2010 Mitchell Lecture on Sustainability
Keynote Speaker
Elinor Ostrom, Indiana University, Bloomington
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Elinor Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, an achievement that honors a lifetime of groundbreaking research, teaching, and scholarship. Osrom’s work shows how common resources—forests, fisheries, oil fields or grazing lands, can be managed successfully by the people who use them, rather than by governments or private companies. In particular, her work emphasizes how humans interact with ecosystems to maintain long-term sustainable resource yields.
Ostrom earned her Ph.D. in Political Science in 1965 from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science and Professor at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is also Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change at Indiana University and the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in spring, 1991, and a member of the National Academy of Science in 2001.