Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom was the first woman to win a Nobel prize in economics. 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.

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, 2009

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.

How Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win a Nobel prize in economics?

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.”

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.

Are people able to self-organize water resources?

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.

Together with her husband, Ostrom founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. They believed that it was crucial to discuss their work with scholars across disciplines, and to conduct their field studies with the help of researchers in multiple countries.

But it was worth it. Ostrom discovered that small, local communities were able to manage shared natural resources such as fishing water or forests, and that, over time, rules for managing the common were established to maintain the resources’ long-term sustainability. No need for the government to step in, or to privatize resources. Ostrom’s research proved that community management was a powerful tool, and that ordinary people were able to take control of the decisions affecting their life.

Why you need to go into the field to be successful

“It’s encouraging for people who would like to see more local, rather than top-down, global control,” Johnson, who put Ostrom on TIME’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2012, explains. “Governance by people for themselves can be a very healthy and positive way of organizing society,” Johnson believes, and emphasizes how important Ostrom’s work was to acknowledge this.

Ostrom described eight design principles that affect the success of self-organized governance systems, for example collective choices, mechanisms of conflict resolution and the recognition of a community’s self-determination by the authorities. These principles remain valid today, as a framework for further developing the theory of common-pool resources. As she once remarked:

Ostrom’s work shed light on a topic that remains crucial for the future of the human species: how can we protect the environment? Again, she fought against top-down control, explaining how individuals and communities were essential to halt climate change. Though she knew that some international agreement was important, she felt the need to really involve the people outside the government. Her concept of “polycentrism” recommended giving local communities the authority to regulate the use of common resources.

In 2017, women are still seriously underrepresented in the Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics, medicine and economics (18 in total). But Johnson believes that things are changing, and that the rate of change is healthy: “The challenge isn’t over, but women are recognized as being more important to the profession,” he explains.

Though there hasn’t yet been another female laureate in Ostrom’s field, she was very optimistic about the future. During the press conference for her Nobel Prize she proclaimed: