Elinor Ostrom

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Lore & Background

Elinor Claire Awan was born in Los Angeles, California, as the only child of Leah Hopkins, a musician, and Adrian Awan, a set designer. Her parents separated early in her life, and Elinor lived with her mother most of the time. She attended a Protestant church with her mother and often spent weekends with her father's Jewish family. Growing up in the post-Depression era to divorced artisans, Ostrom described herself as a "poor kid." Her major recreational activity was swimming, where she eventually joined a swimming team and swam competitively until she started teaching swimming to earn funds to help put herself through college. She attended UCLA, receiving a B.A. with honors in political science in 1954, graduating in three years by attending multiple summer sessions and extra classes. After graduation, she had trouble finding a job because employers presumed she was only looking for jobs as a teacher or secretary. She began a job as an export clerk after taking a correspondence course for shorthand, which she later found helpful when taking notes in face-to-face interviews on research projects. After a year, she obtained a position as assistant personnel manager in a business firm that had never before hired a woman in anything but a secretarial position. This job inspired her to think about attending graduate-level courses and eventually applying for a research assistantship and admission to a Ph.D. program. Lacking any math from her undergraduate education and trigonometry from high school, she was consequently rejected for an economics Ph.D. program at UCLA. She was admitted to UCLA's graduate program in political science, where she was awarded an M.A. in 1962 and a Ph.D. in 1965. The teams of graduate students she was involved with were analyzing the political economic effects of a group of groundwater basins in Southern California. Specifically, Ostrom was assigned to look at the West Basin. She found it is very difficult to manage a common-pool resource when it is used between individuals. The locals were pumping too much groundwater and salt water seeped into the basin. Ostrom was impressed with how people from conflicting and overlapping jurisdictions who depended on that source found incentives to settle contradictions and solve the problem. She made the study of this collaboration the topic of her dissertation, laying the foundation for the study of "shared resources."

Reader's Guide

Ostrom is probably best known for revisiting the so-called "tragedy of the commons" – a conjecture proposed by biologist Garrett Hardin in 1968. In an article by the same name published in the journal Science, Hardin theorized that if each herdsman sharing a piece of common grazing land made the individually rational economic decision of increasing the number of cattle he keeps on the land, the collective effect would deplete or destroy the commons. Ostrom believes that the "tragedy" in such situations isn't inevitable, as Hardin thought. Instead, if the herders decide to cooperate with one another, monitoring each other's use of the land and enforcing rules for managing it, they can avoid the tragedy. Based on her fieldwork, her book Governing the Commons demonstrates that there are practical algorithms for the collective use of a limited common resource, which solve the many issues with both government/regulation driven solutions and market-based ones. In 1973, Ostrom 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, her institutional approach to public policy, known as the Institutional analysis and development framework, 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. Elinor Ostrom was a dedicated scholar until the very end of her life; on the day before she died, she sent e-mail messages to at least two different sets of coauthors about papers that she was writing with them.

Did You Know?

• Ostrom was the first woman to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, awarded in 2009.
• She graduated from UCLA in three years by attending multiple summer sessions and extra classes.
• She was rejected for an economics Ph.D. program at UCLA because she lacked math and trigonometry, so she earned her Ph.D. in political science instead.
• On the day before she died, she sent e-mail messages to at least two different sets of coauthors about papers she was writing with them.
• Her dissertation studied how people from conflicting jurisdictions in Southern California's West Basin cooperated to solve groundwater saltwater seepage.