Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

Elinor Ostrom was born in 1933, in Los Angeles, California. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1954, and she later returned to UCLA for both her MA (1962) and PhD (1965) in political science. When she was in graduate school, the water basin cases mentioned in Governing the Commons were being litigated and resolved, which helped shape the trajectory of her research interests.

Ostrom spent most of her academic career as a professor of political science at Indiana University, where she and her husband, the political economist Vincent Ostrom, founded the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. She was also the first president of the International Association for the Study of the Commons, founded in 1989. 

Ostrom’s focus on small-scale common pool resources (CPRs) challenged conventional academic theories at the time, as her research demonstrated that appropriators in some cases were able to resolve CPR problems and prevent depletion of the resource without privatization or the external intervention of governmental authorities. Her research garnered many awards throughout her career, including the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award for Political Economy, the William H. Riker Prize in Political Science, and the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, among other honors.