Elinor Ostrom

Who was Elinor Ostrom?

Elinor Ostrom was a political scientist who looked before she judged. Ever since Garrett Hardin described the tragedy of the commons in 1968, shared land had been taken as lost unless it was divided up or run by the state. Ostrom looked at how people actually shared such land: in mountain villages, on coasts, in irrigation communities. Many of them had developed rules over generations by which they used pastures, forests, fishing grounds and water without destroying them.

From these observations she built a science of self-government. In 2009 she became the first woman to receive the Nobel prize in economics for it.

Her life

Elinor Ostrom was born on 7 August 1933 in Los Angeles and grew up during the years of the Great Depression. She graduated from Beverly Hills High School in 1951. At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) she studied political science and took her bachelor's degree in 1954. She then worked in offices for some years, last as an assistant personnel manager, before returning to the university: a master's degree followed in 1962 and her doctorate in 1965. Her dissertation dealt with the management of groundwater basins in California. Her very first research subject was thus a resource that many people use together.

In 1965 she came to Indiana University in Bloomington with her husband, the political scientist Vincent Ostrom. He was offered a professorship, she at first a visiting assistant professorship. From there she rose step by step: associate professor in 1969, full professor in 1974, chair of the political science department from 1980 to 1984 and from 1989 to 1990, and from 1991 Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science.

In 2006 she also founded the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University and directed it until her death. Elinor Ostrom died of cancer on 12 June 2012 in Bloomington, at the age of 78. The day before she died she was still writing to her co-authors about their ongoing research.

The Workshop in Bloomington

In 1973 Elinor and Vincent Ostrom founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. It began in a former fraternity house near the campus and was interdisciplinary from the start: researchers and students from different fields worked there together on institutions and forms of self-government. Elinor Ostrom led the Workshop with Vincent until 2009, then as senior research director. In 2012 the university named it after both of them; today it is called the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis.

In her first fifteen years or so in Bloomington, Ostrom studied police departments across the United States, large and small. Then she returned to the subject of her dissertation: resources that many people use together.

The answer to Hardin

In the journal Science Hardin had described a pasture open to all. Each herder gains the full benefit of one more animal, while the damage of overgrazing is shared by everyone. So each keeps adding animals until the pasture is ruined. As remedies Hardin saw private property or control by the state.

Ostrom asked a simple question: what do people who share a pasture, a forest or a fishing ground actually do? In Governing the Commons (1990) she gathered case studies from around the world and compared them. Her finding: many communities have kept shared resources over long periods without privatising them and without handing them to the state. Hardin's pasture had users, but no community, no rules and nobody watching over it. The commons Ostrom studied had all of these. Hardin himself conceded in 1998 that he should have written of the unmanaged commons.

Ostrom did not romanticise the commons. She also studied cases in which shared use had failed, and she warned against simple solutions meant for every place. In her Nobel lecture she said that "we should not be proposing panaceas".

Examples from around the world

Törbel in Valais. The mountain village of Törbel lies in Upper Valais above the town of Visp. The American anthropologist Robert Netting visited it in 1970 and 1971 and described it in Balancing on an Alp in 1981; Ostrom drew on his work. The village has used its alpine pastures and forests in common for centuries and has managed its irrigation channels since at least 1483. A rule of 1517 laid down that no one could send more cows to the alp than he could feed through the winter. In this way the hay from each household's own land limited the load on the shared pasture. Whoever takes water from the channels gives a few days of work each year to their upkeep.

Irrigation in Spain. In the huertas around Valencia, Murcia and Alicante, farmers have shared water for centuries by their own rules. In Valencia disputes are still settled by the Water Tribunal, which meets every Thursday at the Apostles' Door of the cathedral; its members are farmers elected by the irrigation communities. In 2009 UNESCO inscribed it, together with the Council of Wise Men of the plain of Murcia, on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Fishing in Alanya. On the south coast of Turkey the fishermen of Alanya allocate the named fishing spots by lot, and the boats move from spot to spot in turn, so that each comes to the productive places. The case had been studied by the ecologist Fikret Berkes. Ostrom used it to show how users invent rules themselves that settle the dispute over the best places.

Her book also includes the common lands of the Japanese villages Hirano, Nagaike and Yamanoka and the groundwater basins of southern California, her own first field of research.

The eight design principles

From such cases Ostrom drew eight features that long-lived commons share. In our words:

1. Clear boundaries. It is clear who may use the resource and where it ends.
2. Rules that fit the place. What users take and what they contribute suit local conditions and stand in proportion to each other.
3. A say for those affected. Most of those bound by the rules can take part in changing them.
4. Monitoring. Someone watches the state of the resource and the conduct of its users, and is accountable to them.
5. Graduated sanctions. A first breach is met mildly, repeated breaches more firmly.
6. Quick settlement of disputes. Conflicts can be resolved locally, fast and at low cost.
7. Recognition. Outside authorities do not deny the users the right to make their own rules.
8. Nested layers. Larger systems are organised in several layers, with small local units at the base.

Ostrom understood these principles as patterns drawn from observation. They describe what successful commons have in common and do not prescribe to any community what its rules must look like in detail. They are explained at length in the article on the commons.

The Nobel prize and later work

On 12 October 2009 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Elinor Ostrom would receive the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons. She shared it with Oliver E. Williamson. Ostrom was the first woman to receive the prize and the first member of the Indiana University faculty to do so. She gave her Nobel lecture under the title Beyond Markets and States. In it she described a polycentric order, in which many centres of decision exist side by side at different levels.

Her view widened from land to new resources. In 2007 she edited Understanding Knowledge as a Commons with Charlotte Hess and asked the same questions of knowledge: who may use it, who maintains it and which rules protect it. In 2010 she and Vincent received Indiana University's University Medal, and in 2012 Time magazine named her among the hundred most influential people.

Ostrom and permaculture

Ostrom did not belong to the permaculture movement, yet her work touches one of its cores. In the language of permaculture, commons are invisible structures: rules about land, decisions and knowledge that appear on no plan and still decide whether a pasture, a spring or a seed collection lasts.

Her principles can be read together with several ideas of permaculture. Monitoring and graduated sanctions are feedback loops of the kind described by the principle apply self-regulation and accept feedback. The say of those affected is what methods such as sociocracy try to secure within a group. Community supported agriculture, in which a farm and a group of households share harvest and risk, faces the same questions Ostrom asked: who belongs, who contributes what and how decisions are made together. And the fair share among the three ethics of permaculture finds in the commons one of its oldest forms.

What we learn from Elinor Ostrom

Terra Humana takes from Elinor Ostrom first of all her attitude: look first, then judge. She trusted the people on the ground a great deal and tested assumptions against real places. That is also the core of the principle observe and interact.

We also take her warning against panaceas. What works on a slope in the Alps need not work elsewhere; rules for land and water have to fit this land and these people. And we take her idea that knowledge, too, is a commons. What we learn about soil, water and plants we share openly, so that others can build on it.