A poor kid in a rich kid’s school
Elinor Claire Awan was born in Los Angeles on August 7, 1933, the only child of Leah Hopkins, a musician, and Adrian Awan, a set designer. Her mother was Protestant and her father Jewish, and when her parents separated early in her life she lived mostly with her mother. She went to a Protestant church with her mother and often spent weekends with her father’s Jewish family.
She grew up during the Great Depression. The family’s backyard was turned into a vegetable garden and fruit orchard, and she learned to grow vegetables and can apricots and peaches; during the Second World War she knitted scarves for the soldiers overseas. Because the house sat at the lower edge of Beverly Hills, her mother arranged for her to attend Beverly Hills High School. It was, she later wrote, a challenge being a poor kid in a rich kid’s school, but it gave her a different view of the future: since nine in ten of her classmates went to college, college seemed the normal next step, even though no one in her immediate family had ever gone. Joining the debate team taught her that every public policy question has at least two sides, and that you must be able to argue and critique both. Swimming was her great recreation; she swam competitively and then taught swimming to save money for college.
Doors that were closed to women
Her mother saw no reason to support her through college, so she paid her own way at the University of California, Los Angeles, working in the library, a dime store and the bookstore. She graduated with honours in political science in 1954, in just three years. When she went looking for work, employers asked whether she could type and take shorthand, since the assumption was that a woman would be a secretary or a schoolteacher. After a year as an export clerk she became assistant personnel manager at a firm that had never before hired a woman for anything but secretarial work.
When she approached UCLA about a doctorate in economics, she was discouraged: as a girl she had been steered away from mathematics beyond algebra and geometry. Political science admitted her, in a class of forty with three other women, though she later learned that the faculty had held a heated meeting criticizing the decision to admit women at all. She earned her M.A. in 1962 and her Ph.D. in 1965. The lesson she drew, she said, was not to treat initial rejections as permanent obstacles.
Water wars in her own backyard
As a graduate student she joined a research team studying the water industry in Southern California and was assigned the West Basin, a groundwater basin under several coastal cities. Users were pumping too much, and salt water from the Pacific was seeping in. Without yet having a name for it, she was studying what economists would call a common-pool resource: something many people can draw on, where each user’s taking leaves less for others. What impressed her was that the cities and water users, with conflicting and overlapping interests, found ways to negotiate rules, limit pumping and save the basin. That collaboration became the subject of her dissertation.
Only after she defended it did Garrett Hardin publish his famous 1968 essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which argued that shared resources are doomed to be overused unless they are either privatized or controlled by the state. That view became economic orthodoxy. Ostrom spent much of her career showing that it was too simple.
Bloomington and the Workshop
In 1963 she married Vincent Ostrom, a political scientist fourteen years her senior who had led her graduate seminar, in what she called a lifelong partnership of “love and contestation.” In 1965 he was offered a professorship at Indiana University in Bloomington, and she, as she put it, tagged along, because departments rarely hired women. Her first job there was teaching Introduction to American Government on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturday mornings at 7.30 a.m. She became a professor of political science in 1974, chaired the department and later held the Arthur F. Bentley chair. She stayed at Indiana for 47 years.
For fifteen years she studied American police services, finding that large departments did not outperform small and medium ones in direct services to residents. In 1973 the Ostroms founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, deliberately organized as a workshop of collaborating scholars rather than a lecture-hall hierarchy. It drew economists, political scientists, ecologists and anthropologists from around the world, and it became the base for her life’s work on the commons. The couple had no children and used their own money as well as grants to support students and visiting researchers from many countries.
Governing the commons
In the mid-1980s a National Research Council committee set out to review research on common-pool resources, and Ostrom discovered that a huge body of case studies existed but was scattered across disciplines, regions and methods. She and her colleagues gathered and systematically compared cases from around the world: irrigation systems in Spain, Nepal and the Philippines, alpine pastures and forests in Switzerland and Japan, inshore fisheries in Nova Scotia, Maine and Indonesia, and many more. Her 1990 book Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action showed that many communities had managed shared resources sustainably for generations, sometimes for centuries, without either privatization or central control.
