Elinor Ostrom
Facts
© The Nobel Foundation. Photo: U. Montan
Elinor Ostrom
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2009
Born: 7 August 1933, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Died: 12 June 2012, Bloomington, IN, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA; Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
Prize motivation: “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons”
Prize share: 1/2
Life
Elinor Clair Awan was born in Los Angeles, California in the United States, and grew up in a family of simple means. She studied political science at the University of California Los Angeles, where she also received her PhD in 1965. She later went on to work at Indiana University in Bloomington. Ostrom has also been affiliated with Arizona State University in Tempe and Virginia Tech. She married fellow political scientist Vincent Ostrom in 1963.
Work
It was long unanimously held among economists that natural resources that were collectively used by their users would be over-exploited and destroyed in the long-term. 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. She 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 used in a way that is both economically and ecologically sustainable.
Nobel Prizes and laureates
Six prizes were awarded for achievements that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. The 12 laureates' work and discoveries range from proteins' structures and machine learning to fighting for a world free of nuclear weapons.
See them all presented here.
