- Person
- Elinor Ostrom
- Lived
- 1933–2012
- Field
- Political economy
- From
- American
The story
Elinor Ostrom was born in Los Angeles in 1933 to a Protestant mother and a Jewish father. As a graduate student at UCLA in the early 1960s she studied the West Basin, a groundwater basin under several coastal cities in Southern California. Users were pumping so much water that sea water was seeping in. Yet the cities and water users, despite conflicting interests, negotiated rules among themselves to limit pumping and protect the basin.
In 1968 the biologist Garrett Hardin published “The Tragedy of the Commons,” arguing that any resource open to many users, such as a pasture, a fishery or a forest, will be overused, because each user gains the full benefit of taking more while the cost is shared by all. The usual remedies were to privatize the resource or to put it under government control. Ostrom, by then at Indiana University, suspected the picture was too simple.
With colleagues at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, which she founded with her husband Vincent in 1973, she collected and compared a large number of case studies: irrigation systems in Spain and the Philippines, farmer-run canals in Nepal, mountain pastures and forests in Switzerland and Japan, and inshore fisheries in Nova Scotia, Maine and Indonesia. Her 1990 book Governing the Commons showed that many such communities had kept their resources healthy for generations by making and enforcing their own rules.
She also explained what made them succeed: clear boundaries on who may use the resource, rules fitted to local conditions, a say for users in changing the rules, monitoring by people accountable to the users, graduated penalties, cheap ways to settle disputes, and recognition by governments of the community’s right to organize. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences highlighted cases from her work in which outside reforms backfired. Grasslands in Mongolia managed by traditional herding groups stayed healthier than neighbouring land in China and Russia that was collectivized and then privatized, and in Nepal some farmer-built irrigation systems of stone, mud and timber produced higher crop yields than new concrete dams built by outside agencies.
Ostrom never claimed that local management always works. Her point was that durable rules made by users are often wiser than outsiders realize, and that policy should build on them rather than sweep them away.
Why it matters
Ostrom’s findings guide community forestry, fisheries co-management and water governance programmes worldwide, helping governments and aid agencies protect natural resources by working with the communities that depend on them.
About Elinor Ostrom
Political scientist who showed that communities can manage shared forests, fisheries and water themselves. First woman to win the economics Nobel, 2009.
Sources
- Popular information: The Prize in Economic Sciences 2009 NobelPrize.org
- Elinor Ostrom, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Political scientist Elinor Ostrom wins Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences Jewish Women’s Archive
- Elinor Ostrom Wikipedia
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