Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom (1933 to 2012) was a political scientist, born in Los Angeles, who studied political science at the University of California Los Angeles, where she took her doctorate in 1965, and then worked at Indiana University in Bloomington. She married the political scientist Vincent Ostrom in 1963. Economists had long held that natural resources used in common would be over-exploited and destroyed, and through field studies of how small local communities manage pastures, fishing waters and forests she showed that users establish rules that care for such resources in an economically and ecologically sustainable way. In 2009 she shared the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.