A Tribute to Elinor Ostrom August 7, 1933–June 12, 2012

Abstract

[Author Affiliation]James M Walker, * The Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Department of Economics, Indiana University, Wylie Hall 105, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA. E-mail: walkerj@indiana.edu.Elinor Ostrom passed away June 12, 2012, after a courageous battle with pancreatic cancer. Her husband, Vincent, passed away June 29, 2012, after a long battle with prostate cancer. Lin and Vincent left a lasting legacy as researchers who spent their lives focusing on complex, highly relevant policy issues and as educators who gave unselfishly to their students and colleagues.Lin dedicated her pathbreaking book Governing the Commons (Ostrom 1990) to Vincent for his love and contestation. In many ways, this dedication also captures the approach Lin and Vincent brought to the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, hereafter the Workshop, which they founded in 1973.1 The research and educational life of the Workshop is very much a product of the passion and intellectual drive that lies at the core of their research programs and their lives. In essence, the students, colleagues, staff, and visiting scholars of the Workshop became the Ostrom's family. In a setting that fostered collaboration and contestation in a multidisciplinary environment where multiple methods of analysis were embraced, Lin and Vincent created a unique and world-renowned institution for the study of collective action and self-governance.As a Ph.D. student in political science at UCLA in the early 1960s, Lin's dissertation research grew out of a class project examining the role of entrepreneurs in devising groundwater management rules in California. In her research, she concluded that the use of equity proceedings in state courts (the shadow of the law) was an important facilitator in devising rules that accounted for the complex patterns of interagency arrangements necessary to prevent saltwater incursion from the ocean and to assure the replenishment of groundwater supplies. Even in these early years, Lin's awareness of the importance of multiple methods of research was apparent. In addition to the analytical framework guiding her research, she conducted in-depth interviews, archival research, and nonparticipant observation of negotiations to establish the basis for institutional agreements. What was to become a common theme in her work, Lin discovered in her dissertation research that a factor crucial to successful local institutional agreements was the existence of institutional arrangements at the state level that authorized local associations, special districts, and public and private agencies to deal with local problems, relying on local knowledge of particular physical and contractual constraints.Lin's path to the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences is one of intellectual passion, collaboration, and what appeared to be a limitless capacity for work. Despite Lin's early research on natural resource management, her first large-scale empirical research program as a faculty member at Indiana University focused on the provision of government services. In this research, it was demonstrated that the nature of the good or service was a crucial variable in the relationship between scale of production and citizen evaluation of agency performance. …