All Thinkers

Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012) was an American political economist. She was born in Los Angeles and grew up during the Great Depression, a period of severe economic hardship in the United States. She studied political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and spent most of her career at Indiana University, where she co-founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. In 2009 she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics. She received it for her work on how communities manage shared resources: things like forests, fisheries, water systems, and grazing land that many people depend on and that can be damaged if anyone takes too much. The standard economic view was that shared resources would always be destroyed by overuse, the so-called tragedy of the commons. Ostrom showed, through decades of careful fieldwork and research across many countries, that this was wrong. Communities around the world had developed their own rules and institutions for managing shared resources sustainably, without privatisation and without government control. She died in 2012, still working.

Origin
United States
Lifespan
1933-2012
Era
20th-21st century
Subjects
Political Economy Institutional Economics Environmental Governance Commons Collective Action
Skills
Environmental Thinking Citizenship Systems Thinking Financial Literacy Research Skills
Why They Matter

Ostrom matters because she challenged one of the most influential and damaging ideas in economics: that shared resources inevitably collapse because individuals always act in self-interest. This idea, known as the tragedy of the commons, was used to justify privatising shared resources or putting them under government control. Ostrom went out into the world and looked at what actually happened. She found that communities in many countries, from Swiss mountain villages to Japanese coastal fisheries to irrigation systems in Spain, had successfully managed shared resources for centuries through their own collectively developed rules and institutions. She did not find this by sitting in an office and building mathematical models: she found it by talking to real people in real places and taking their knowledge seriously. Her work matters beyond economics: it shows that human beings are capable of genuine cooperation and collective self-governance, and that the standard economic picture of human beings as purely self-interested is wrong.

Key Ideas
1
The tragedy of the commons: the standard view
In 1968, an ecologist named Garrett Hardin published a famous essay called The Tragedy of the Commons. He argued that any resource shared by a community, such as a shared pasture, a fishery, or a water supply, will eventually be destroyed. His logic was: every individual has an incentive to take as much as possible, because they get the full benefit of what they take but share the cost of overuse with everyone else. If everyone thinks this way, the resource will be overused until it is gone. This argument was very influential. It was used to justify privatising shared resources or putting them under government control. Ostrom showed it was based on a false assumption about how people actually behave.
2
Communities can manage shared resources sustainably
Ostrom spent decades studying real cases of shared resource management around the world. She found that many communities had successfully managed forests, fisheries, water systems, and grazing land for generations, without privatising them and without relying on government control. In the Swiss Alps, villages had managed shared forests and grazing land sustainably for centuries. In Japan, coastal communities had managed shared fisheries. In Spain, farmers had maintained shared irrigation systems for hundreds of years. These communities had developed their own rules, institutions, and enforcement systems that kept the resources healthy for everyone.
3
The design principles for successful commons
After studying many cases of successful and unsuccessful common resource management, Ostrom identified a set of design principles that tended to appear in systems that worked well. These included: clear boundaries about who is in the community and what resource they share; rules that fit the local conditions; those affected by the rules can participate in changing them; there is a system for monitoring compliance; sanctions for those who break the rules, starting with small penalties; and mechanisms for resolving disputes. Communities that had these features tended to manage their resources sustainably; those that lacked them tended to struggle.
Key Quotations
"A lot of models in economics assume that human beings are fundamentally selfish. But the evidence shows that many people cooperate and share, even when they could get away with not doing so."
— Various interviews
Ostrom is making a fundamental point about human nature that challenges standard economic theory. The tragedy of the commons argument assumes that people always act in narrow self-interest. Ostrom's fieldwork showed something different: in many communities, people cooperated to manage shared resources fairly, even when they could have taken more without being caught. Human beings are capable of genuine cooperation, fairness, and concern for the long-term health of the communities they are part of. This more accurate picture of human nature is the foundation of her alternative to the tragedy of the commons.
"The people who are involved in a resource problem are often the best ones to solve it, if they are given the chance."
— Various interviews and lectures
Ostrom is making an argument about knowledge, legitimacy, and the right to self-governance. The people who depend on a shared resource, who live with it every day, who understand its behaviour and its limits, often have more relevant knowledge than outside experts or government officials. They also have more at stake: their livelihoods and communities depend on the resource being managed well. Giving them the power to develop and enforce their own rules is not only more democratic but often more effective. This is a challenge to top-down expert management of environmental and social problems.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Environmental Thinking When introducing the challenge of managing shared resources
How to introduce
Introduce the tragedy of the commons with a simple scenario: imagine a shared fishing lake that everyone in a village can fish from. If everyone takes as many fish as possible, the fish will run out and everyone loses. Ask: what should be done? After hearing ideas, introduce the three standard options: privatise it, put it under government control, or let the community manage it together. Then introduce Ostrom: she found that the community option often worked best, and she discovered what made it succeed.
Citizenship When discussing community self-governance
How to introduce
Introduce Ostrom's finding: communities around the world have successfully managed shared resources for generations through their own rules and institutions. Ask: can you think of examples of community self-governance in your own experience? How does your school or community manage shared spaces or resources? What makes some of these systems work and others fail? Connect to Ostrom's design principles: who participates in making the rules? How are they enforced? What happens when someone breaks them?
Further Reading

