A Biographical Memoir by
Bonnie J. McCay
and Joan Bennett
©2014 National Academy of Sciences.
Any opinions expressed in this memoir are
those of the authors and do not
necessarily reflect the views of the
National Academy of Sciences.
Elinor Ostrom
1933–2012
2
B
orn Elinor Clair Awan on August 7, 1933, in Los Angles, Lin was an only child
raised in a poor household. Nevertheless, her mother arranged for her to attend the
prestigious Beverly Hills High School. Many years later Lin wrote, “While it was a chal-
lenge being a poor kid in a rich kid’s school, it did give me a different perspective on the
future.” Moreover, the high school provided an outlet for her competitive streak, and the
competitions she engaged in as a member of the debate team had a lasting impact on
her approach to problem solving. Debaters had to learn how to make good arguments in
support of—and against—both sides of an issue.
Lin graduated from high school in 1951. Although her mother had encouraged her to
attend an elite high school, she saw no reason to give her financial support for college.
Elinor “Lin” Ostrom was a political scientist, pragmatic
thinker, prolific author, and international consultant in
the field of common pool resources. At the time of her
death on June 12, 2012, she was a Distinguished Professor
of Political Science at Indiana University, senior research
director of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in
Political Theory and Policy Analysis at IU, and founding
director of the Center for the Study of Institutional
Diversity at Arizona State University. In 2009 she shared
with Oliver E. Williamson the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in
Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, being
cited “for her analysis of economic governance, especially
of the commons.”
Lin’s pathway to the Prize was unusual: During her entire
career she identified herself as a political scientist not an economist. Moreover, her
provocative research challenged a deeply entrenched concept concerning the manage-
ment of common resources. What was it about her background that equipped her to
challenge an established paradigm and become “the first woman to receive the Nobel
Prize in Economics”?
ELINOR CLAIR OSTROM
August 7, 1933–June 12, 2013
Elected to the NAS, 2001
By Bonnie J. McCay
and Joan Bennett
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ELI N O R OS T ROM
Luckily, fees at UCLA were low enough at the time that she was able to work her way
through college with part-time jobs at the library, at the book store, and in the economics
department. In an early indication of her formidable intellect and discipline, she finished
her B.A. in political science in three years, debt free and with honors. When she entered
the job market in 1954 she learned that women were expected to type and take shorthand.
She took a correspondence course and learned shorthand—a skill she never used in a
secretarial capacity but later turned to her advantage when she was taking field notes.
After several years working in business, Lin returned to UCLA for graduate school,
obtaining an M.S. in 1962 and a Ph.D. in 1965. While in graduate school she married
political scientist Vincent Ostrom. For her graduate research she worked as part of a team
studying the water industry in southern California. Specifically, her project involved the
West Basin Municipal Water District, a system that serves 17 suburbs of Los Angeles
and parts of L. A. County. In her Nobel autobiography, she wrote, “Without knowing
I was studying a common-pool resource problem, I became very familiar with the kinds
of problems that users of a common-pool resource face in trying to manage such a
resource.”
The year Lin finished her Ph.D., Vincent was offered a full professorship at Indiana
University in Bloomington. Fortuitously, the IU Department of Political Science needed
someone to teach a course in American government. In those years, academic jobs for
women were hard to come by, and Lin gladly accepted a position as a visiting assistant
professor in the department. The following year, she became graduate advisor and was
offered a tenure-track appointment. There followed a rapid climb up the academic ladder
in the political science department, becoming professor in 1974. She also came to hold
a part-time professorship in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Eventually
she became the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science and finally Distinguished
Professor at IU. She also was Founding Director of a Center for the Study of Institu-
tional Diversity at Arizona State University, established in 2009. She served as chair of
the department from 1980 to 1984 and acting chair from 1989 to 1990.
Key to Lin’s early success was her role, together with Vincent, in founding the Indiana
University Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis in 1973, and co-directing
it until 2009 when she became senior research director. This interdisciplinary forum for
academic collaboration was purposely called a “workshop” based on Vincent’s philosophy
that science is a form of artisanship (V. Ostrom, 1980).
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ELI N O R OS T ROM
Renamed for the Ostroms in 2011, the Workshop remains a major international center
for interdisciplinary collaboration on institutions, incentives, and behavior as they relate
to policy and governance. Its central themes remain self-governance and democratic
reform, joined since the 1980s by Lin’s focus
on collective action in the context of sustainable natural
resources. The Ostroms’ visit to the Center for Inter-
disciplinary Research in Bielefeld, Germany, in 1981
was the beginning of the internationalization of the
Workshop, which became a go-to place for leaders
of new nations seeking guidance about democratic
governance. Further visits to Bielefeld stimulated Lin’s
interest in game theory, which became a key tool in
her subsequent work. She also co-directed a major NSF
center at IU, the Center for the Study of Institutions,
Population, and Environmental Change, from
1996 to 2006.
