Dr. Elinor Ostrom was a pioneering political economist and the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009. Born in Los Angeles in 1933, she earned her BA, MA, and PhD in political science from UCLA, completing her doctorate in 1965 with a dissertation on groundwater basin management in California. That same year, she joined Indiana University Bloomington as a visiting assistant professor, where she would remain for 47 years, rising to become the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science. Despite facing skepticism as a woman entering academia, she established herself as a vital member of the political science department, serving as department chair from 1980-1984 and again from 1989-1990.
Dr. Ostrom's groundbreaking research fundamentally challenged the prevailing 'tragedy of the commons' theory by demonstrating how communities can successfully self-organize to manage shared resources without top-down regulation or privatization. Her seminal book 'Governing the Commons,' published in 1990, synthesized decades of fieldwork studying irrigation systems in Spain and the Philippines, mountain villages in Switzerland and Japan, and fisheries in Nova Scotia and Indonesia. Through rigorous empirical analysis, she identified design principles that enable successful collective action and resource management, fundamentally reshaping scholarly understanding of institutional arrangements for common-pool resources. Her early work on police industries across the United States revealed how multiple small and medium-sized departments often outperformed larger centralized units in service delivery.
The profound impact of Dr. Ostrom's scholarship was recognized with the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, cementing her legacy as one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century. She co-founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University in 1973, creating an academic environment where students and scholars collaborated across disciplines to study institutional analysis and collective action. Inspired by her woodworking apprenticeship, she designed the Workshop as a space where researchers could learn through collaboration, much like artisans in a craft workshop. Dr. Ostrom's commitment to mentoring students and fostering collaborative scholarship created a lasting intellectual community that continues to advance her pioneering work on sustainable resource management worldwide.
