43 Facts About Elinor Ostrom

1.

Elinor Claire "Lin" Ostrom was an American political scientist and political economist whose work was associated with New Institutional Economics and the resurgence of political economy.

2.

Elinor Ostrom was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

3.

Elinor Ostrom was a Distinguished Professor at Indiana University and the Arthur F Bentley Professor of Political Science and co-director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, as well as research professor and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University in Tempe.

4.

Elinor Ostrom was a lead researcher for the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program, managed by Virginia Tech and funded by USAID.

5.

Since the 60s, Elinor Ostrom was involved in resource management policy and created a research center, which attracted scientists from different disciplines from around the world.

6.

Elinor Ostrom studied the interaction of people and ecosystems for many years and showed that the use of exhaustible resources by groups of people can be rational and prevent depletion of the resource without either state intervention or markets with private property.

7.

Elinor Ostrom Claire Awan was born in Los Angeles, California as the only child of Leah Hopkins, a musician, and Adrian Awan, a set designer.

8.

Elinor Ostrom's parents separated early in her life, and Elinor lived with her mother most of the time.

9.

Elinor Ostrom attended a Protestant church with her mother and often spent weekends with her father's Jewish family.

10.

Elinor Ostrom grew up across the street from Beverly Hills High School, which she attended, graduating in 1951.

11.

Elinor Ostrom regarded this as fortunate, for the school had a very high rate of college admittance.

12.

Elinor Ostrom's mother did not wish for her to attend college, seeing no reason for it.

13.

Elinor Ostrom worked at the library, dime store and bookstore in order to pay her fees which were $50 per semester.

14.

Elinor Ostrom married a classmate, Charles Scott, and worked at General Radio in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while Scott attended Harvard Law School.

15.

Elinor Ostrom began a job as an export clerk after taking a correspondence course for shorthand, which she later found to be helpful when taking notes in face-to-face interviews on research projects.

16.

Specifically, Elinor Ostrom was assigned to look at the West Basin.

17.

Elinor Ostrom found it is very difficult to manage a common-pool resource when it is used between individuals.

18.

Elinor Ostrom was impressed with how people from conflicting and overlapping jurisdictions who depended on that source found incentives to settle contradictions and solve the problem.

19.

Elinor Ostrom made the study of this collaboration the topic of her dissertation, laying the foundation for the study of "shared resources".

20.

Elinor Ostrom joined the faculty as a visiting assistant professor.

21.

Elinor Ostrom was richly informed by fieldwork, both her own and that of others.

22.

Elinor Ostrom authored many books in the fields of organizational theory, political science, and public administration.

23.

Elinor Ostrom was a dedicated scholar until the very end of her life.

24.

Elinor Ostrom disproved this idea by conducting field studies on how people in small, local communities manage shared natural resources, such as pastures, fishing waters and forests.

25.

Elinor Ostrom showed that when natural resources are jointly used by their users, in time, rules are established for how these are to be cared for and they become used in a way that is both economically and ecologically sustainable.

26.

Elinor Ostrom was appointed Professor of Political Science in 1974.

27.

Elinor Ostrom was the head of the department from 1980 to 1984, and then held the Arthur F Bentley Chair of Political Science.

28.

Elinor Ostrom was senior research director of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Distinguished Professor and Arthur F Bentley Professor of Political Science in the College of Arts and Sciences, and professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

29.

Elinor Ostrom has been involved in international activities throughout her long and productive career.

30.

Elinor Ostrom had experience in Kenya, Nepal and Nigeria, and made research trips to Australia, Bolivia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Philippines, Poland and Zimbabwe.

31.

Elinor Ostrom was a founding member and first president of the IASC.

32.

Dr Elinor Ostrom, besides poring over satellite data and quizzing lobstermen herself, enjoyed employing game theory to try to predict the behaviour of people faced with limited resources.

33.

Elinor Ostrom's work has considered how societies have developed diverse institutional arrangements for managing natural resources and avoiding ecosystem collapse in many cases, even though some arrangements have failed to prevent resource exhaustion.

34.

Elinor Ostrom identified eight "design principles" of stable local common pool resource management:.

35.

Elinor Ostrom's proposal was that of a polycentric approach, where key management decisions should be made as close to the scene of events and the actors involved as possible.

36.

Elinor Ostrom disproved this idea by conducting field studies on how people in small, local communities manage shared natural resources, such as pastures, fishing waters in Maine and Indonesia, and forests in Nepal.

37.

Elinor Ostrom showed that when natural resources are jointly managed by their users, in time, rules are established for how these are to be cared for and used in a way that is both economically and ecologically sustainable.

38.

Elinor Ostrom was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and president of the American Political Science Association and the Public Choice Society.

39.

Elinor Ostrom's presented paper, on "The Comparative Study of Public Economies", was followed by a discussion among Kenneth Arrow, Thomas Schelling, and Amartya Sen.

40.

Elinor Ostrom was awarded the John J Carty Award from the National Academy of Sciences in 2004, and, in 2005, received the James Madison Award by the American Political Science Association.

41.

Elinor Ostrom was named one of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World" in 2012.

42.

In July 2019, Indiana University Bloomington announced that as part of their Bridging the Visibility Gap initiative, a statue of Elinor Ostrom would be placed outside of the building which houses the university's political science department.

43.

In 2009, Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.