Elinor Clair Awan was born in Los Angeles, California in the United States, and grew up in a family of simple means. She studied political science at the University of California Los Angeles, where she also received her PhD in 1965. She later went on to work at Indiana University in Bloomington. Elinor Ostrom has also been affiliated with Arizona State University in Tempe and Virginia Tech. She married fellow political scientist Vincent Ostrom in 1963. Initially, she worked primarily on studying the role of public decisions and choices in the case of the production of useful goods and services. Later, Ostrom began to study the interaction of people with ecosystems in relation to providing a long-term scheme for maintaining a large 'crop yield' of useful resources. In 2009 Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics. In October 2011, Ostrom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and it was from this disease that She died. Elinor Ostrom died on June 12, 2012.
Countribution
Ostrom challenged the view that there are only 2 management options for public property - public or private - and suggested paying attention to the 3rd option-collective.
Ostrom was awarded the accolade for her research analyzing economic governance, with a focus on managing finite resources, referred to as "commons," within a community. It was long unanimously held among economists that natural resources that were collectively used by their users would be over-exploited and destroyed in the long-term. Elinor Ostrom disproved this idea by conducting field studies on how people in small, local communities manage shared natural resources, such as pastures, fishing waters, and forests. She showed that when natural resources are jointly used by their users, in time, rules are established for how these are to be cared for and used in a way that is both economically and ecologically sustainable.
Elinor Ostrom demonstrated that common-pool resources can be effectively managed collectively, without government or private control.
Bibliography
- 1990 - Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-40599-7.
- 1993 - Institutional incentives and sustainable development: infrastructure policies in perspective. Boulder: Westview Press. ISBN 978-0-8133-1619-2. (With: Schroeder, Larry; Wynne, Susan)
- 1994 - Rules, games, and common-pool resources. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-06546-2. (With: Walker, James; Gardner, Roy)
- 2003 - Trust and reciprocity: interdisciplinary lessons from experimental research. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. ISBN 978-0-87154-647-0. (With: Walker, James)
- 2005 - Understanding institutional diversity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-12238-0.
- 2007 - Linking the formal and informal economy: concepts and policies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-923729-6. (With: Kanbur, Ravi; Guha-Khasnobis, Basudeb)
- 2007 - Understanding knowledge as a commons: from theory to practice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-51603-7. (With: Hess, Charlotte)
- 2009 – (Chapters in books) "Engaging with impossibilities and possibilities", in Kanbur, Ravi; Basu, Kaushik (eds.), Arguments for a better world: essays in honor of Amartya Sen | Volume II: Society, institutions and development, Oxford New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 522–541, ISBN 978-0-19-923997-9.
Source list
1. Elinor Ostrom – Biographical. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2020. Sun. 1 Nov 2020. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2009/ostrom/biographical/
2. Jessop, Bob. "Introduction to Elinor Ostrom". Beyond Ostrom. Retrieved October 30, 2020.
3. "Elinor Ostrom, 2009 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences: Indiana University". www.elinorostrom.com. Retrieved October 30, 2020.