Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom trained as a political scientist at UCLA and spent 47 years at Indiana University Bloomington, where in the 1960s she built the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis—a research center run like its name, collaborative and non-hierarchical, drawing scientists across disciplines. She spent decades studying how groups—communities, cooperatives, unions—interact with ecosystems and finite resources. What she found cut against the prevailing gospel: people could govern the commons rationally, averting depletion, without state control or private markets. In 2009 she shared the…