Elinor Ostrom.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

Elinor Ostrom is the first woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in Economics in its forty-one-year history.

She made her name critiquing a concept in the social sciences called the "tragedy of the commons." This concept assumes that common property will inevitably be overused and degraded in the absence of private ownership. Not necessarily so, Ostrom said. She studied communally owned property in places ranging from Southern California and coastal Maine to Nepal and Kenya. "Self-organizing arrangements enable people to learn more about one another's needs and the ecology around them," she writes in Understanding Institutional Diversity . "Learning problem-solving skills ... enables them to reach out and more effectively examine far-reaching problems that affect all peoples living on this Earth."

It was this insight the Nobel Committee appreciated. "Elinor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized," it stated on awarding her the prize last fall.

Ostrom received her Ph.D. in political science from UCLA, and for more than three decades has been teaching political science at Indiana University. She is a past president of the American Political Science Association, as well as a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

I met Ostrom in February at the Indiana University campus in Bloomington. Her office is in a small building in a residential-looking neighborhood. The waiting area had artifacts from all over the world and was adorned with a banner congratulating Ostrom on her Nobel. At the end of the interview in a large conference room, we chatted about her visits to Nepal, where she has studied how rural communities have managed irrigation systems to the benefit of all.

Q: What was your initial reaction to being awarded the Nobel?

Elinor Ostrom: You don't want me to scream now. [Laughs.] I was surprised and thrilled. It was at 6:30 in the morning. It was an unbelievably wonderful phone call.

Q: How has your life changed in the months after that?

Ostrom: I was teaching in the fall. In fact, I taught the day after the Nobel phone call. My students were surprised I came, but I did. Since then, I've been very busy.

Q: Could you summarize your work?

Ostrom: I've been interested in democratic governance at the very base. A lot of work has focused on the national level--elections and all the rest--and that's very important. But if we keep our...