For a short accessible introduction

Ostrom's Nobel Prize lecture, available freely on the Nobel Prize website, is a clear and engaging statement of her main findings.

For her key text

Governing the Commons (1990, Cambridge University Press) is the foundational work, and the first two chapters are accessible without specialist knowledge. David Bollier's Think Like a Commoner (2014, New Society Publishers) is an accessible popular introduction to the commons framework.

Key Ideas
1
Neither privatisation nor state control is always the answer
The standard view in economics offered two solutions to the tragedy of the commons: either privatise the resource, giving individuals ownership and therefore an incentive to protect their own property, or put the resource under government control, using regulation to prevent overuse. Ostrom showed that both of these solutions failed in many contexts, and that a third option, community self-governance, often worked better. She argued that the best solution depends on the specific context: the nature of the resource, the community, and the history of the place. There is no one-size-fits-all answer.
2
Local knowledge and adaptive management
One of Ostrom's most important findings was that local knowledge is essential for managing shared resources well. Communities that had lived with a resource for generations developed detailed knowledge of its behaviour, its seasonal patterns, and the signs of overuse. Rules developed from this local knowledge, by the people who depended on the resource, tended to work much better than rules imposed from outside by governments or experts who did not have this knowledge. This finding connects to Robin Wall Kimmerer's argument about the value of Indigenous ecological knowledge and challenges the assumption that expert knowledge from outside is always superior.
3
Polycentric governance: multiple centres of decision-making
Ostrom developed the concept of polycentric governance: the idea that complex problems are often best addressed not by a single centralised authority but by multiple overlapping institutions at different scales, each handling what it is best suited to handle. Local communities manage local resources. Regional bodies coordinate between communities. National governments set broader rules. International agreements handle global issues. Each level has its own legitimacy and its own appropriate sphere. This is very different from the standard view that complex problems require centralised expert management. It is also a more democratic and more resilient way of organising governance.
Key Quotations
"Designing institutions to force people to act in the general interest is usually a failure."
— Governing the Commons, 1990
Ostrom is making a point about the limits of top-down institutional design. When governments or experts design rules to make people behave in the general interest, those rules often fail because they do not fit the local context, they are not understood or accepted by the people they govern, and they lack the legitimacy that comes from people having a voice in making them. Rules that people have participated in making, that reflect their knowledge of local conditions, and that they have agreed are fair, are much more likely to be followed and enforced.
"What we have ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of real involvement of the people affected."
— Nobel Prize lecture, 2009
In her Nobel lecture, Ostrom made this point directly to the international community of economists and policymakers. Standard economic and policy approaches had ignored the capacity of ordinary citizens to manage their own shared resources. By doing so, they had dismissed a huge amount of practical wisdom and institutional knowledge, and had imposed inappropriate solutions on communities that already had better ones. Taking citizens seriously, giving them genuine power over the resources they depend on, was not just a matter of justice but of practical effectiveness.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Systems Thinking When analysing how complex social-ecological systems work
How to introduce
Introduce polycentric governance: the idea that complex problems need responses at multiple scales simultaneously. Ask: take a specific environmental problem, such as managing a river that flows through several countries. Who should be responsible: local communities along the river? National governments? An international body? Ostrom would say: all of them, each handling what they are best suited to handle. Ask: what are the advantages of this approach? What are its difficulties? How do the different levels coordinate?
Financial Literacy When discussing alternatives to markets and governments
How to introduce
Introduce the standard economic view that the only two options for managing resources are markets (private ownership) and governments (public control). Ostrom showed a third option: community governance. Ask: can you think of resources in your community that are managed by the community itself, rather than by private owners or the government? What makes this possible? What are the conditions under which community management works well?
Research Skills When discussing how to do research that takes local knowledge seriously
How to introduce
Introduce Ostrom's method: rather than building mathematical models in an office, she went out and talked to real people managing real resources in real places, and took their knowledge seriously. Ask: what difference does it make to research if you treat local knowledge as genuinely valuable rather than as anecdote? Connect to Robin Wall Kimmerer's argument about Indigenous ecological knowledge. Ask: whose knowledge counts in research? How do you ensure that the people most affected by a problem have their knowledge taken seriously?
Further Reading

Governing the Commons (1990, Cambridge University Press) is the primary text.

