Courtesy of Indiana University
Elinor Ostrom
In the press release for the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences reminds all of us that if we want to study, use and prescribe markets, we have to keep in mind the ways that people organize to participate in them. One of the recipients, the political scientist Elinor Ostrom, has helped us understand the many ways that people have come to share as communities — peacefully, equitably and even gainfully — such common property resources as fisheries, lakes, pastures and woods. The other recipient, the economist Oliver Williamson, has revealed to us the fundamentals of the interaction between enterprises and markets, and how conflict can be mediated when people form firms.
And whether or not they intended to do so, in awarding the prize to Ostrom, the Swedish scientists may have also taught us something about how to be a good scholar.
The work of Ostrom reminds us that if we want to tell other people how they should organize their governments, their economies and their societies, we cannot do so solely from our classrooms, our Web sites and our conference halls. Ostrom has done extensive field research on common property resources in Nepal, Nigeria and Kenya, and interviewed communities in Australia, Bolivia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, Poland, Zimbabwe and many localities in the United States. She has had countless discussions with people in all corners of the globe on how they have come to share common resources, and in so doing has become a mobile repository of the diversity of human knowledge about property rights. In sharing her extensive knowledge of how people manage common property, Ostrom has also been an adviser to local communities that are trying to peacefully manage their resources even as they try to merge with the global economy.
Ostrom’s professional history also reminds us of the importance of curiosity and perseverance. When she visited Rice University 10 years ago, Ostrom offered professional advice to the junior political science scholars and students who wanted to follow her lead and study property rights and political economy. She warned them that they might be rejected by some political scientists — leave the study of markets and property to the economists! — but at the end of the day, we all have to follow where our own curiosity leads us. Apparently, such curiosity can lead even a political scientist to receive the Nobel Prize in economics.
Ostrom is also the first woman recipient of that prize, which is testimony to the value of perseverance. As she told the junior scholars she met at Rice, when she finished her Ph.D. in political science from UCLA in 1965, her job opportunities were very limited because she was a woman. She had to swallow her pride and begin the career that would lead her to become a Nobel scholar by working as a secretary for an academic department. It took her decades to become a faculty member, the creator of research centers and the president of the American Political Science Association. Clearly perseverance pays.
Steven W. Lewis is the Baker Institute’s fellow in Asian studies and faculty adviser for the Jesse Jones Leadership Center Summer in D.C. Policy Research Internship Program. He is also a professor in the practice and an associate director of the Chao Center for Asian Studies, as well as an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Sociology, at Rice University.