Elinor Ostrom’s Contribution to Nonprofit and Voluntary Action Studies

Abstract

Elinor “Lin” Ostrom, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics, spent her career developing ideas and tools to address the concept of governance—what Oliver Williamson describes as the “provision of good order and workable arrangements.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Action (NVA) scholars are similarly concerned with good order and workable arrangements but draw on different, if not more disparate, scholarly traditions. This special issue sheds light on the promise that integration of the tools developed by Ostrom and NVA scholarship holds. In this article, including its primer appendix, we provide a broad introduction to the tools created by Lin and her collaborators at The Ostrom Workshop (the “Workshop”) in the interest of exploring their utility for NVA scholars’ central questions.