Announcements
Elinor Ostrom
1933–2012
Resolution of Respect
Elinor “Lin” Ostrom, nee Awan, was born on 7 August 1933 in Los Angeles, California. She received
a B.A. (with honors), in 1954, an M.A. in 1962, and a Ph.D. in 1965, all in Political Science from the
University of California at Los Angeles. She married political scientist Vincent Ostrom in 1963, and
they moved to Bloomington, Indiana, to join the faculty of the Department of Government at Indiana
University in 1965. Dr. Ostrom began her academic career with an appointment as a Visiting Assistant
Professor, and the following year received a tenure-track appointment. She and Vincent established the
Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University in 1973, where she served as
Co-Director until 2009. She was appointed as a Full Professor in 1974, Arthur F. Bentley Professor of
Political Science in 1991, and Distinguished Professor in 2010. She was a co-founder of the Center for
the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change (CIPEC) in 1996 and served as Co-
Director until 2006. She died of pancreatic cancer on 12 June 2012, at the age of 78. She was survived
by Vincent, who passed away two weeks later.
Dr. Ostrom’s research examined the use of collective action and cooperation in the management of
common pool resources (CPR) by using a comprehensive, institutional analysis approach. Common
pool resources that she and colleagues studied include forests, fisheries, grazing lands, and irrigation
systems. She carefully analyzed the “tragedy of the commons” concept as initially developed by Garrett
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Hardin. Although this concept is intuitively appealing to many, she and her co-workers in numerous,
detailed field studies of various natural resource systems found little in support of that concept. Dr.
Ostrom
1
identified eight “design principles” of stable local common pool resource management: (1)
clearly defined boundaries allowing effective exclusion of external unentitled parties; (2) clearly
developed and defined rules regarding the appropriation and provision of common resources that are
adapted to local conditions; (3) collective-choice arrangements allowing most parties-at-interest to
participate in decision-making processes; (4) effective monitoring of the resources; (5) various sanctions
for resource users who violate community rules; (6) effective mechanisms of conflict resolution; (7)
self-determination of the community, recognized by higher-level authorities; and (8) in the case of larger
common-pool resources, organizations with multiple layers of nested enterprises, with small local CPRs
at the base.
Dr. Ostrom had friends and colleagues literally around the world, and she always asked everyone
to call her Lin. She always insisted on using an interdisciplinary approach to her research and worked
closely in teams with members having different academic backgrounds, such as anthropology, ecology,
economics, geography, and political science. She also always insisted on using careful, empirical
analysis of both the natural resource itself (e.g., “forest conditions”),
2
and also of those who used the
resource. She was quick to incorporate new analytical approaches and tools, such as complex models,
geographic information systems, and remotely sensed imagery into her research. Lin was an outstanding
mentor to doctoral students, post-doctoral students and other young scholars. Everyone who worked with
her benefited tremendously both from her astonishing intellect and her friendly, positive, unassuming
personality. She travelled extensively and often would make a comment to a doctoral student, something
like: “I will be in Melbourne next Wednesday and then on to Bangkok, but I will be back in time for your
defense.” Serving on doctoral research committees with her was always a delight, because everyone
came away from meetings with new knowledge and a wonderful feeling of synthesis and cooperation.
In 2009 Dr. Ostrom was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of
Alfred Nobel, which she shared with Oliver E. Williamson, for “her analysis of economic governance,
especially the commons.” She was the first, and to date the only, woman to win the Nobel Prize in this
category. Dr. Ostrom was elected as a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in
1991. She served as president of the American Political Science Association in 1996–1997. In 1999
she became the first woman to receive the prestigious Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science. She was
awarded the John J. Carty Award from the National Academy of Sciences in 2004, and received the
James Madison Award from the American Political Science Association in 2005. The Ecological Society
of America’s Sustainability Science Award was given at the ESA Annual Meeting in Montreal in 2005
to Thomas Dietz, Elinor Ostrom, and Paul Stern for their paper, The Struggle to Govern the Commons.
3
Other awards and accomplishments are also quite notable. In April 2012, Lin was named to the
Time 100,
Time magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In July 2012,
The Economist magazine published her obituary. In addition to the awards mentioned above, she
has received 32 titles or awards. Dr. Ostrom has had Honorary Doctorates conferred upon her by 12
universities. She has served as Project Director, Principal Investigator, or Co-Principal Investigator for
35 major, externally funded research projects. She has authored or co-authored 30 books, including
edited volumes, and 325 articles.
Announcements
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Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America
Lin always enjoyed interacting with ecologists and involved one or more ecologists in her CPR
projects. A recent article
4
provides some tangible evidence. She had a high regard for the Ecological
Society of America and was a member since 2005.
Footnotes
1
Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: the evolution of institutions for collective
action.
Cambridge
University Press,
Cambridge, UK. ISBN 0-521-40599-8.
2
Moran, Emilio F., and Elinor Ostrom, editors. 1995. Seeing the forest and the trees: human–
environment interactions in forest ecosystems
. MIT Press, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. ISBN
0-262-63312-4.
3
Dietz, Thomas, Elinor Ostrom, and Paul Stern. 2003. The struggle to govern the Commons.
Science 302(5652):1907–1912.
4
DeFries, Ruth, Erle Ellis, F. Stuart Chapin, III, Pamela Matson, B. L. Turner II, Arun Agrawal,
Paul Crutzen, Chris Field, Peter Gleick, Peter Kareiva, Eric Lambin, Diana Liverman, Elinor
Ostrom, Pedro Sanchez, and James Syvitski. 2012. Planetary opportunities: a social contract for
global change science to contribute to a sustainable future. BioScience 62(6):603–606.
Announcements
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