Honorary Fellow Elinor Ostrom passed away

ISS is shocked to learn that its Honorary Fellow Professor Elinor Ostrom (78) has passed away on 12 June 2012 as a result of cancer. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate at ISS in 2002 on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.

Apart from being Honorary Fellow at ISS, Ostrom was also a much appreciated member of the Advisory Board of Development and Change, the international multidisciplinary journal in the field of development studies and social change of ISS.

Elinor Ostrom won many prizes for her distinguished work and in 2009 Dr. Ostrom was awarded the Nobel economics prize (together with Oliver Williamson) for her work with  on economic governance - the way
authority is exercised in economic systems. Ostrom was the first woman to receive this prize.

Her groundbreaking work on governance with particular reference to collective action and critique of the Tragedy of the Commons has influenced economics and all social science disciplines, particularly her contention that individuals and communities could effectively manage their own collective resources — such as fisheries, forests and water supplies — without the intrusion of government regulation or private industry. She called for polycentric governance and matching governance scales to solve collective action problems beyond common pool resources to include urban areas, police, local public economics and collective choice arrangements.

Elinor Ostrom was a wonderful human being, modest, unassuming and immediately accessible to all people regardless of age, race, creed or academic seniority. Not only an exceptionally gifted academic, educator and researcher, she is also a passionate public intellectual, an activist who championed the cause of Southern Sudanese refugees and academics and gave an intellectual home to prosecuted scholars. In her last public take on Rio+20 (which will reach its climax next week) in Green from the Grassroots she wrote:

“ Decades of research demonstrate that a variety of overlapping policies at city, subnational, national, and international levels is more likely to succeed than are single, overarching binding agreements. Such an evolutionary approach to policy provides essential safety nets should one or more policies fail.       The good news is that evolutionary policymaking is already happening organically. In the absence of effective national and international legislation to curb greenhouse gases, a growing number of city leaders are acting to protect their citizens and economies.”

The ISS Community and the world of academia and research will miss Professor Elinor Ostrom immensely.