Elinor Ostrom

Based on Wikipedia: Elinor Ostrom

The Woman Who Proved the Economists Wrong

For generations, economists agreed on one thing: when ordinary people share a resource, they will inevitably destroy it. Give a group of fishermen access to the same waters, and they'll fish until nothing remains. Let farmers graze their cattle on common land, and they'll keep adding animals until the pasture turns to dust. The logic seemed airtight, almost mathematical in its certainty.

Elinor Ostrom spent her career proving this wrong.

In 2009, she became the first woman ever to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The award recognized decades of fieldwork showing something the theorists had missed: real people, in real communities, had been successfully managing shared resources for centuries. Not through government regulation. Not through private ownership. Through something else entirely—cooperation, trust, and rules they created themselves.

A Swimming Champion From the Wrong Side of Beverly Hills

Elinor Claire Awan was born in Los Angeles in 1933, the only child of a musician mother and a set designer father who separated when she was young. She grew up during the Great Depression's aftermath, describing herself simply as "a poor kid." Her parents were artisans—creative people, not wealthy ones.

Her one major recreational outlet was swimming. She joined a competitive team and swam seriously for years, eventually teaching swimming lessons to help pay her way through college. This athletic discipline would prove prophetic. Her intellectual career would also require endurance, persistence, and the willingness to swim against powerful currents.

By a geographical accident, she attended Beverly Hills High School, growing up across the street from it. This mattered enormously. The school sent ninety percent of its graduates to college, making higher education seem like the natural next step rather than an unusual ambition. No one in her immediate family had any college experience. Her mother actively discouraged her from attending, seeing no point in it.

But there was a catch. As a young woman in the early 1950s, Ostrom faced barriers that seem almost absurd today. She was forbidden from taking trigonometry because girls without top marks in algebra and geometry weren't allowed to study advanced mathematics. This gap in her education would come back to haunt her.

The Debate Team and the Seeds of Her Life's Work

Something important happened during Ostrom's junior year of high school. A teacher encouraged her to join the debate team.

This experience shaped how she thought for the rest of her life. Debate taught her that every public policy question has at least two legitimate sides. You can't understand an issue until you can argue both positions with equal conviction. This insight—that reasonable people can disagree, that the "obvious" solution might not be right—became the foundation of her intellectual approach.

Most economists in the mid-twentieth century believed they already knew the answer to how shared resources should be managed. Either the government should step in and regulate, or the resource should be divided into private property so that individual owners would have incentives to protect it. There was no serious debate. These were the only two options anyone considered.

Ostrom would eventually show there was a third way. But first, she had to fight her way into academia.

Doors That Wouldn't Open

Ostrom earned her bachelor's degree in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1954. She did it in three years, attending summer sessions and taking extra courses each semester. She worked at the campus library, a dime store, and a bookstore to pay her tuition, which was fifty dollars per semester.

After graduation, she couldn't find work. Not because jobs didn't exist, but because employers assumed that a young woman with a college degree must want to be either a teacher or a secretary. Nothing else seemed imaginable to them.

She took a correspondence course in shorthand and found work as an export clerk. A year later, she became an assistant personnel manager at a business firm—the first woman the company had ever hired for anything other than a secretarial position. The experience ignited something in her. She started thinking about graduate school.

When she applied for a doctoral program in economics at UCLA, they rejected her. The reason? She lacked the mathematical prerequisites—including that trigonometry course she'd been barred from taking in high school because of her gender. The economics department's door was closed.

Political science was more welcoming. She earned her master's degree in 1962 and her doctorate in 1965, both from UCLA. Her dissertation topic emerged from a real crisis happening in her own backyard.

The Water Wars of Southern California

Southern California in the 1950s was fighting a slow-motion disaster. Multiple communities shared underground water basins, pumping groundwater for drinking, farming, and industry. Everyone pumped as much as they could. No one coordinated. The predictable result: the water levels dropped so low that saltwater from the Pacific Ocean began seeping into the aquifers, contaminating the fresh water supply.

This was exactly the kind of scenario that economists predicted would end in catastrophe. Multiple users sharing a common resource, each acting in their own interest—the textbook setup for what ecologist Garrett Hardin would later call "the tragedy of the commons."

But something unexpected happened in Southern California's West Basin, the region Ostrom was assigned to study. The people who depended on that water—from conflicting and overlapping jurisdictions, with competing interests and no central authority—figured out how to work together. They created rules. They monitored each other. They found incentives to cooperate rather than compete.

They solved the problem themselves.

Ostrom made this collaboration the subject of her doctoral dissertation. She had stumbled onto the question that would define her life's work: under what conditions can ordinary people successfully manage shared resources without either government control or private ownership?

The Tragedy of the Commons

To understand why Ostrom's work was revolutionary, you need to understand the idea she was fighting against.

