Exhibition Visionary Female Researchers: Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom is born Elinor Claire Awan on 7 August 1933 in Los Angeles.

Elinor Ostrom studies political science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and, after completing her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees there, graduates with a PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) in 1965. In her doctoral thesis, ‘Public Entrepreneurship: A Case Study in Ground Water Basin Management,’ she analyses strategies used by public companies to solve the problem of saltwater contamination of groundwater in Los Angeles.

In 1973, together with her husband Vincent Ostrom, she founds the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University in Bloomington, which is regarded worldwide as one of the most important centres for common property studies. Central to Ostrom's research is the question of how people organise themselves to solve complex problems collectively. She analyses how institutional rules affect the actions of individuals who are exposed to certain incentives, make decisions and influence each other in the process. Her particular achievement is that she identifies practical, fair and efficient solutions to these problems.

In 2006, she founds the Centre for the Study of Institutional Diversity (CSID) at Arizona State University as a sister institute to the workshop. Ostrom establishes international collaborations with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) in Bielefeld, the Faculty of Agriculture and Horticulture at Humboldt University in Berlin, and the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics in Stockholm, Sweden. She establishes herself worldwide as one of the leading researchers in the field of environmental economics. Her work focuses on the fishing industry, irrigation systems, forestry and pasture management, and, in later works, the issue of intellectual property.

She becomes internationally known primarily for her 1990 book Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, in which she addresses problems of collective action in the context of scarce natural resources that are used communally. Her research leads her to conclude that, in many cases, institutionalised local cooperation among those affected is superior to both state control and privatisation for the appropriate and sustainable management of local common resources.

Her magnum opus, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, is published in German in 1999 under the title “Die Verfassung der Allmende: Jenseits von Markt und Staat” (The Constitution of the Commons: Beyond Market and State). In this book, Ostrom succeeds in illustrating the complexity of satisfactory solutions to local resource problems and the inadequacy of simple recipes. She demonstrates that there are problems with common pool resources that could be solved without privatising these resources and without a solution imposed from above by a central government.

On 12 October 2009, she is awarded the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her work in the field of commons research.

Elinor Ostrom dies on 12 June 2012 at the age of 78 in Bloomington, Indiana. Just a few days later, on 29 June 2012, her husband Vincent Ostrom follows her at the age of 92. Their work is continued in the Elinor and Vincent Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, which consistently pursues the research tradition established by the couple.