Eleanor Ostrom

excerpt from Dufferin Grove Park as a Neighbourhood Commons, by Jutta Mason, 2016

Lin

One of our teachers about local governance has been Elinor Ostrom – everyone called her “Lin” – who taught political theory at Indiana University in Bloomington until her death in 2012.

Professor Ostrom shared the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, for her work on “governing the commons.” In November 2010 seven of us (two from CELOS, five park staff) made the 12-hour drive in two cars to Indiana to meet her. We brought along a list of ten principles of governance that we got from reading her work, and we had a travelling seminar in the cars on the trip down.

When we got there, we found that Ostrom’s institute is called the “Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis.” It has that name, Ostrom told us, because she and her husband, also a political scientist, both did a lot of woodworking during their summer breaks from the university. They built a log cabin on some land they bought on Manitoulin Island, and made most of the furniture themselves. They like the term workshop because in a workshop people have to fit wood – or governance theories – together with care. Ostrom also told us that their cabin had no electricity. They had a generator to pump their water, and they adapted the water pump to run their computers and their printer as well. Then they sat down and wrote.

Ostrom’s writings, and these stories that she told us, made us think she was our kind of analyst. She was frank and unsentimental when writing about the problems that come between people in shared spaces: “In the absence of effective sanctions for people who shirk working on solutions, or who free-ride on the work of others, the rest will feel like suckers and will most likely quit trying.”

Ostrom: ten principles for good governance of public spaces