Written for a general audience, Erik Nordman’s The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom is a conversational volume that is part biography, part undergraduate seminar supplement, and part panegyric. If the book can contribute to popularizing Elinor (Lin) Ostrom, this is no bad thing.

More than a decade after Stockholm shocked the economics world by naming Ostrom as a co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize, we still lack a comprehensive intellectual history of her work.Footnote ¹ Because the award preceded Ostrom’s death by only three years, we also have very little of her own reflections on her work, the prize, and her position in the field. While some of this gap has been filled by her many students, co-authors, and colleagues, their festschrifts, histories, and extensions invariably highlight one facet of Ostrom’s work, whether it be contributions to public administration theory, institutional design, political theory, game theory, public choice, methodology, environmental economics, or urban development (e.g., Herzberg, Boettke, and Aligica Reference Herzberg, Boettke and Aligica2019; Lemke and Tarko Reference Lemke and Tarko2021; Locher Reference Locher2018; Tarko Reference Tarko2017; Wall Reference Wall2017). Nordman’s book focuses on environmental resource management.

One reason Ostrom has not received more comprehensive treatment is that her work is complex—a concept she manifestly appreciated (Ostrom Reference Ostrom, Hanna and Munasinghe1995; Ostrom Reference Ostrom2010). Although trained as a political scientist, Ostrom worked across disciplinary boundaries. She believed in asking big, open-ended questions. She preferred mixed methods to hyper-specialization and deployed case studies as readily as game-theoretic analyses. An implication of Ostrom’s complexity is that her ideas have a different refractive index depending on the initial position of the interpreter.Footnote ² Thus, while this review will focus on Nordman’s book in the context of the history of economics, such treatment is somewhat unfair as the book’s primary objective is to demonstrate “how Ostrom’s ideas on governing common resources have played out around the world,” viz. examples from the field (back cover copy).

Economists will no doubt find The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom challenging in that it tells the story of Ostrom’s contributions to environmental resource management—notably the problem of the commons—without reference to James M. Buchanan or Herbert Simon. Elon Musk is mentioned more frequently than Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, or Reinhart Selten. Chapters 2 to 7 take the reader through Ostrom’s development of the commons problem in the context of Los Angeles groundwater management (the topic of her doctoral dissertation), Maine lobster conservation, water use in medieval and contemporary Spain, and situations of successful forest and climate management. These are presented as refutations to Garrett Hardin’s (Reference Hardin1968) inevitability of the tragedy of the commons. Nordstrom sees Ostrom’s insight, that there are solutions to the problem of the commons that exist between the market and the state, as deriving from her field studies and intellectual collaboration with her husband, Vincent. What is missing is consideration of the Ostroms’ deep engagement with the emergent public choice research program that was then wrestling with similar problems related to public goods: Charles Tiebout’s (Reference Tiebout1956) voting with the feet, Ronald Coase’s (Reference Coase1960) problems of social costs, and Buchanan and Gordon Tullock’s Calculus of Consent (Reference Buchanan and Tullock1962).Footnote ³ Mixing political theory, rational-choice economics, voting models, and theories of institutional behavior, public choice carved out space at the intersection of economics and political science to explore social coordination and organization problems. The approach was distinct from mainstream thinking at the time that presumed omniscient social planners and selfless political agents. Vincent Ostrom was a founder and early president of the Public Choice Society; Elinor Ostrom served as president two decades later. Indeed, the Ostroms’ work on the commons would become one pillar of the Virginia-Bloomington mantra for “governance not government.”Footnote ⁴

Chapters 8 and 9 postdate Ostrom’s Governing the Commons (Reference Ostrom1990) and reflect extensions of her analysis to new and larger problems such as space and the digital commons. Throughout the book, exposition of how Ostrom thought about particular situations is interspersed with insights gained from interviews with colleagues, community collaborators, non-profit organizers, and government officials. The chapters are full of contextual information that is likely useful for the casual student: details about the first Earth Summit, the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement, the International Space Station, and the Outer Space Treaty. Nordman intersperses his narrative with boxed text illustrative anecdotes or summaries of Ostrom’s theories, e.g., “Ostrom’s Eight Design Principles of Managing a Commons” (p. 65). One cannot help but wonder if these would be more successful if they were in Ostrom’s own words. Missing is the sharp incisiveness of Ostrom’s thinking—how she defined problems, constructed vocabulary, and developed theories and experiments.