In 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin published an enormously influential article in the journal Science titled "The Tragedy of the Commons." His argument was elegant and seemingly irrefutable.

Imagine a pasture shared by several herders. Each herder faces a simple calculation: if I add one more cow to my herd, I get all the benefit of that extra animal, but the cost of overgrazing is spread among everyone. The rational choice, for each individual herder, is to add more cattle. But when every herder makes this individually rational decision, the collective result is disaster. The pasture is destroyed. Everyone loses.

This wasn't just abstract theory. Hardin and others saw the tragedy of the commons playing out everywhere: overfished oceans, polluted air, depleted forests. The solution seemed obvious. Either a government must step in to regulate access, or the commons must be divided into private parcels so that individual owners bear the full consequences of their choices.

There was no third option. Or so everyone assumed.

A Workshop, Not a Department

In 1965, Ostrom and her husband Vincent—also a political scientist—moved to Bloomington, Indiana, where Vincent had accepted a professorship at Indiana University. Elinor joined as a visiting assistant professor. Her first course was an evening class on American government.

They had left UCLA under uncomfortable circumstances. Vincent had coauthored an article arguing against the centralization of metropolitan government, favoring instead a "polycentric" approach with multiple overlapping authorities. This ran directly against the interests of UCLA's Bureau of Governmental Research. The conflict made staying untenable.

In 1973, the Ostroms founded something unusual: the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. Note the word "workshop." Not department. Not institute. Not center.

The choice was deliberate. A workshop implies collaboration among equals, people working together on shared problems rather than a hierarchy of professors lecturing to students. The Ostroms attracted scholars from economics, political science, ecology, anthropology, and other fields. They shared data. They challenged each other's assumptions. They tested ideas against real-world evidence from around the globe.

This interdisciplinary approach was itself a kind of commons—a shared intellectual resource that worked precisely because the participants cooperated rather than competed.

Going Into the Field

Ostrom's method was unfashionable in an era that valued mathematical models and abstract theory. She went places. She talked to people. She watched how they actually behaved.

She studied irrigation systems in Spain and the Philippines. Mountain villages in Switzerland and Japan. Fisheries in Nova Scotia and Indonesia. Pasture management in Africa. Water systems in Nepal. She and her collaborators didn't just fly in, collect data, and leave. They built networks of local scholars who understood their own communities intimately.

What she found contradicted the textbooks.

In village after village, community after community, people had developed sophisticated systems for managing shared resources. These weren't simple or accidental. They were intricate institutional arrangements, evolved over generations, perfectly adapted to local conditions.

Swiss alpine villages had managed common meadows sustainably since at least the thirteenth century. Japanese mountain communities had preserved their forests for generations. Spanish irrigation systems had allocated water equitably for centuries. These weren't anomalies. They were everywhere, once you started looking.

The tragedy of the commons wasn't a universal law. It was a failure of imagination.

Eight Principles for the Commons

In 1990, Ostrom published her masterwork: Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. The book synthesized decades of fieldwork into a set of design principles found in successful common-pool resource institutions around the world.

First, the boundaries must be clear. Everyone needs to know who has rights to the resource and where the resource's limits are. Ambiguity breeds conflict.

Second, the rules must fit local conditions. An irrigation system in the Philippines faces different challenges than a fishery in Maine. Rules that work in one place may fail catastrophically in another. Cookie-cutter solutions imposed from outside rarely succeed.

Third, the people affected by the rules must be able to participate in making and modifying them. Rules imposed by distant authorities, however well-intentioned, lack the local knowledge and buy-in that make compliance possible.

Fourth, someone must monitor whether people follow the rules—and the monitors must be accountable to the community, or be community members themselves. You can't have cooperation without some way to detect cheating.

Fifth, sanctions for rule violations should be graduated. Minor infractions deserve minor penalties. Harsh punishment for first offenses destroys trust and undermines cooperation.

Sixth, there must be accessible ways to resolve disputes. Conflicts will arise. Without low-cost mechanisms for working them out, small disagreements escalate into commons-destroying feuds.

Seventh, the community's right to organize itself must be recognized by higher authorities. A village that creates its own rules for managing a forest needs those rules to have legal standing, or outside actors will simply ignore them.

Eighth, for larger systems, governance should be organized in nested layers—local groups managing local problems, regional bodies coordinating across localities, and so on up. No single scale works for everything.

These weren't commandments from on high. They were patterns Ostrom found repeatedly in communities that had successfully managed their commons for generations, sometimes centuries.

The Importance of Face-to-Face

One of Ostrom's most striking findings concerned the importance of communication. In her Workshop at Indiana University, students played games designed to simulate commons dilemmas. When players couldn't communicate—when they made decisions in isolation, like the rational actors in economic models—they typically destroyed the resource, just as the theory predicted.

