Born: 7 August 1933, United States
Died: 12 June 2012
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Elinor Claire Awan
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
In 1973, the year she turned 40, Elinor “Lin” Ostrom and her husband established the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, now called the Ostrom Workshop, at Indiana University. She would spend the rest of her career at the university, where she was made a professor in 1974 and later chair of the political science department. In 2009, she became the first woman to win a Nobel prize in economics, “for her analysis of economic governance, especially of the commons.” Ostrom looked at the economics of how people use communal resources, such as water, and how policies and practices might responsibly ensure that small groups do not use up all these resources to the detriment of the entire community, such as overfishing an area and depleting the entire supply of fish. She challenged the idea that government regulation could readily solve these problems, instead identifying ways that regular people in different settings come together to manage these resources. She published a landmark book on the topic, Governing the Commons, in 1990. With this focus on collective action to maintain natural resources, she described key design principles to cooperation, without resorting to government regulation or private ownership.
Ostrom was co-director of the Workshop until becoming senior research director in 2009. It remains a major international center for policy-related collaboration across different disciplines. Ostrom herself never stopped working, emailing colleagues until the day before she died in 2012 of pancreatic cancer, aged 78.
The following bio was written by Emma Rosen, author of On This Day She Made History: 366 Days With Women Who Shaped the World and This Day In Human Ingenuity & Discovery: 366 Days of Scientific Milestones with Women in the Spotlight, and has been republished with permission.
Elinor Claire “Lin” Ostrom was an accomplished American political scientist and economist. She received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009 for her significant contributions to New Institutional Economics and the resurgence of political economy. She shared this recognition with Oliver E. Williamson, making her the first woman to achieve the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Starting in the 1960s, Ostrom actively engaged in resource management policy and established a research center that attracted scholars from various disciplines worldwide. Her center operated on a workshop model, fostering collaboration and inclusivity rather than traditional lectures and hierarchy.
For an extended period, Ostrom studied the interaction between human societies and ecosystems. Her work highlighted that collective resource management by groups like communities, cooperatives, trusts, and unions can be a practical approach, preventing resource depletion without necessitating state intervention or market-driven private ownership.