Elinor Ostrom is best known for her understanding and defense of the commons. As one of the rare political scientists who continued to study reality first and then come up with a theory she has personal experience with hundreds of community managed fisheries, forests and irrigation systems.
In 2009 she was the first and so far only woman who was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics, in large part in acknowledgment of her work on the commons. Some say that in the year of the most severe economic crisis in our recent past the Nobel Committee had a hard time finding male economists.
Elinor Ostrom was Professor of Political Science at Indiana University. And she lived in Indiana until her death in June 2012. She and her husband, political scientist Vincent Ostrom, developed a world view that they called polycentric.
They define polycentrism, and with it the commons, as systems based on collective action, trust, cooperation and the management of common pool resources.
On February 16, 2010, Elinor Ostrom presented an updated version of her Nobel Prize lecture at Indiana University.
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