Ostrom plus Habermas is nearly all we need

The late, great Elinor Ostrom is much on my mind. I taught her work in Mexico a couple of weeks ago and will be visiting her Bloomington (IN) Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis next weekend. I’d like to claim that many thinkers have influenced me, and I wouldn’t want to have to do […]

why engineers should study Elinor Ostrom

(New Haven) Next week, I will lead a discussion of the Nobel-Prize-winning research of the late Elinor Ostrom. I will be with a group of engineers, natural scientists, and social scientists who are concerned about water, one of the basic scarce and contested natural resources. Ostrom studied water-management, but she was a political scientist concerned […]

Elinor Ostrom, 1933-2012

I was very sad to read this morning that Elinor Ostrom has died. Lin ran the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, where she was also Distinguished Professor and Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science in the College of Arts and Sciences and professor in the School of Public and […]

Good Society special issue on Elinor Ostrom

The Good Society has published a special symposium issue on the work of Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School, which includes Lin’s husband Vincent Ostrom and their many colleagues and students. All study common property regimes, institutional design, the conditions under which voluntary collaboration occurs, and polycentric governance (governance understood as occurring at many levels […]

Elinor Ostrom wins the Nobel!

The Nobel Foundation announced yesterday that Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel prize in Economic Sciences. She is the first woman to win the prize and surely one of the few non-economists. When Lin was president of the American Political Science Association, she was a strong voice for civic education and has been a consistent […]