Profile of Elinor Ostrom

Abstract

Fig. 1. Elinor Ostrom Born in Los Angeles in 1933, Elinor Ostrom experienced firsthand the value of sustainability at a young age. She grew up in an era of economic depression that led into a resource-consuming war, in a city where fresh water was a prized commodity. “My mother had a victory garden during the war,” she recalls, “so I learned all about growing vegetables and preserving them by canning, and that was a wonderful experience that a lot of urban kids don't ever learn.” These early real-world lessons also revealed another important fact of life to Ostrom: that most people, when presented with a resource problem, can cooperate and act for the common good. Ostrom, the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science at Indiana University (Bloomington, IN) and cofounder and codirector of Indiana University's Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, has studied how self-organization and local-level management works to keep common resources, whether natural (e.g., forests) or man-made (e.g., police forces), viable. Combining data from diverse sources ranging from classical techniques such as surveys to modern advances such as satellite imagery, Ostrom has uncovered numerous principles that govern successful sustainability and that defy conventional beliefs Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2001 and a member of the PNAS Editorial Board, Ostrom discusses her insights for effective forest management in her Inaugural Article in this issue of PNAS (1). From the Amazon basin to the Arctic Circle, forests provide an abundance of resources (timber, fuel, minerals, food, and tourism) yet face rapid depletion. Using social and ecological measurements in conjunction with computational predictions of human decision-making, Ostrom highlights the conditions that allow for the most productive tenure arrangements, but she stresses that no single governance policy can control overharvesting in all settings. In a reverse of a popular …