Elinor Ostrom quotes

Elinor Ostrom was an American political economist renowned for her groundbreaking research on the governance of common resources. Her work challenged conventional wisdom by demonstrating that communities can effectively manage shared resources without top-down regulation. She became the first woman to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Here are 9 of her quotes:

What is missing from the policy analyst's tool kit -- and from the set of accepted, well-developed theories of human organization -- is an adequately specified theory of collective action whereby a group of principals can organize themselves voluntarily to retain the residuals of their own efforts.

Elinor Ostrom

What we have ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of real involvement of the people versus just having somebody in Washington make a rule.

Elinor Ostrom

In some settings, however, rampant opportunistic behavior severely limits what can be done jointly without major investments in monitoring and sanctioning arrangements.

Elinor Ostrom

Humans have a more complex motivational structure and more capability to solve social dilemmas than posited in earlier rational-choice theory. Designing institutions to force (or nudge) entirely self-interested individuals to achieve better outcomes has been the major goal posited by policy analysts for governments to accomplish for much of the past half century. Extensive empirical research leads me to argue that instead, a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans.

Elinor Ostrom

We should continue to use simple models where they capture enough of the core underlying structure and incentives that they usefully predict outcomes. When the world we are trying to explain and improve, however, is not well described by a simple model, we must continue to improve our frameworks and theories so as to be able to understand complexity and not simply reject it.

Elinor Ostrom

Little by little, bit by bit, family by family, so much good can be done on so many levels.

Elinor Ostrom

The power of a theory is exactly proportional to the diversity of situations it can explain.

Elinor Ostrom

I would like to focus your attention not on the subject of the article (national security in a nuclear world) but on the kind of conclusion they reached, namely that there is no technical solution to the problem. An implicit and almost universal assumption of discussions published in professional and semipopular scientific journals is that the problem under discussion has a technical solution. A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.

Elinor Ostrom