For polycentric governance

Ostrom's essay Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems (her Nobel lecture, published in the American Economic Review 2010) is the most accessible statement of her mature framework.

For applications

Jonathan Rowe's Our Common Wealth (2013, Berrett-Koehler) applies Ostrom's framework to a wide range of shared resources from the internet to the atmosphere.

Key Ideas
1
The importance of trust and social capital
Ostrom found that successful commons management depended heavily on trust and what social scientists call social capital: the networks of relationships, shared norms, and accumulated reputation that allow people to cooperate with each other. Communities in which people trusted each other, knew each other over long periods, and had developed shared norms of fairness were much better at managing shared resources than communities where these things were absent. This finding challenges purely economic approaches to resource management: the solution to collective action problems is not only better incentive structures but stronger communities.
2
Institutional diversity: no single solution
One of Ostrom's most important contributions was her insistence on institutional diversity: the recognition that different communities, in different contexts, with different histories and resources, need different institutional arrangements. There is no single best way to manage a fishery, a forest, or a water supply. The right institutions are those developed by and for the specific community in its specific context. This argument for institutional diversity is a powerful challenge to the tendency of international development organisations, governments, and economists to impose single solutions, whether privatisation or state control, across very different contexts.
3
Commons and climate change
Ostrom's framework is directly relevant to the challenge of climate change, which is the largest commons problem in history. The atmosphere is a shared resource that everyone uses and everyone affects. Ostrom's analysis suggests that addressing climate change requires what she called a polycentric approach: many different actors at many different scales, from local communities to national governments to international agreements, each taking responsibility for what they can address. She was sceptical of waiting for a single global agreement and argued for many parallel initiatives at different levels, which was a controversial position in climate policy debates.
Key Quotations
"There is no reason to believe that bureaucrats and politicians have better information than the people on the ground."
— Various interviews
Ostrom is making a challenge to the assumption that expertise and authority flow from the centre to the local. Government officials and technical experts often assume that their training and their access to large-scale data gives them better knowledge than local communities. Ostrom's research showed that local people often had knowledge that no amount of data collection from outside could replicate: knowledge of specific places, seasonal patterns, community dynamics, and the history of how a resource had been managed and mismanaged. This local knowledge is often invisible to outside experts precisely because it is not written down or formalised.
"I always find it interesting that people want simple answers to very complex problems. Complexity is what we have to deal with."
— Various interviews
Ostrom is making a methodological and practical point. The standard solutions to resource management problems, privatise it or give it to the government, were appealing precisely because they were simple. Ostrom's research showed that reality was more complicated: what worked depended on the specific features of the resource, the community, and the context. Simple solutions applied uniformly across different contexts often made things worse. She argued for taking complexity seriously rather than reducing it to a formula, which is a harder but more honest approach to understanding and solving real problems.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Nutrition and Food Systems When discussing the governance of food and agricultural resources
How to introduce
Apply Ostrom's framework to food systems. Many of the resources that food production depends on, water, soil, fisheries, seed varieties, are shared. Ask: who manages these shared resources in your country? Are they privately owned, government controlled, or community managed? Apply Ostrom's design principles: are the people most affected by the rules able to participate in making them? Is there monitoring and enforcement? What happens when rules are broken? What reforms would Ostrom suggest?
Global Studies When examining global commons and climate governance
How to introduce
Introduce the atmosphere as the ultimate global commons: everyone uses it and everyone affects it, but no one owns it. Apply Ostrom's framework: what would successful governance of this global commons look like? She argued for polycentric responses rather than waiting for a single global agreement. Ask: what examples of climate action at different scales can you identify? Local communities, cities, national governments, regional blocs, international agreements. How do these interact? What is missing from the current system according to Ostrom's design principles?
Common Misconceptions
Common misconception

Ostrom showed that shared resources always work well without private ownership or government control.

