Bloomington school

The Bloomington School is a new institutionalist research tradition spanning political science, economics, sociology and public administration, founded by Vincent and Elinor Ostrom at Indiana University Bloomington, where in 1973 they established the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis as its lasting institutional home. Vincent Ostrom, drawing on Friedrich Hayek, Michael Polanyi and the public choice tradition, promoted polycentric governance, the idea that many overlapping centers of decision making can often outperform a single centralized authority, as a direct challenge to top-down bureaucratic models of government. Elinor Ostrom extended the school's reach through detailed empirical studies of common-pool resources, work she gathered into her landmark 1990 book Governing the Commons, which challenged the standard tragedy of the commons narrative by showing that communities around the world successfully manage shared resources like fisheries and irrigation systems through locally devised rules, identifying eight recurring design principles behind their success. That body of work led to her Institutional Analysis and Development framework for systematically studying institutions, and in 2009 to her winning the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, becoming the first woman to receive that prize.