Are ordinary people able to self-organize?

Elinor Ostrom was the first female Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences. Her extensive fieldwork focused on how people interact with ecosystems such as forests, fisheries and irrigation systems, challenging the conventional wisdom that ordinary people weren’t able to successfully manage natural resources without any regulation or privatization. She believed that people are perfectly capable of taking control of decisions that affect their lives, same way she had proven as a young woman when trying to succeed in the still male-dominated working world and academia of the 1950s.

Elinor Ostrom


At a glance

Born: 1933, Los Angeles, California, USA

Died: 2012, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

Field: Public Economics, Economic Governance

Awarded: Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (shared), 2009


Unknown talents: Drew most of the sketches when building a ranch house

What lesson to learn from stuttering

Ostrom was born into a family of simple means. Money was short, especially at the time of the Great Depression. Even as an old woman, she still remembered how her parents would try very hard to make ends meet. Childhood was also challenging because she was one of very few poor kids in a “rich kids’ school” in Beverly Hills. “There were times that was very painful for me,” she remembered. “And then, of all things, I stuttered.” But she was encouraged to join the debate team and did well. Plus, she learned an important lesson very early in life: how to make a good argument.

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As a young woman in the 1940s, Ostrom grew up in a different world. During the war, she was expected to knit scarves for the soldiers overseas, but not encouraged by her family to go to college. Her mother had arranged for her to attend high school but expected her to go find a job after graduation. “No one in my immediate family had any college experience,” Ostrom recalled in her autobiography written at the time of the Nobel. “My mother saw no reason to support me.” But she worked her way through and graduated “with eight dollars in the bank.”

Making a career though being a woman in the 1950s

Challenges didn’t end there. When looking for a position, future employers asked whether she’d taken shorthand and typing in college. She hadn’t. “I wanted a real position,” Ostrom recalled. “I didn’t want to end up being a secretary the rest of my life.” But in those days, it was not appropriate for a woman to aim for more. Ostrom didn’t care, and finally got a job in a business firm “that had never hired a woman in anything but a secretarial position.” Still in her early twenties, she had succeeded in making a very good argument. And being an Assistant Personnel Manager was only the first step of her career.

Ostrom had had her first economics course during her final year as an undergraduate. And she’d liked it, so much so that she thought about applying for a PhD. At UCLA, however, she found herself in a rather hostile environment. “A lot of the faculty didn’t like that there were women in the program. They just said no,” partly because Ostrom hadn’t had any math in college, and hadn’t taken trigonometry in high school. The Political Science Department was also rather skeptical about admitting women, but gave her a chance. During grad school, Ostrom met Vincent who would become her second husband and partner in crime on a professional level. It was also as a graduate student that Ostrom was first introduced to the question of how to organize a common, and her related research and field work would earn her the Nobel Prize four decades later.

Do people care for the common good of society?

In 1833, Victorian economist William Forster Lloyd published an essay in which he explained what became known as the “tragedy of the commons”. Lloyd believed that environmental commons – natural resources that aren’t privately owned but are accessible to everybody and collectively used – would, in the long term, be destroyed because the individual users would act in their own self-interest only and not care about the common good of all.

130 years later, most economists still believed this to be true. They “presumed that people could not self-organize. They just couldn’t do it,” Ostrom explained, the implication being that there was only one way around this: government regulation or private ownership. Ostrom wanted to put this presumption to the test, and started collecting a large number of case studies to find out more about how humans interact with ecosystems. “She was inspired by observing the world, grappling with these problems rather than theorizing,” Robert Johnson at Columbia explains.


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