Nobel Prize Winner Elinor Ostrom Speaks at Tsinghua Forum

Professor Elinor Ostrom, the Nobel Prize Winner of 2009 in Economic Sciences, delivered a speech entitled “Diagnosing Social-Ecological Systems” at Tsinghua on May 9. Chairman of Tsinghua Academic Affairs Committee Qian Yi had a discussion with Professor Ostrom prior to the speech.

Elinor Ostrom is the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science at Indiana University and the co-founder and senior research director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. She also is founding director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society and a recipient of the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy and many other awards. Her books include Governing the Commons (1990); Understanding Institutional Diversity (2005) and Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice (2010).

In 2009, Elinor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, which she shared with Oliver E. Williamson, for her study of economic governance, especially the commons. Her work shows how common resources — forests, fisheries, grazing lands or groundwater basins — can be managed successfully by the people who use them, rather than by governments or private companies. She is the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics, which has been awarded since 1969.

(Photo by Guo Haijun)