Elinor Ostrom

design principles for governing the commons.

Ostrom was Professor of Political Science at Indiana University and co-director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. She won the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences — the first woman to do so — for her empirical work on common-pool resources. Her 1990 book 'Governing the Commons' dismantled the assumption that shared resources inevitably collapse, offering a framework of institutional design principles still used in environmental policy worldwide.