Lin’s dissertation work took place before the publication in Science of the famous article
by G. Hardin entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons,” (Hardin, 1968), but at that
time her empirical approach to questions about resource management attracted little
attention. Hardin’s metaphor of a tragic commons describes situations in which indi-
viduals “acting rationally in their own self-interest” deplete a shared limited resource
such as a pasture, inevitably resulting in its destruction. Hardin felt that there were only
two ways to address the problem: Either resources had to be divided up and privatized,
or the government had to intervene and impose regulations. Hardin’s article had an
enormous impact on the thinking of this era, and the “tragedy of the commons” became
a prevailing metaphor that supported policies and practices to convert common lands
and resources to private ones or to replace local arrangements for managing commons
with top-down government regulation.
Lin, on the other hand, put little faith in simple metaphors and theories not buttressed
by empirical observation, or on reliance on government for solutions. She and Vincent
pointed out the need to distinguish between “common pool resources,” a type of
resource, and “common property,” a kind of institutional arrangement about ownership
and responsibility. This was an important early step toward her later work on the
potential for small-scale local management of common pool resources. Toward this
purpose she reviewed fieldwork-based empirical studies on a variety of common-pool
Lin identified the ways in
which ordinary people
around the globe have
came together, often in
stable arrangements lasting
for centuries, to manage
common resources such as
forests, fisheries, and water
supplies.
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ELI N O R OS T ROM
resources—fisheries, water for irrigation, grazing lands—for her landmark book,
Governing the Commons (E. Ostrom, 1990).
In that volume Lin identified the ways in which ordinary people around the globe have
came together, often in stable arrangements lasting for centuries, to manage common
resources such as forests, fisheries, and water supplies. She asked, “What works?,” and
she identified key design principles found in the many ways in which people have
been observed to cooperate with each other without resorting to private ownership
or government regulation. These principles, though often challenged and sometimes
modified, inspired decades of research on management of common pool resources, local
to global (Agrawal, 2007) (Cox, Arnold, Villamayor Tomas 2010).
The ideas developed in the Governing the Commons project came to function as middle-
range theory. That theory and Lin’s commitment to theory-inspired empirical research
led to further comparative research on the capacity of people dependent upon common
pool resources, with some “common property” rights, to develop resilient and effective
systems for protecting those resources for the future. An important example, one that
underscored her commitment to the use of scientific methods in social and interdisci-
plinary science, was her leadership in a long-standing interdisciplinary and transnational
program on forest use and management, the International Forestry Resources and Insti-
tutions (IFRI) research program. It has resulted in the training of scholars in methods of
consistent data collection to ensure comparability and a unique database for more than
250 sites in 15 countries (Tucker, Agrawal, & Fischer, 2010).
Lin and her colleagues learned that the forms of these cooperative arrangements varied
considerably from place to place, and that context and complexity mattered. University of
Chicago law professor Lee Anne Fennell has summarized this perspective into something
she calls “Ostrom’s Law”—namely, that “A resource arrangement that works in practice
can work in theory.” Left to themselves, groups of people can figure out ways of sharing
resources without depleting them and without tragic outcomes. On the other hand,
collective action does not inevitably emerge. Lin always suggested that if the approach of
theorists or policy-makers is too simple, “We lose an understanding of what’s going on out
there.” As she wrote in Governing the Commons, “Relying on metaphors as the foundation
for policy advice can lead to results vastly different from those presumed to be likely.”
Lin’s more recent work sought to inform scientists and policymakers about complex and
dynamic systems, at scales that range up to the global. She developed a general framework
for the analysis of “social-ecological systems” (E. Ostrom, 2009) that now influences
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ELI N O R OS T ROM
scholarship on complex systems and coupled natural and human systems. She effectively
communicated the dangers of single-solutions or panaceas (E. Ostrom, 2007; E. Ostrom,
Janssen, & Anderies, 2007) and spoke publicly about the need to address major issues,
such as climate change, from a wide variety of institutional, spatial, and temporal scales, or
what she and Vincent called polycentric systems (E. Ostrom, 2012).