She did not claim that local management always works. Instead she identified the design principles shared by long-lasting commons: clear boundaries on who may use the resource; rules suited to local conditions; a say for users in making and changing the rules; monitoring by people accountable to the users; graduated penalties, light for first or minor offences and heavier for serious ones; quick, cheap ways to resolve disputes; recognition by outside governments of the community’s right to organize; and, for larger systems, layers of governance nested inside one another. In laboratory experiments she also found that people will pay a personal cost to punish free-riders, and that simply letting groups talk to each other before acting greatly improved how well they cooperated.
What her work gives the world
Ostrom’s research changed how governments, development agencies and conservationists approach forests, fisheries, grazing land and water. The Nobel committee pointed to examples she helped bring to light. In the grasslands of inner Asia, satellite images showed that land managed by traditional herding groups in Mongolia stayed healthier than neighbouring land in China and Russia that had been collectivized and then privatized. In Nepal, small irrigation systems built of stone, mud and timber and run by farmers often produced higher crop yields than modern concrete dams built by outside agencies, because the new dams removed the need for upstream and downstream users to cooperate.
The practical lesson is that rules made and enforced by the people who use a resource often have more legitimacy and work better than rules imposed from outside, and that well-meaning reforms can destroy institutions that work. In the early 1990s her Workshop launched a long-term international forestry research network, at the request of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, in which local scholars in each country studied how forest governance affected both livelihoods and forest health. Her ideas now inform community forestry, fisheries co-management and water governance programmes around the world, and her argument for polycentric governance, with decisions taken at many levels rather than by a single global authority, has shaped thinking about climate change and other global environmental problems.
Honours
Ostrom was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and served as president of the American Political Science Association and the Public Choice Society. In 1999 she became the first woman to receive the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science. In 2009 she shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Oliver Williamson for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons, becoming the first woman to receive the economics prize. A political scientist who had once been turned away from an economics doctorate, she was now honoured by the economics profession itself.
Time magazine named her one of the hundred most influential people in the world in 2012. Indiana University later announced a statue of her outside the building that houses its political science department.
Two traditions
Ostrom’s family straddled two religious worlds. Her mother was Protestant and raised her in the church, while her father, Adrian Awan, was Jewish, and she spent many weekends with his Jewish relatives. The Jewish Women’s Archive notes that she was born to a Protestant mother and a Jewish father, and she is listed among Jewish Nobel laureates by the Jewish Virtual Library, which marks her as of partial Jewish descent. She did not describe herself as practising Judaism, and her public life centred on her scholarship rather than on religion.
What she carried from her childhood was a sense of being an outsider who had to work for every opportunity: a poor child among wealthy classmates, a woman in departments that did not want women, and a political scientist who was told she could not study economics.
Last years and legacy
Ostrom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in late 2011 but kept travelling, writing and teaching a graduate seminar. She was chief scientific adviser for the Planet Under Pressure conference in London in March 2012 and contributed to preparations for Nobel laureate dialogues at the UN Rio+20 Earth Summit. On the day before she died she was still sending emails to co-authors about papers in progress. She died in Bloomington on June 12, 2012, aged 78. Vincent Ostrom died about two weeks later. Indiana University’s president called her an irreplaceable and magnificent treasure and noted that her gifts to the university, including her Nobel Prize money, totalled many millions of dollars.
Her legacy is a more hopeful and more accurate picture of human beings. Where theory said that people sharing a resource would inevitably destroy it, she went and looked, and found farmers, fishers and herders who had built fair, lasting rules for themselves. The scholar Lee Anne Fennell later summed up her approach in what is sometimes called Ostrom’s law: a resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory.
Sources & further reading
Elinor Ostrom, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Popular information: The Prize in Economic Sciences 2009, NobelPrize.org · Political scientist Elinor Ostrom wins Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Jewish Women’s Archive · Indiana University mourns Elinor Ostrom, only woman to win Nobel in economics, Christian Science Monitor · Jewish Nobel Prize Laureates, Jewish Virtual Library · Elinor Ostrom, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.