Elinor (Lin) Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her pathbreaking research on "economic governance, especially the commons," but she also made important contributions to several other fields of political economy and public policy. The range of topics she covered and the multiple methods she used might convey the mistaken impression that her body of work is disjointed and incoherent. This four-volume compendium of papers written by Lin, alone or with various coauthors (most notably including her husband and partner, Vincent), supplemented by others expanding on their work, brings together the common strands of research that serve to tie her impressive oeuvre together. That oeuvre, together with Vincent's own impressive body of work, has come to define a distinctive school of political-economic thought, the "Bloomington School." Each of the four volumes is organized around a central theme of Lin's work. The fourth and final volume, "Policy Applications and Extensions," collects sixteen papers that explore further applications and extensions of Ostrom's work. In fact, Ostrom had been writing about the scaling up of Bloomington School ideas to treat such problems since the mid-1990's. Her contributions to the climate change literature have been very impactful. An increasing number of scholars working on climate policy are now promoting various polycentric approaches to the problem. Equally influential, even seminal, was Ostrom's work (with Charlotte Hess) on the so-called "knowledge commons," a "hot" area of research dealing with contested issues such as the appropriate balance between private ownershipand open-access to information resources. The third part of the volume moves from applications of Ostrom's ideas to continuing her own efforts to improve the IAD and SES frameworks so as to make them even more useful for researchers and analysts. Finally, the volume concludes with two papers by Ostrom reflecting on continuing challenges confronting the social sciences generally and interdisciplinary research in particular. They are reminders that much work remains to be done.
Introduction to Volume 4 Part I: Climate Change and Sustainability Chapter 1: Organization of Decision-Making Arrangements and the Development of Atmospheric Resources, by Vincent Ostrom Chapter 2: Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges, by Elinor Ostrom, Joanna Burger, Christopher B. Field, Richard B. Norgaard, and David Policansky Chapter 3: Earth System Science for Global Sustainability: Grand Challenges, by W. Reid, D. Chen, L. Goldfarb, H. Hackmann, Y. Lee, K. Mokhele, E. Ostrom, K. Raivio, J. Rockstrom, H. Schellnhuber, and A. Whyte Chapter 4: A Polycentric Approach for Coping with Climate Change, by Elinor Ostrom Chapter 5: Advantages of a Polycentric Approach to Climate Change Policy, by Daniel H. Cole Part II: The Artifactual Commons: Information, Infrastructure, and Public Health Chapter 6: Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource, by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom Chapter 7: Constructing Commons in the Cultural Environment, by Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann, and Katherine J. Strandburg Chapter 8: Learning from Lin: Lessons and Cautions from the Natural Commons for the Knowledge Commons, by Daniel H. Cole Chapter 9: The governance of Infrastructures as Common-Pool Resources, by Rolf Kunneke and Mattias Finger Chapter 10: The Science Commons in Health Research: STructure, Function, and Value, by Robert Cook-Deegan Chapter 11: Commons, Institutional Diversity, and Polycentric Governance in US Health Policy, by Michael D. McGinnis Part III: Continuing Projects Chapter 12: Digging Deeper into Hardin's Pasture: The Complex Institutional Structure of "The Tragedy of the Commons" by Daniel H. Cole, Graham Epstein, and Michael D. McGinn Chapter 13: Building a Diagnostic Ontology of Social-Ecological Systems, by Ulrich J. Frey and Michael Cox Chapter 14: Polycentric Transformation in Kenyan Water governance: A Dynamic Analysis of Institutional and Social-Ecological Change, by Paul McCord, Jampel Dell'Angelo, Elizabeth Baldwin, and Tom Evans Part IV: Persisting Challenges Chapter 15: Coevolving Relationships between Political Science Economics, by Elinor Ostrom Chapter 16: Policy Analysis in the Future of Good Societies, by Elinor Ostrom About the Contributors
