Elinor Ostrom
Research Professor
Founding Director, Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity
Ph.D., Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles
Member, National Academy of Sciences
Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science
SHESC Themes: Global Dynamics and Regional Interactions, Societies and their Natural Environments
Field Specializations: Complex Adaptive Systems, Global Change, Human Environmental Interaction, Institutional Analysis, Quantitative Methods, Political Economy
Regional Focus: International
Contact: Elinor Ostrom
Research:
As a political economist, Elinor Ostrom has studied how institutions—conceptualized as sets of rules—affect the incentives of individuals interacting in repetitive and structured situations. Ostrom and her colleagues at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University developed the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, which enables them to analyze diversely structured markets, hierarchies, common-property regimes and local public economies using a common set of universal components. Large-scale studies of urban public economies demonstrated that systems composed of a few large-scale producers of services, such as forensic laboratories and training academies, combined with a large number of autonomous direct service producers (such as crime and traffic patrol) perform more effectively at a metropolitan level than a few consolidated producers. More recent empirical studies in the field and in the experimental laboratory have challenged the presumption that individuals jointly using a common-pool resource would inexorably be led to overuse, if not destroy, the resource. The design principles characterizing robust self-governed resource systems have been identified. An initial theory of institutional change has been formulated and is being tested.
Teaching:
Ostrom's teaching includes institutions, society and the environment.
Select Publications:
Ostrom, E. & Poteete, A. (2008). Fifteen years of empirical research on collective action in natural resource management: Struggling to build large-N databases based on qualitative research. World Development, 36(1), 176-195.
Hess, C. & Ostrom, E. (Eds.) (2007). Understanding knowledge as a commons: From theory to practice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Ostrom, E. (2007). Challenges and growth: The development of the interdisciplinary field of institutional analysis. Journal of Institutional Economics, 3(3), 239-264.
Ostrom, E., Guha-Khasnobis, B. & Kanbur, R. (Eds.) (2006). Linking the formal and informal economy: Concepts and policies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ostrom, E. & Nagendra, H. (2006). Insights on linking forests, trees, and people from the air, on the ground, and in the laboratory. Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103(51), 19224-19231.
Ostrom, E. (2005). Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
