Elinor Ostrom > Quotes

“The power of a theory is exactly proportional to the diversity of situations it can explain.”
― Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

“One can … get trapped in one's own intellectual web.”
― Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

“Scientific knowledge is as much an understanding of the diversity of situations for which a theory or its models are relevant as an understanding of its limits.”
― Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

“Organizing is a process; an organization is the result of that process.”
― Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

“In some settings, however, rampant opportunistic behavior severely limits what can be done jointly without major investments in monitoring and sanctioning arrangements.”
― Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

“Driven by a concern with institutions, we re-enter the world of the behavioralists. But we do so not in protest against the notion of rational choice, but rather in an effort to understand how rationality on the part of individuals leads to coherence at the level of society. (Bates 1988, p. 399)”
― Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

“As long as a single center has a monopoly on the use of coercion, one has a state rather than a self-governed society.”
― Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

“Theoretical inquiry involves a search for regularities. It involves abstraction from the complexity of a field setting, followed by the positing of theoretical variables that underlie observed complexities.”
― Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

“Confusing a model – such as that of a perfectly competitive market – with the theory of which it is one representation can limit applicability still further.”
― Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

“But until a theoretical explanation -based on human choice – for self-organized and self-governed enterprises is fully developed and accepted, major policy decisions will continue to be undertaken with a presumption that individuals cannot organize themselves and always need to be organized by external authorities.”
― Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

“Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. (Hardin 1968, p. 1,244)”
― Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

“Godwin and Shepard (1979) pointed out a decade ago that policy scientists were doing the equivalent of “Forcing Squares, Triangles and Ellipses into a Circular Paradigm” by using the commons-dilemma model without serious attention to whether or not the variables in the empirical world conformed to the theoretical model.”
― Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

“all good books are bad!”
― Elinor Ostrom, Understanding Knowledge As a Commons: From Theory to Practice

“Since Garrett Hardin's challenging article in "Science" (1968), the expression "the tragedy of the commons" has come to symbolize the degradation of the environment to be expected whenever many individuals use a scarce resource in common.”
― Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

“Unfortunately, many analysts – in academia, special-interest groups, governments, and the press – still presume that common-pool problems are all dilemmas in which the participants themselves cannot avoid producing suboptimal results, and in some cases disastrous results.”
― Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

“Die wichtigste Lehre für die Politikanalyse und -gestaltung, die sich aus der hier skizzierten intellektuellen Reise ableiten lässt, lautet, dass Menschen komplexere Motivationsstrukturen und mehr Fähigkeiten zur Lösung sozialer Dilemmas mitbringen als die Theorie der rationalen Wahl annimmt.”
― Elinor Ostrom, Jenseits von Markt und Staat. Über das Potential gemeinsamen Handelns: [Was bedeutet das alles?] – Ostrom, Elinor – Erläuterungen – Analyse (Reclams Universal-Bibliothek)

“If the individuals who are crafting and modifying rules do not understand how particular combinations of rules affect actions and outcomes in a particular ecological and cultural environment, rule changes may produce unexpected and, at times, disastrous outcomes.”
― Elinor Ostrom, Understanding Institutional Diversity