After completing her doctorate in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1965 – a time when it was still rare for women to hold advanced degrees, let alone tenured positions, in the social sciences – she moved, with her husband, the political theorist Vincent Ostrom, to Bloomington, Indiana, where Lin was initially hired as a visiting assistant professor at Indiana University. The couple remained at the university for the rest of their long and productive careers. Her work was for a long time considered far outside the mainstream of American political science. In 1973 the Ostroms co-founded a research and teaching centre, the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, where academics could engage in collaborative and interdisciplinary learning and scholarship. The couple evolved a distinct Bloomington school of political economy, premised on notions of polycentric governance that Vincent had pioneered in the early 1960s. Polycentric systems involve resource management at multiple levels. The notion remained a constant feature of Lins work throughout her career, including recent contributions to climate change literature. Having started her career by focusing on groundwater resources in the Los Angeles basin, then studying neighbourhood policing in Indianapolis, Lin turned her attention to the subject that gained her worldwide recognition: how the overexploitation of unowned or commonly owned resources could be averted by collective action by local users. Her hugely influential 1990 book, Governing the Commons, examined numerous local management regimes for common resources and established a set of principles for predicting success and failure. It was this work, challenging the conventional wisdom of resource management, which the Nobel committee cited as her primary contribution to economics. But it was far from her only major contribution. The Ostrom name will for ever be associated with two related frameworks for social-scientific analysis: the institutional analysis and design (IAD) framework and the still-evolving social-ecological systems (SES) framework. The former received its most comprehensive treatment in her 2005 book, Understanding Institutional Diversity, and has become one of the leading analytical tools in the study of public policy. While IAD focused on social rules governing resource use, the SES framework, which pays equal attention to ecological features, will be among Lins legacies to social science. She also provided a model for breaking down disciplinary boundaries so that researchers from diverse fields could collaborate. In her 2010 book, Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice, Lin and her co-authors offered concrete ideas to make collaboration more successful. Throughout her work, Lin made it clear that complex and combined social and ecological problems defied simple (or simplistic) institutional solutions. At the biweekly Bloomington Workshop seminars, over which she presided for many years, she would often deny the existence of panaceas. To her, the combined social and ecological world was a highly complex place in which different circumstances favoured different approaches to problem-solving. https://facebook/WorkshoponOstromsCommonsandSelfGovernance/posts/810598912308131
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 01:19:38 +0000
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