Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012)

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