original on December 14, 2009. Retrieved June 12, 2010.
    14. ^ "Elinor Ostrom". The Economist. June 30, 2012. Retrieved August 30, 2012.
    15. ^ a b c d e f "Elinor Ostrom – Biographical". www.nobelprize.org. Retrieved March 3, 2018.
    16. ^
      OCLC 965120114.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link
      )
    17. ^ a b McKay, Bonnie J.; Bennett, Joan (2014). Biographical Memoir of Elinor Ostrom (1933–2012) (PDF). National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved April 15, 2015.
    18. ^ Harford, Tim (August 30, 2013). "Do You Believe in Sharing?". Financial Times. Archived from the original on July 15, 2014. Retrieved April 15, 2015.
    19. ^ Elinor Ostrom. https://www.ubs.com/microsites/nobel-perspectives/en/laureates/elinor-ostrom.html in UBS Nobel Perspectives interview, 2009.
    20. ^ a b c d Burke, Maureen (September 2011). "People in Economics. The Master Artisan" (PDF). Finance & Development: 2–5.
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    22. ^ Woo, Elaine (June 13, 2012). "Elinor Ostrom dies at 78; first woman to win Nobel in economics". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved April 15, 2015.
    23. ^
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    24. ^ "Elinor Ostrom". The Economist. June 30, 2012. Retrieved March 3, 2018.
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    26. ^ "The Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis". Indiana.edu. Archived from the original on October 7, 2009. Retrieved October 13, 2009.
    27. S2CID 153671519
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    28. ^
      PMC 3421197
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    29. ^ "Ostrom Facts", Nobel Prize.org
    30. ^ "Elinor Ostrom – Facts". www.nobelprize.org. Retrieved March 5, 2019.
    31. ISSN 0373-2630
      .
    32. ^ a b "Elinor Ostrom, 2009 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences: Indiana University". www.elinorostrom.com. Retrieved March 3, 2018.
    33. ^ "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2009". NobelPrize.org. Retrieved January 13, 2022.
    34. ^ a b McCay; Bennett (2014). Elinor Ostrom. Biographical Memoirs (PDF). National Academy of Sciences.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
    35. ^ "About the Commons". Retrieved June 9, 2021.
    36. ^ "Polycentricity and Local Public Economies". Archived from the original on April 3, 2013. Retrieved February 8, 2013.
    37. JSTOR 974306. Archived from the original
      (PDF) on November 2, 2012. Retrieved February 8, 2013.
    38. ^ "Beyond the tragedy of the commons". Stockholm Whiteboard Seminars. April 3, 2009. Archived from the original on November 18, 2021. Retrieved March 23, 2013.
    39. ISBN 978-0-521-40599-7
      .
    40. ^ Big Think (April 23, 2012), Ending The Tragedy of The Commons, archived from the original on November 18, 2021, retrieved March 25, 2018
    41. ^ Poteete, Janssen; Elinor Ostrom (2010). Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice. Princeton University Press.
    42. S2CID 39710673
      .
    43. ^ Vedeld, Trond. 2010, February 12. "A New Global Game – And How Best to Play It," Archived June 24, 2016, at the Wayback Machine The NIBR International Blog.
    44. ISSN 1875-0281. Archived from the original
      on February 17, 2015. Retrieved February 16, 2015.
    45. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved May 24, 2021.
    46. ^ "The Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science – Prize Winners". Archived from the original on March 14, 2012.
    47. ^ "Frank E. Seidman Award: Acceptance Paper". Archived from the original on February 12, 2013. Retrieved February 8, 2013.
    48. ^ "John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science". National Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on December 29, 2010. Retrieved February 25, 2011.
    49. ^ "Elinor Ostrom: The Commoner". Utne Reader. October 13, 2010. Retrieved October 19, 2010. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
    50. ^ "Honorary doctors at NTNU". Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
    51. ^ Bloomington, Inside IU (July 9, 2019). "Around IU Bloomington". News at IU. Retrieved August 27, 2019.
    52. ^ "First woman wins economics Nobel". BBC News. October 12, 2009. Archived from the original on October 21, 2014. Retrieved April 15, 2015.
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    54. ^ Rampell, Catherine (June 13, 2012). "Elinor Ostrom, Winner of Nobel in Economics, Dies at 78". New York Times. Retrieved April 15, 2015.
    55. ^ Daniel Cole (June 13, 2012). "obituary". Guardian. London. Retrieved March 23, 2013.
    56. ^ Stokes, Kyle (June 13, 2012). "How IU Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom Changed the World". StateImpact. Indiana Public Media. Retrieved March 23, 2013.
    57. ^ Jessop, Bob. "Introduction to Elinor Ostrom" (PDF). Beyond Ostrom. Retrieved April 15, 2015.
    58. ^ Ostrom, Elinor (June 12, 2012). "Green from the Grassroots". Project Syndicate.
    59. ^ "Elinor Ostrom, Only Female Nobel Laureate in Economics, Dies". Wall Street Journal. June 12, 2012.
    60. ^ "Distinguished Indiana University scholar Vincent Ostrom dies: IU News Room: Indiana University". newsinfo.iu.edu. Retrieved March 3, 2018.

    Further reading

    External links

    Wikimedia Commons has media related to Elinor Ostrom.
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    Awards
    Preceded by
    Laureate of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics
    2009
    Served alongside: Oliver E. Williamson
    		 Succeeded by
    Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elinor_Ostrom&oldid=1220199528"