Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School of Political Economy
Policy Applications and Extensions
Contributions by Vincent Ostrom, Elinor Ostrom, Joanna Burger, Christopher B. Field, Richard B. Norgaard, David Policansky, W. Reid, D. Chen, L. Goldfarb, H. Hackmann, Y. Lee, K. Mokhele, K. Raivio, J. Rockström, H. Schellnhuber, A. Whyte, Daniel H. Cole, Charlotte Hess, Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann, Katherine J. Strandburg, Rolf Künneke, Matthias Finger, Robert Cook-Deegan, Michael D. McGinnis, Graham Epstein, Ulrich J. Frey, Michael Cox, Paul McCord, Jampel DellAngelo, Elizabeth Baldwin, Tom Evans Edited by Daniel H. Cole, Michael D. McGinnis
Publication date:
02 April 2018Length of book:
460 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9780739191132
Elinor (Lin) Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her pathbreaking research on "economic governance, especially the commons," but she also made important contributions to several other fields of political economy and public policy. The range of topics she covered and the multiple methods she used might convey the mistaken impression that her body of work is disjointed and incoherent. This four-volume compendium of papers written by Lin, alone or with various coauthors (most notably including her husband and partner, Vincent), supplemented by others expanding on their work, brings together the common strands of research that serve to tie her impressive oeuvre together. That oeuvre, together with Vincent's own impressive body of work, has come to define a distinctive school of political-economic thought, the "Bloomington School." Each of the four volumes is organized around a central theme of Lin's work.
The fourth and final volume, "Policy Applications and Extensions," collects sixteen papers that explore further applications and extensions of Ostrom's work. In fact, Ostrom had been writing about the scaling up of Bloomington School ideas to treat such problems since the mid-1990's. Her contributions to the climate change literature have been very impactful. An increasing number of scholars working on climate policy are now promoting various polycentric approaches to the problem. Equally influential, even seminal, was Ostrom's work (with Charlotte Hess) on the so-called "knowledge commons," a "hot" area of research dealing with contested issues such as the appropriate balance between private ownershipand open-access to information resources. The third part of the volume moves from applications of Ostrom's ideas to continuing her own efforts to improve the IAD and SES frameworks so as to make them even more useful for researchers and analysts. Finally, the volume concludes with two papers by Ostrom reflecting on continuing challenges confronting the social sciences generally and interdisciplinary research in particular. They are reminders that much work remains to be done.
The fourth and final volume, "Policy Applications and Extensions," collects sixteen papers that explore further applications and extensions of Ostrom's work. In fact, Ostrom had been writing about the scaling up of Bloomington School ideas to treat such problems since the mid-1990's. Her contributions to the climate change literature have been very impactful. An increasing number of scholars working on climate policy are now promoting various polycentric approaches to the problem. Equally influential, even seminal, was Ostrom's work (with Charlotte Hess) on the so-called "knowledge commons," a "hot" area of research dealing with contested issues such as the appropriate balance between private ownershipand open-access to information resources. The third part of the volume moves from applications of Ostrom's ideas to continuing her own efforts to improve the IAD and SES frameworks so as to make them even more useful for researchers and analysts. Finally, the volume concludes with two papers by Ostrom reflecting on continuing challenges confronting the social sciences generally and interdisciplinary research in particular. They are reminders that much work remains to be done.
This volume completes and brings to a climax this definitive compendium of readings in honor of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. It contains pathbreaking essays by the Ostroms and others on polycentric governance, climate change, sustainability and other vital issues. It travels well beyond Lin’s famous work on common-pool resources, but it extends analytical frameworks that she originally developed in that context. This work is on the frontier of discovery in social science and it addresses several of the most urgent problems of our time. It is a magnificent memorial to the Ostroms and their legacy.