Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom

New institutional economics
Born	(1933-08-07)August 7, 1933 Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Died	June 12, 2012(2012-06-12) (aged 78) Bloomington, Indiana, U.S.
Nationality	American
Institution	Indiana University Arizona State University
Field	Public economics Public choice theory
Alma mater	University of California, Los Angeles
Influences	Friedrich von Hayek James M. Buchanan
Contributions	Governing the Commons
Awards	Elected to the US National Academy of Sciences (2001); John J. Carty Award (2004); Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2009)
Information at IDEAS/RePEc

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

She was awarded the 2009 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, which she shared with Oliver E. Williamson, for "her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons". She was the first, and to date, the only woman to win the prize in this category. Her work was associated with the new institutional economics and the resurgence of political economy.

Ostrom lived in Bloomington, Indiana, and served on the faculty of both Indiana University and Arizona State University. She held the rank of Distinguished Professor at Indiana University and was the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University in Bloomington, as well as Research Professor and the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University in Tempe. She was a lead researcher for the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program (SANREM CRSP), managed by Virginia Tech and funded by USAID. She and her husband, Vincent Ostrom, advised the journal Transnational Corporations Review beginning in 2008.

Personal life and education

Ostrom was born Elinor Claire Awan in Los Angeles, California, the only child of Leah (born Hopkins) and Adrian Awan. Her father was Jewish, while her mother was Protestant. She attended a Protestant church and often spent weekends staying with her aunt, one of her father's sisters, who kept a kosher home. Her parents were poor, especially when her father left her mother.

Ostrom graduated from Beverly Hills High School in 1951 and then received a B.A. (with honors) in political science at UCLA, in 1954. She was awarded an M.A. in 1962 and a PhD in 1965, both from UCLA Department of Political Science.

She married political scientist Vincent Ostrom in 1963.

Career

In 1973, she and her husband founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. Examining the use of collective action, trust, and cooperation in the management of common pool resources (CPR), her institutional approach to public policy, known as the Institutional analysis and development framework (IAD), has been considered sufficiently distinct to be thought of as a separate school of public choice theory. She authored many books in the fields of organizational theory, political science, and public administration.

Research

Ostrom's early work emphasized the role of public choice on decisions influencing the production of public goods and services. Among her better known works in this area is her study on the polycentricity of police functions in the Greater St. Louis areas. Her later, and more famous, work focused on how humans interact with ecosystems 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 in Africa and irrigation systems management in villages of western Nepal (e.g. Dang). 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.

Design Principles for CPR Institutions

Ostrom identified eight "design principles" of stable local common pool resource management:

1. Clearly defined boundaries (effective exclusion of external un-entitled parties);
2. Rules regarding the appropriation and provision of common resources that are adapted to local conditions;
3. Collective-choice arrangements that allow most resource appropriators to participate in the decision-making process;
4. Effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators;
5. A scale of graduated sanctions for resource appropriators who violate community rules;
6. Mechanisms of conflict resolution that are cheap and of easy access;
7. Self-determination of the community recognized by higher-level authorities; and
8. In the case of larger common-pool resources, organization in the form of multiple layers of nested enterprises, with small local CPRs at the base level.

These principles have since been slightly modified and expanded to include a number of additional variables believed to affect the success of self-organized governance systems, including effective communication, internal trust and reciprocity, and the nature of the resource system as a whole.

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.

Work with Environmental Protection

"Ostrom cautioned against single governmental units at global level to solve the collective action problem of coordinating work against 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 was one of 20 Nobel Laureates who signed the "Stockholm Memorandum" at the 3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability in Stockholm, Sweden on 18 May 2011.

Awards

Ostrom was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and past 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.

Ostrom was awarded the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award for Political Economy in 1998. Her presented paper, on "The Comparative Study of Public Economies," was followed by a discussion among Kenneth Arrow, Thomas Schelling and Amartya Sen. She was awarded the John J. Carty Award from the National Academy of Sciences in 2004, and in 2005 received the James Madison Award by the American Political Science Association. In 2008, she received the William H. Riker Prize in political science, and became the first woman to do so. In 2009, she received the Tisch Civic Engagement Research Prize from the 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." 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.

Nobel Prize in Economics

Telephone interview with Elinor Ostrom

In 2009, Ostrom became the first woman to receive the prestigious Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, commonly known as the Nobel Prize in Economics. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited Ostrom "for her analysis of economic governance," saying her work had demonstrated how common property could be successfully managed by groups using it. Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson shared the 10-million Swedish kronor (£910,000; $1.44 m) prize for their separate work in economic governance.

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 or grazing lands, can be managed successfully by the people who use them, rather than by governments or private companies". Ostrom's work in this regard challenged conventional wisdom, showing that common resources can be successfully managed without government regulation or privatization.

Death

Ostrom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in October 2011 and died of the disease on June 12, 2012, at the age of 78. She was survived by her husband, Vincent Ostrom, though he died shortly afterwards in the same month. On the day of her death, she published her last article, "Green from the Grassroots," in Project Syndicate. Indiana University president Michael McRobbie wrote "Indiana University has lost an irreplaceable and magnificent treasure with the passing of Elinor Ostrom".

Selected publications

• 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Ostrom, Elinor, Cambridge University Press. Description and preview links. ISBN 9780521405997.
• 1993. Institutional Incentives and Sustainable Development: Infrastructure Policies in Perspective. Ostrom, Elinor, and Schroeder, Larry, and Wynne, Susan, Oxford: Westview Press.
• 1994. Rules, Games, and Common Pool Resources. Ostrom, Elinor, and Gardner, Roy, and Walker, James, Editors, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press.
• 1995. With Crawford, Sue E. S., “A Grammar of Institutions.” American Political Science Review 89, no.3 (September 1995): 582–600.
• 1998. "A Behavioral Approach to the Rational Choice Theory of Collective Action," Presidential Address, American Political Science Association, 1997. American Political Science Review, 92(1), 1–22.
• 2003. Trust and Reciprocity: Interdisciplinary Lessons for Experimental Research, Volume VI in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust, Elinor Ostrom and James Walker, Editors, Russell Sage Foundation.
• 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Ostrom, Elinor, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
• 2006. Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice. Ostrom, Elinor and Hess, Charlotte, Editors, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• 2006. Linking the Formal and Informal Economy: Concepts and Policies, edited with Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis and Ravi Kanbur. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
• 2010. "Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems," American Economic Review, 100(3), pp. 641-72.

See also

• Co-production of public services by service users and communities

Additional reading

• Aligica, Paul Dragos; Boettke, Peter (2009). Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development: The Bloomington School. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-77820-6. 
• Ostrom, Vincent and Elinor Ostrom. "Rethinking Institutional Analysis: Interviews with Vincent and Elinor Ostrom." By Paul Dragos Aligica. Interview, Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 2003.

External links

• "Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action" published in Ukraine
• On Collaboration Elinor Ostrom speaks on BBC The Forum

• The Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University
  • Elinor Ostrom Curriculum Vitae
• Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University
• No Panaceas! Elinor Ostrom Talks with Fran Korten
• Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems, 2009 lecture at NobelPrize.org
• Profile and Papers at Research Papers in Economics/RePEc
• Works by or about Elinor Ostrom in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Elinor Ostrom news, photos & videos from the The Herald-Times Bloomington, Indiana
• Profile at The international Institute of Social Studies (ISS)
• Annual Reviews Conversations Interview with Elinor Ostrom 2011 (Video)