Before you read on: Elinor Ostrom studied communities that share pastures, forests and fishing grounds. What did she find in many of them?
Ostrom found many communities that had enforced their own rules for centuries, against the view that shared resources must be privatised or state-run.
- Lived
- Born 7 August 1933 in Los Angeles; died 12 June 2012 in Bloomington, Indiana
- Nationality
- American
- Work
- Political scientist (PhD, UCLA, 1965); Indiana University from 1965, where she co-founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis with her husband, Vincent Ostrom, in 1973
- Key works
- Governing the Commons (1990) and Understanding Institutional Diversity (2005)
- Prize
- Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, 2009, shared with Oliver Williamson, for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons; the first woman to win it
- Field
- How groups govern shared resources
What Ostrom was reacting to
In 1968 the ecologist Garrett Hardin published The Tragedy of the Commons in the journal Science. Picture herders sharing a pasture. Each gains the full benefit of adding one more animal, while the cost of overgrazing is shared by all. So each keeps adding animals until the pasture is ruined.
Hardin's argument led many to conclude that a shared resource needs one of two fixes: private property or state control. Ostrom questioned both and studied how real communities had handled the problem.
Ostrom's key ideas
Can you name Ostrom's four key ideas?
Shared resources such as fisheries, pastures and groundwater. It is hard to keep users out, and what one takes leaves less for the rest.
Can you think of an example?
Ostrom's PhD studied a groundwater basin under coastal Los Angeles. Over-pumping let seawater seep in, and the water users above it, from cities to private firms, worked out ways to cooperate to stop it.
Users of a resource can set and enforce their own rules, with no private owner or central government. Ostrom saw this as a third way beside markets and the state.
Can you think of an example?
Ostrom compared studies of a Swiss alpine village and several Japanese villages that owned grazing land and forest in common. Village rules set when and how much each household could use, and they held for centuries.
Features that Ostrom found in commons that had lasted a long time. In Governing the Commons she listed eight, including clear boundaries, rules that users help to make, and monitors who answer to the users.
Can you think of an example?
Graduated sanctions: someone caught taking too much is fined lightly at first and more heavily for repeat offences.
Many governing bodies working at different scales, instead of a single authority at the top. Vincent Ostrom and colleagues introduced the idea in 1961.
Can you think of an example?
In the 1970s experts wanted to merge small police forces. Ostrom's team studied 80 metropolitan areas and found small and medium forces often did better on patrol than large ones.