But when they could talk to each other first, when they could discuss what they should do before doing it, their rate of return from the shared resource more than doubled.

This wasn't complicated game theory. It was something simpler and more human: when people can look each other in the eye, make promises, and build trust, they cooperate. When they can't, they don't.

Real communities managing real resources aren't collections of anonymous strangers making isolated decisions. They're neighbors who will see each other tomorrow, and next year, and for the rest of their lives. Reputation matters. Relationships matter. Trust, built slowly through repeated interactions, makes cooperation possible.

The tragedy of the commons assumed those human elements away. Ostrom put them back in.

No Panaceas

Ostrom was careful never to claim she had found a universal solution. She explicitly warned against what she called "panacea thinking"—the belief that one approach could work everywhere.

Some commons do collapse. Some communities fail to cooperate. The conditions that make self-governance possible don't always exist. When resources span huge areas, when users are anonymous to each other, when powerful outsiders can override local rules, community management may not work.

Her point wasn't that government regulation and private property were wrong. Her point was that they weren't the only options. Between the extremes of state control and individual ownership lay a vast middle ground of community-based solutions that economists had simply ignored.

The right approach depended on the specific situation—the nature of the resource, the history of the community, the broader political and economic context. There was no formula you could apply everywhere. Understanding local conditions was essential.

A Life of Collaboration

The Ostroms never had children. Instead, they poured their resources into their students and their Workshop. They supported international scholars, funded research trips, and built a global network of collaborators. In a 2010 interview, Elinor noted that because they had no family to support, salary was never a concern for her. They used personal funds and grant money to help others.

This collaborative approach extended to her scholarly work. Ostrom was constantly engaged with coauthors, building on others' research and inviting others to build on hers. The Workshop's interdisciplinary model attracted scientists from around the world who might never have talked to each other otherwise.

She remained actively involved in global sustainability efforts until the very end of her life. In 2012, she was the chief scientific advisor for an international meeting on planetary sustainability in London. She was heavily involved in planning Nobel laureate dialogues on global sustainability for the United Nations Rio+20 Earth Summit. When she realized she couldn't attend in person, she kept contributing remotely.

On the day before she died, on June 12, 2012, she sent emails to at least two different groups of coauthors about papers they were writing together.

Why This Matters Now

Climate change is, in many ways, the ultimate commons problem. The atmosphere is shared by everyone. The oceans are shared by everyone. No single nation can solve the problem alone, and no nation can be excluded from the consequences.

The traditional policy debate has followed familiar lines: governments must regulate, or market mechanisms like carbon pricing must create private incentives. These approaches have merits. But Ostrom's work suggests they're not the whole answer.

Large-scale environmental problems won't be solved by a single global agreement any more than a single village irrigation system can be managed from a distant capital. Effective action requires nested layers of cooperation—local communities, regional bodies, national governments, and international institutions, each handling the problems at their appropriate scale.

It requires clear boundaries and rules adapted to local conditions. It requires monitoring and graduated sanctions. It requires spaces for conflict resolution and channels for communication. It requires, above all, trust built through face-to-face interaction and repeated cooperation.

These are not romantic notions. They are empirical findings from decades of careful fieldwork. Communities around the world have been managing their commons successfully for centuries. The question is whether we can learn from them.

Against Cynicism

There is something deeply hopeful in Elinor Ostrom's work, but it's not naive optimism. She never claimed that cooperation was easy or automatic. She documented plenty of failures alongside the successes. She understood that the conditions for effective self-governance are demanding and don't always exist.

But she also understood something that the cynical models missed: humans are capable of cooperation. We are not trapped in tragedy by our nature. When conditions are right—when boundaries are clear, rules are fair, monitoring is possible, and communication is open—people can and do work together to protect shared resources.

The economists who predicted inevitable tragedy weren't wrong about human self-interest. They were wrong about human capabilities. People can create institutions. They can establish norms. They can build trust. They can cooperate.

Ostrom proved it, not through abstract theory, but by going into the world and watching it happen.

The First Woman

When the Nobel committee announced in 2009 that Elinor Ostrom would share the prize in economics with Oliver Williamson, it was the first time in the award's forty-year history that a woman had won.

It was also, in some ways, a vindication of her entire approach. Ostrom wasn't a traditional economist. She was trained in political science. Her methods—fieldwork, case studies, interdisciplinary collaboration—were not what economics departments typically valued. She worked at Indiana University, not Harvard or MIT. She spent decades studying problems that mainstream economists considered beneath their notice.

And she was right when they were wrong.

The tragedy of the commons wasn't a law of nature. It was a failure of imagination. Elinor Ostrom had the imagination—and the persistence, and the rigor—to see what others had missed. Real people, in real communities, had been solving the problem all along. She just paid attention.