Over her long and productive career, Lin’s international activities included extensive
field experience in Kenya, Nepal, and Nigeria, as well as research visits to Australia,
Bolivia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, Poland, and Zimbabwe. Through the
Workshop and research grants, she and Vincent supported many foreign students, visiting
researchers, and policy-makers. They had no children of their own, and used personal
funds as well as efforts to obtain grants to help others. In a 2010 interview, Lin 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.” Indeed, when she chaired the Department of Political Science (1980-1984)
she recalled that “…I purposely kept my salary at zero because our junior faculty were
just—we weren’t competitive, you know?” (Annual Reviews Conversations 2010).
Her ground-breaking research received support from the 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.
She was active in a number of professional associations, in particular the American
Political Science Association, serving as vice president in 1975-75 and president in
1996-97. From 1984 until her death she was active with the Committee on Profes-
sional Careers and Standards, Women’s Caucus for Political Science. She was also pres-
ident of the Public Choice Society (1982-1984), the International Association for the
Study of Common Property (1990-91), and the Midwest Political Science Association
(1984-1985).
Lin was an editorial board member for 24 journals, including the American Journal of
Political Science, the Journal of Institutional Economics, the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, and Science. She was awarded 12 honorary doctorates from univer-
sities all over the world and more than 25 major awards for her contributions. She was
elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991 and to the National
Academy of Sciences in 2001.
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ELI N O R OS T ROM
One of us (BM) had the great good fortune to be a colleague and friend of Lin Ostrom.
She was a wonderful mentor and associate, highly disciplined, very honest, and excep-
tionally generous. She and Vincent lent their time, talent, and personal resources to
hundreds of students and foreign visitors; their welcoming spirit and collegiality are
commemorated every year in the WOW (Workshop on the Workshop) gathering
at Indiana University. She understood and by example communicated the idea that
academic work, like the common resources she studied with her husband and her
students, can benefit from cooperation.
In summary, Elinor Ostrom’s belief that ordinary people have a large body of common
sense was grounded in her scholarly research. Her legacy will continue to have enormous
practical, political, and ethical implications for policies toward public health, climate
change, environmental resilience, population growth, and other pressing issues of the
21st century.
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ELI N O R OS T ROM
REFERENCES
Agrawal, A. 2007. Forests, Governance, and Sustainability: Common Property Theory and its
Contributions. International Journal of the Commons 1(1):111-136.
Annual Reviews Conversations Presents An Interview with Elinor Ostrom. 2010. Margaret
Levi, Interviewer. Online transcript. http://www.annualreviews. org/userimages/ContentE-
ditor/1326999553977/ElinorOstromTranscript.pdf.
Cox, M., G. Arnold, and S. Villamayor Tomás. 2010. A review of design principles for commu-
nity-based natural resource management. Ecology and Society 15(4):38. URL: http://www.ecolog-
yandsociety.org/vol15/iss4/art38/
Fennell, Lee Anne. (2011). Ostrom’s Law: Property Rights in the Commons. International Journal
of the Commons 5(1): 9-27. Available online at http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/
article/view/252/182.
Hardin, G. 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Science 162:1243–1248.
Ostrom, Elinor. 1987. Institutional Arrangements for Resolving the Commons Dilemma: Some
Contending Approaches. In The Question of the Commons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal
Resources. Eds. Bonnie J. McCay and James M. Acheson. pp. 250–265. Tucson: University of
Arizona Press.
Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ostrom, Vincent. 1980. Artisanship and artifact. Public Administration Review 40: 09-317.
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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
1987 Institutional Arrangements for Resolving the Commons Dilemma: Some Contending
Approaches. In The Question of the Commons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal
Resources. Eds. Bonnie J. McCay and James M. Acheson. pp. 250–265. Tucson: University
of Arizona Press.
1990 Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
2007 With M. A. Janssen, and J. M. Anderies. Going Beyond Panaceas. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences U.S.A. 104(39):15176-15178.
A Diagnostic Approach for Going Beyond Panaceas. Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences U.S.A. 104(39):15181-15187.
2009 A general framework for analyzing sustainability of social-ecological systems. Science
325(5939):419-422.
2012 Polycentric Systems: Multilevel Governance Involving a Diversity of Organizations.
In Global Environmental Commons: Analytical and Political Challenges in Building
Governance Mechanisms. E. Brousseau, T. Dedeurwaerdere, P.-A. Jouvet and M. Willinger
eds. pp. 105-125. Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press.
Published since 1877, Biographical Memoirs are brief biographies of deceased National Academy
of Sciences members, written by those who knew them or their work. These biographies provide
personal and scholarly views of America’s most distinguished researchers and a biographical history
of U.S. science. Biographical Memoirs are freely available online at www.nasonline.org/memoirs.
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