<nettime> Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012)

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Elinor Ostrom Remembered (1933-2012)

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

http://bollier.org/blog/elinor-ostrom-remembered-1933-2012

The world lost a brave, creative mind when Elinor Ostrom died this 
morning from cancer.  She was 78, a professor at Indiana University, and 
the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, in 
2009.  Without her pioneering work and global outreach, it’s doubtful 
that the commons would have survived the “tragedy of the commons” myth 
that Garrett Hardin inflicted on it in 1968.  Nor would the commons have 
gone on to become a respected paradigm of governance, let alone an 
orienting framework for the current surge of commons policy advocacy and 
social activism.

In the 1970s, economics was quickly veering into a kind of religious 
fundamentalism.  It was a discipline obsessed with “rational 
individualism,” private property rights and markets even though the 
universe of meaningful human activity is much broader and complex.  Lin 
Ostrom pioneered a different, more humanistic way of thinking about “the 
economy” and resource management.  She originally focused on property 
rights and “common-pool resources,” collective resources over which no 
one has private property rights or exclusive control, such as fishers, 
grazing lands and groundwater.  This work later evolved into a broader 
study of the commons as a rich, cross-cultural socio-ecological 
paradigm.  Working within the social sciences, Ostrom proceeded to build 
a new school of thought within the standard economic narrative while 
extending it in vital ways.    Professor Elinor Ostrom. Photo courtesy 
of Indiana University.

As important, Ostrom built a global network of colleagues and a vast 
literature that explores how people can actually cooperate in managing 
resources.  At Indiana University, she and her husband, political 
scientist Vincent Ostrom, in 1973 founded the Workshop in Political 
Theory and Policy Analysis, a crucible for much seminal thinking about 
the commons.  Internationally, she helped start the International 
Association for the Study of the Commons, an academic network whose 
hundreds of members have developed a rich literature documenting 
how ordinary people create fair rules and institutions for managing 
shared resources in sustainable ways.  Much of this literature can be 
found at the Digital Library of the Commons, which is affiliated with 
the Workshop at Indiana University.

Eschewing the mathematical abstractions of conventional economists, 
Ostrom went out and did extensive field work in Africa, Asia and Latin 
America.  She came to see the on-the-ground realities of cooperation in 
their sovereign human dimensions, which then became the basis for her 
creative theorizing about how commons work and how they fail. That's 
largely why Ostrom's work has been so durable:  it's based on some 
hard-earned empirical observations.  Working from within economics but 
mindful of its limits, she enriched our vocabulary for understanding how 
humans can collaborate in effective, ongoing ways.

Lin Ostrom was active until the end.  Last month, Ostrom published a new 
book, with co-authors Amy R. Poteete and Marco A. Janssen, that takes on 
the “my method is better than yours, my discipline is better than yours” 
mentality, which she considered destructive.  The book, Working 
Together:  Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in 
Practice, describes the advantages of using several different research 
methods to study a problem.

I had the rare pleasure of meeting Lin Ostrom in October 2009 the 
weekend before she won the Nobel Prize.  I was speaking at a 
community-organized event, not an academic gathering, on the commons in 
Bloomington, Indiana, her hometown.  Here is how I reflected on Ostrom 
at the time:

    Perhaps because she is not an economist, Ostrom was able to see 
that free-market theories fail to explain many things of economic 
importance.  Perhaps because she is a woman, she was more attentive to 
the relational aspects of economic activity — the ways in which people 
interact and negotiate with each other to forge rules and informal 
social understandings.  The social, moral and political, she realized in 
the 1960s as a graduate student, may hold many important clues for how 
communities can govern themselves and manage collective resources. It’s 
not all about economics (as traditionally construed).

That 2009 blog post reviewed Ostrom’s brilliant career and her enormous 
contribution to the social science and economics of the commons.  But 
perhaps what I remember most was how remarkably gracious and generous 
Lin Ostrom was.  She never stood on ceremony or her credentials.  I 
think this sensibility and openness is what made Lin Ostrom so fertile 
as a thinker:  she was willing to engage openly with people and 
phenomena on their own terms.  Even after winning her Nobel Prize, 
Ostrom remained a down-to-earth colleague and fellow seeker.  After I 
gave a talk at the International Association for the Study of Commons 
conference in India last year, Lin was surrounded by TV camera crews in 
the Green Room, but managed to flash me a "thumbs up."

I later learned that she had had to dart off early from that conference 
to meet some grassroots organizations in Asia and then to meet with some 
top government officials, and then to make six other stops before 
getting home.  This was apparently her new routine after receiving her 
Nobel Prize.  At age 75, Ostrom intensified her travels and outreach 
around the world as if to make the most of her remaining time to educate 
yet another government ministry, another economics conference and 
another university gathering.  The comforting thought is that, among the 
thousands of people that she reached and the hundreds of colleagues that 
she worked with, her legacy is very much alive.




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