This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for showing, against a generation of theory that assumed shared resources are doomed to overuse unless privatized or nationalized, that communities repeatedly govern commons successfully on their own, through locally made rules, monitoring and graduated sanctions rather than an outside authority handing down either private property rights or state control. The idea traces back further than her own fieldwork. In 1961, her husband Vincent Ostrom, with Charles Tiebout and Robert Warren, had already argued that a metropolitan region full of overlapping, formally independent local governments was not the chaos it looked like, that such systems, which they called polycentric, could coordinate and function coherently without a single central authority forcing them to. Elinor spent the following decades extending that same structural idea from city government to grazing land, fisheries and irrigation systems, turning a claim about how public agencies happen to behave into a general theory of how self-governance works when it works. In 1973 the two of them founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University together, and ran it together, for nearly forty years, an institutional expression of the same conviction: that governance does not require a single point of command to be governance. Elinor Ostrom died on 12 June 2012. Vincent Ostrom, her husband and collaborator for very close to fifty years, died seventeen days later, on 29 June 2012.