[12] As a high school student, Elinor Ostrom had been discouraged from studying trigonometry, as girls without top marks in algebra and geometry were not allowed to take the subject.

[14] The teams of graduate students she was involved with were analyzing the political economic effects of a group of groundwater basins in Southern California.

Ostrom was impressed with how people from conflicting and overlapping jurisdictions who depended on that source found incentives to settle contradictions and solve the problem.

During her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles, she spent years studying the water wars and pumping races going on in the 1950s in her own dry backyard.

In contrast to the prevailing rational-economic predictions of Malthusianism and the tragedy of the commons, she showed cases where humans were not trapped and helpless amid diminishing supplies.

In her book Governing the Commons, she draws on studies of irrigation systems in Spain and Nepal, mountain villages in Switzerland and Japan, and fisheries in Maine and Indonesia.

In other words, multiple individuals—acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest—will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen.

"[20]Garrett Hardin believes that the most important aspect that we need to realize today is the need to abandon the principle of shared resources in reproduction.

Based on her fieldwork, the book demonstrates that there are practical algorithms for the collective use of a limited common resource, which solve the many issues with both government/regulation driven solutions and market-based ones.

She was the chief scientific advisor for the International Council for Science (ICSU) Planet Under Pressure meeting in London in March, and Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre wrote that"Lin, up until the very end, was heavily involved in our preparations for the Nobel laureate dialogues on global sustainability we will be hosting in Rio 17th and 18th of June during the UN Rio+20 Earth Summit.

Elinor Ostrom disproved this idea by conducting field studies on how people in small, local communities manage shared natural resources, such as pastures, fishing waters and forests.

She showed that when natural resources are jointly used by their users, in time, rules are established for how these are to be cared for and they become used in a way that is both economically and ecologically sustainable.

She had experience in Kenya, Nepal and Nigeria, and also made research trips to Australia, Bolivia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Philippines, Poland and Zimbabwe.

For some colleagues who have big families, and all the rest, it’s a major issue.” [30] Ostrom was a founding member and first president of the IASC (International Association for the Study of the Commons).

Dr. Ostrom, besides poring over satellite data and quizzing lobstermen herself, enjoyed employing game theory to try to predict the behaviour of people faced with limited resources.

Her work emphasized the multifaceted nature of human–ecosystem interaction and argues against any singular "panacea" for individual social-ecological system problems.

Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.These principles have since been slightly modified and expanded to include a number of additional variables believed to affect the success of self-organized governance systems, including effective communication, internal trust and reciprocity, and the nature of the resource system as a whole.

[39] Ostrom and her many co-researchers have developed a comprehensive "Social-Ecological Systems (SES) framework", within which much of the still-evolving theory of common-pool resources and collective self-governance is now located.

[40] According to the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research, "Ostrom cautioned against single governmental units at global level to solve the collective action problem of coordinating work against environmental destruction.

Her proposal was that of a polycentric approach, where key management decisions should be made as close to the scene of events and the actors involved as possible."

Ostrom helped disprove the idea held by economists that natural resources would be over-used and destroyed in the long run.

Elinor Ostrom disproved this idea by conducting field studies on how people in small, local communities manage shared natural resources, such as pastures, fishing waters in Maine and Indonesia, and forests in Nepal.

She showed that when natural resources are jointly managed by their users, in time, rules are established for how these are to be cared for and used in a way that is both economically and ecologically sustainable.

Ostrom's detailed analyses of functional examples of the commons create an alternative view of the arrangement of resources that are both practically and theoretically possible.

This marked the beginning of a lifelong partnership named "love and contestation," as Ostrom put it in her dedication to her seminal 1990 book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited Ostrom "for her analysis of economic governance", saying her work had demonstrated how common property could be successfully managed by groups using it.

[9][52] The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Ostrom's "research brought this topic from the fringe to the forefront of scientific attention...by showing how common resources—forests, fisheries, oil fields or grazing lands—can be managed successfully by the people who use them rather than by governments or private companies".

Ostrom's work in this regard challenged conventional wisdom, showing that common resources can be successfully managed without government regulation or privatization.

[53] In awarding Ostrom the Nobel Prize for the Analysis of Economic Governance, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted that her work "teaches us novel lessons about the deep mechanisms that sustain cooperation in human societies."

Even if Ostrom's selection (along with co-recipient Oliver Williamson of the University of California, Berkeley) seemed odd to some, others saw it as an appropriate reaction to free-market inefficiencies highlighted by the 2008 financial crisis.