Nordman uses Ostrom’s Nobel Prize as a sort of a marker of achievement—a justification of both Ostrom’s contributions and his book. Since “Ostrom was not destined to win the Nobel Prize,” Nordman tells us that it is worth reconstructing “how she got there” (p. 18). Yet, because the focus of the book is on the real-world situations of commons problems explored by Ostrom, one never gets a proper sense of the depth of Ostrom’s engagement with economic theory or of the Nobel decision process. The reader is told that “academia rewards specialization,” that Ostrom worked at the margins of economics proper, and that she was largely unknown to mainstream economists (pp. 193–194). Simultaneously, the reader is asked to accept that the choice of Ostrom was obvious to the Nobel decision committee—the institutional process of making the decision is dismissed, as is the historiographic problem of how to understand post-Nobel assessments of an economist’s work (Offer and Söderberg Reference Offer and Söderberg2016). Out of the reactions, pro and con, to the Ostrom Nobel, Nordman overlooks Vernon Smith’s (Reference Smith2005) prescient speculation on a prize for Ostrom, where he noted “there are deserving others yet to be recognized for their contributions to the study of behavior, e.g., Charles Plott (Caltech) and Lin Ostrom (Indiana).” Nordman also misses the importance of Herbert Simon, another political scientist who won the prize (1978).

A related problem for historians of economics is the role gender plays in shaping careers, research programs, and recognitions. To simply say that Ostrom managed to achieve a successful academic career and research program “at a time when women were regularly excluded from academia” (back cover copy) fails to consider the social and institutional context in which she worked. One could excuse the oversight given that this was not intended to be the focus of the book; however, because Nordman periodically takes up the issue, not least in the book’s description, it bears consideration as to how economists should approach such questions.

Ostrom was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and the award has served to obscured the degree to which gender-biased discrimination limited many of her choices. Nordman notes that Ostrom was not admitted to graduate study in economics and barely managed to pursue political science (pp. 31, 196, and 205). He also recounts that the Ostroms left University of California, Los Angeles for Indiana University with the hope of avoiding anti-nepotism laws that would have barred Elinor from an academic position at UCLA (pp. 32 and 205). What goes unconsidered is how Ostrom navigated these constraints to produce economic knowledge. Study of Ostrom’s career illustrates that she approached economics from its boundaries with other disciplines. She focused on questions in political science and public administration that overlapped with public economics. Her strategic choices regarding graduate course work, dissertation topic, and assistantships allowed her to enroll in economics courses that would otherwise have been closed to her.Footnote ⁵ Early in her career, she opted to work in public choice, a newly established field that sought to apply economic methods and rational choice logic to the problems of collective choice usually associated with political science studies. Later, Ostrom mastered game theory, bringing her into theoretical and methodological concert with mainstream economics. In fact, Ostrom’s strategy was similar to that of many other pioneering women who carved out space at the margins of economics. Hazel Kyrk established consumer economics as a field in the overlap between consumer choice theory and statistical methods, thereby providing berth for a generation of women economists. Her professionalization of social work—a field adjacent to economics and rooted in the old subject of “social problems”—had similar impact. Women such as Edith Abbott and Kate Holladay Claghorn established social statistics as a legitimate academic enterprise, applying innovative statistical methods to social problems including immigration, crime, poverty, and health. Margaret Reid applied economic logic to non-market decision making, thereby founding household economics as a research program. The lesson is that Ostrom’s Nobel was not less likely for her marginalization but more so.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from Nordman’s book is the ability—the drive—of creative thinkers like Ostrom to adapt theory to real-world problems and to engage with people in the “ordinary business of life.” Biographers have variably attributed such motivation to personality, temperment, training, or social context. In the case of Ostrom, we see that she had a deep appreciation for the ability of social science to both make sense of of the observed world and make it a better place.