Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom was a Nobel Prize winning political scientist and economist. She was

 also a professor and a lead researcher for the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural 

Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program (SANFREM CRISP). 

Ostrom was born during the Great Depression on August 7, 1933 in Los Angeles, 

California. She was raised as a “poor kid” to divorced artisans in conjunction with the 

wealthy kids in Beverly Hills, her surrounding neighborhood. A hobby she adopted as a 

child was swimming. This hobby grew into a passion, and Ostrom began to swim 

competitively on teams and later became a swim teacher. Money from teaching funded 

her schooling at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she received 

her B.A. in political science in 1954.

A woman pursuing work within economics was controversial during the 1950s. Ostrom 

faced gender discrimination at UCLA, and only took her first economics course in the 

final year of her undergraduate career. She was rejected from UCLA’s Ph.D. program in 

economics due to lack of math courses, but was admitted to the political science 

program where she earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in 1962 and 1965 respectively. As a 

graduate student, Ostrom met both her husband Vincent Ostrom and her interest in 

economic governance of common pool resources, or “the commons”.

Complementing her formal political science education, Ostrom’s research incorporated 

economic principles such rational choice theory to support both public choice and 

ecological conservation. The work that Ostrom produced was not well-supported within 

the social sciences at the time as it starkly contrasted economist William Forster 

Lloyd’s assertion of “the tragedy of the commons”. In his essay published in 1833, 

Lloyd argued that collectively used natural resources would be destroyed by individuals 

acting in self-interest. His argument implied the necessity of central authorities and/or 

private ownership in managing natural resources. This notion was still widely accepted 

nearly 130 years later. Ostrom, however, used case studies to demonstrate that 

ordinary citizens could sustainably govern common pool resources with neither the use 

of privatization or the intervention of central authorities.

Ostrom’s work also contradicted the work of a popular ecologists including Garrett 

Hardin.  Hardin, a Eugenicist and welfare-state opponent, widely advocated for abortion 

rights and population control. He incorporated the “tragedy of the commons” in his 

ecological work and maintained the Malthusian theory, arguing that overpopulation and 

overconsumption were threatening the planet. Nevertheless, Elinor Ostrom found that 

rational actors could manage finite resources in ways that supported ecological 

conversation. 

Ostrom’s discovery was made using dozens of fieldwork cases in which she examined 

the use and management of communal resources such as irrigation systems in Nepal 

and Spain, fisheries in Indonesia and Maine, and villages in Switzerland and Japan. 

Ostrom found that these communities of ordinary individuals were absolutely capable of 

organizing and managing “the commons”. The case studies founded Ostrom’s Law: 8 

governing features of successful management of “the commons”. Her studies of these 

successful co-operative systems made her the first and only woman to ever receive the 

Nobel Prize in economics and ignited a resurgence in the discussion of political economy.
Her assessment of property rights is yet significant in civil law.