In Honor of Elinor Ostrom

[Author Affiliation]James C Cox, * Noah Langdale Jr, Eminent Scholar Chair, and Director of the Experimental Economics Center, Department of Economics, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303, USA. E-mail: jccox@gsu.edu.Elinor ("Lin") Ostrom's research illuminates how institutions affect performance and--even more basically--how performance-enhancing institutions can arise, most especially, how such institutions can arise from voluntary association. She began her research as a graduate student by studying the political economy of water allocation in the West Basin that underlies multiple jurisdictions along the California coast, near and in Los Angeles. For many subsequent years, Lin researched the relative effectiveness of single-provider versus multi-provider delivery of local government services, particularly police services in metropolitan areas across the United States.1 In the 1980s, she returned to the study of institutional effectiveness for appropriation from common pools, with special emphasis on forestry resources and water systems. And the rest "is history," leading in 2009 to the Nobel Prize in Economics, which was awarded for "her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons."Increasingly, from the early 1970s onward, Lin and her husband and collaborator Vincent Ostrom devoted their energies to organizing research projects through the research center they created, which is now known as The Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. This center of intellectual entrepreneurism (hereafter "the Workshop") has led local, national, and international research collaborations over extended periods to study questions centered on the commons and including other topics in governance and political economy. From the outset, the approach was interdisciplinary; the Ostroms were interested in, and encouraged participation by, researchers from any discipline that could contribute to understanding how real problems, such as the social dilemmas in appropriations from common pools, can sometimes be managed effectively. The research method is guided by theory from economics, political science, and other disciplines, but at its core the method is empirical--employing all methods of empirical research including laboratory experiments and applied econometrics--but its most distinctive component has been long-term, large-scale field studies implemented through international networks of researchers instructed, led, and coordinated by Lin Ostrom. An illustrative example is provided by research on forest resources.In response to a perceived need for data by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in the early 1990s, Lin initiated a field research project for systematic collection of data on forest resources and their governance institutions and on how the functioning of the institutions affected the livelihoods of people and the resource itself. Organization of the research did not call only for experts from the United States to travel around the world collecting data; instead, Lin and collaborators trained a core staff from each of several countries to apply data collection methods developed at the Workshop to forests in their own countries and become parts of an international network. Many years later, the fruits of this entrepreneurship are seen in the continuing research and policy work of organizations Lin founded, including the interrelated activities of the Workshop itself, the Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change (CIPEC), and the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) network that maintains 13 research centers on four continents. The creation of these centers is an example of application to the "knowledge commons" of a central finding from Lin's research on common-pool resources: the effectiveness of voluntary organization of self-governing institutions that foster cooperation in solving real problems of the commons. …