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What to teach instead

Ostrom showed that shared resource management can work well when specific conditions are in place. She identified cases of both success and failure. Her design principles describe what tends to make community management work, and many communities that lacked these features did see their shared resources collapse. Her argument was not that community management always works, but that it can work and often works better than privatisation or state control, given the right conditions. The specific conditions matter enormously.

Common misconception

Ostrom was opposed to markets and private property.

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What to teach instead

Ostrom was not ideologically opposed to markets or private property. She was opposed to the dogmatic application of either privatisation or state control as the only solutions to resource management problems. She argued for pragmatism: choosing the institutional arrangement that actually works for the specific resource, community, and context. Sometimes markets work well. Sometimes state control works well. Sometimes community management works best. The right answer depends on empirical investigation, not ideological preference.

Common misconception

Ostrom's research only applies to small, traditional communities.

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What to teach instead

While much of Ostrom's original fieldwork focused on relatively small communities managing local resources, she and her colleagues extended her framework to much larger and more complex situations, including urban governance, large-scale irrigation systems, and global environmental challenges like climate change. Her concept of polycentric governance was specifically developed to address how large-scale problems can be managed through multiple overlapping institutions at different scales, from local to global.

Common misconception

The tragedy of the commons is an established scientific fact.

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What to teach instead

The tragedy of the commons is a theoretical model based on specific assumptions about human behaviour, not an empirical observation. Hardin's model assumed that people always act in narrow self-interest and that no communication or cooperation between users is possible. Ostrom's empirical research showed that these assumptions are often wrong. People do cooperate, do communicate, and do develop and follow rules that prevent overuse. The tragedy of the commons describes what can happen under specific conditions, not what always happens.

Intellectual Connections
Complements
Wangari Maathai
Both Ostrom and Maathai worked on the practical challenge of how communities can protect and restore the natural resources they depend on. Maathai worked through community organising and political advocacy. Ostrom worked through empirical research and institutional design. Both showed that communities are capable of managing shared resources sustainably when they have the right conditions and the political power to do so. Both also challenged top-down approaches that ignore local knowledge and local capacity.
Complements
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Ostrom and Kimmerer arrive at closely related insights from different directions. Kimmerer shows that Indigenous communities developed deep knowledge of and responsibility for shared natural resources over thousands of years. Ostrom shows empirically what conditions allow communities to manage shared resources sustainably. The communities Kimmerer describes as living in right relationship with the natural world are, in Ostrom's terms, communities that have developed effective common resource institutions rooted in local knowledge.
In Dialogue With
Adam Smith
Smith argued that self-interest channelled through markets can produce good outcomes for society. Ostrom's research does not contradict this but adds important complexity: the tragedy of the commons shows that self-interest without rules and institutions can destroy shared resources. Her work shows that human beings are capable of more than narrow self-interest, and that the institutional conditions for cooperative management of shared resources can be created and maintained by communities themselves.
In Dialogue With
John Maynard Keynes
Both Ostrom and Keynes challenged the view that markets automatically produce good outcomes and that government should not interfere. But where Keynes argued for government intervention to correct market failures, Ostrom argued for a third option: community self-governance. Her polycentric governance model sees markets, governments, and community institutions as all having roles to play, chosen pragmatically based on what works in each context rather than on ideological preference for any one of them.
In Dialogue With
Paulo Freire
Both Ostrom and Freire insist that the people most affected by a problem are the ones best placed to solve it, if given the chance. Freire argues that oppressed people must develop their own critical consciousness and their own solutions rather than having answers imposed from above. Ostrom argues that communities managing shared resources must develop their own rules from their own knowledge, rather than having rules imposed by outside experts. Both challenge the assumption that expertise and solutions flow from the centre to the margins.
In Dialogue With
Nagarjuna
Nagarjuna's insistence that nothing has a fixed, permanent, independent nature but arises through interdependence resonates with Ostrom's empirical finding that the right institutional solution to a resource management problem is never fixed and universal but always context-dependent and relational. Both challenge the search for single, universal answers: Nagarjuna philosophically, by showing that all things arise through conditions, and Ostrom empirically, by showing that what works always depends on the specific features of the resource, community, and context.
Further Reading

For the full theoretical framework

Ostrom's Understanding Institutional Diversity (2005, Princeton University Press) is the most comprehensive statement of her institutional analysis framework.

For climate applications

The Drama of the Commons, edited by Ostrom and others (2002, National Academy Press), applies the commons framework to environmental challenges.

For critical engagement

The journal Ecology and Society and the International Journal of the Commons publish the best current research in this tradition.