Elinor Ostrom challenged previous frameworks and assumptions about property, resolving the “Tragedy In Commons” and providing us with a practical, alternative view of an appropriate arrangement of resources. This view has been summed as “Ostrom’s Law”, which states that, “A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory.”

Ostrom pointed toward context, situational logic, and heterogeneity (diversity in beliefs, capabilities, cultures, information, languages, preferences, and social norms) as critical elements in the analysis of collective action, institutions, and systems of governance, and made particular study of rational choice theory, common-pool resources, and polycentrism in government. And, for her well-known work, Governing the Commons, in which she proved that a commons can, indeed, manage finite resources through efficient, economic, and ecological self-governance, Elinor Ostrom, in 2009, became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.

On a final note, before we get to the big list of Elinor Ostrom quotes, the documentary, “Actual World, Possible Future” explores the amazing lives and work of Elinor Ostrom and her husband, Vincent Ostrom, who together sought to address the enormous problems that plague human societies: climate change, endangered species, ocean pollution, deforestation.

The Big List Of Elinor Ostrom Quotes

Quotes are excerpted from ‘Governing the Commons’ and ‘Understanding Institutional Diversity’.

Quotes from ‘Governing the Commons’

“… change the constraining rules of the game to lead to outcomes other than remorseless tragedies.”
“Without a fair, orderly, and efficient method of allocating resource units, local appropriators have little motivation to contribute to the continued provision of the resource system.”
“Individuals attribute less value to benefits that they expect to receive in the distant future, and more value to those expected in the immediate future. In other words, individuals discount future benefits…”
“Norms of behavior reflect valuations that individuals place on actions or strategies in and of themselves, not as they are connected to immediate consequences… Norms of behavior therefore affect the way alternatives are perceived and weighed… The most important impact that the type and extent of shared norms will have on the strategies available to individuals has to do with the level of opportunistic behavior that appropriators can expect from other appropriators.”
“In every group there will be individuals who will ignore norms and act opportunistically when given a chance… Consequently, the adoption of norms of behavior will not reduce opportunistic behavior to zero.”
“At the most general level, the problem… is one of organizing: how to change the situation from one in which appropriators act independently to one in which they adopt coordinated strategies to obtain higher joint benefits or reduce their joint harm.”
“The core of organization involves changes that order activities so that sequential, contingent, and frequency-dependent decisions are introduced…”
“Individuals frequently are willing to forgo immediate returns in order to gain larger joint benefits when they observe many others following the same strategy. By requiring the participation of a minimal set of individuals, organizations can draw on this frequency-dependent behavior to obtain willing contributions on the part of many others.”
“… rationality on the part of individuals leads to coherence at the level of society.”
“Without monitoring, there can be no credible commitment; without credible commitment, there is no reason to propose new rules.”
“The processes of appropriation, provision, monitoring, and enforcement occur at the operational level. The processes of policy-making, management, and adjudication of policy decisions occur at the collective-choice level. Formulation, governance, adjudication, and modification of constitutional decisions occur at the institutional level.”
“To solve appropriation and provision problems… individuals must learn about the structure of the physical system on which they jointly rely, about their own appropriation and use patterns, about the norms of behavior that are followed in a community, about the incentives they will encourage or discourage as they change rules, and about how all of these factors will cumulatively affect their net benefits and costs over time.”
“… locations… stable over long periods of time… have shared a past and expect to share a future.”
“Prudent, long-term self-interest reinforces the acceptance of the norms of proper behavior.”
“When the cares of thinking and the troubles of living are left to others, self-government is abandoned, democracy withers away, autocracy emerges, and people begin preying upon one another in the name of liberty and equality.”
“The future belongs to those whose covenants are bonds of mutual trust grounded in principles of self-governance and who learn to use processes of conflict and conflict resolution to elucidate information, clarify alternatives, stimulate innovation, and extend the frontiers of inquiry to open new potentials for human development.”
“Defining the boundaries of the CPR… can be thought of as a first step in organizing for collective action.”
“Without defining the boundaries of the CPR and closing it to ‘outsiders’, local appropriators face the risk that any benefits they produce by their efforts will be reaped by others who have not contributed to those efforts.”
“… for any appropriators to have a minimal interest in coordinating patterns of appropriation and provision, some set of appropriators must be able to exclude others from access and appropriation rights.”
“The presence of good rules… does not ensure that appropriators will follow them.”
“… reputation and shared norms are insufficient by themselves to produce stable cooperative behavior over the long run.”
“In… robust institutions, monitoring and sanctioning are undertaken not by external authorities but by the participants themselves.”
“Strategic actors are willing to comply with a set of rules… when (1) they perceive that the collective objective is achieved, and (2) they perceive that others also comply… contingent behavior [is] a source of stable, long-term cooperative solutions.”
“… it is apparent that personal rewards for doing a good job are given to appropriators who monitor. The individual who finds a rule-infractor gains status and prestige for being a good protector of the commons.”

Quotes From ‘Understanding Institutional Diversity’

“Broadly defined, institutions are the prescriptions that humans use to organize all forms of repetitive and structured interactions including those within families, neighborhoods, markets, firms, sports leagues, churches, private associations, and governments at all scales. Individuals interacting within rule-structured situations face choices regarding the actions and strategies they take, leading to consequences for themselves and for others.”
“The opportunities and constraints individuals face in any particular situation, the information they obtain, the benefits they obtain or are excluded from, and how they reason about the situation are all affected by the rules or absence of rules that structure the situation.”
“The attributes of a community that are important in affecting action arenas include: the values of behavior generally accepted in the community; the level of common understanding that potential participants share (or do not share) about the structure of particular types of action arenas; the extent of homogeneity in the preferences of those living in a community; the size and composition of the relevant community; and the extent of inequality of basic assets among those affected.”
“The term culture is frequently applied to the values shared within a community. Culture affects the mental models that participants in a situation may share.”
“… [of] robust institutions that have generated substantial benefits over long periods of time… None have been designed in one single step. Rather, accrued learning and knowledge have led those with good information about participants, strategies, ecological conditions, and changes in technology and economic relationships over time to craft sustainable institutions…”
“ Social dilemmas are ubiquitous in economic, political, and social life. They occur whenever the private returns to each participant are greater than their share of a joint return no matter what other participants do. If the structure of a one-shot social dilemma game is not changed, and individuals pursue their own immediate, objective outcomes as the only values taken into account, individuals will not achieve outcomes that could leave everyone better off.”
“When the individual estimates that substantial benefits are likely to occur if others agree to an actual shift of levels of action and to change rules, the individual may then be willing to invest resources to try to convince others that they should agree on a shift and consider the constraints that are currently in effect.”
“Externally imposed sanctions can lead to resentment rather than guilt and adversely affect the willingness to reciprocate trust.”
“… a sanctioning system imposed without agreement of the participants may reduce reciprocity rather than increase it.”
“In order for communication to enhance joint payoffs to a heterogeneous set of subjects, they must agree on (1) the target level of group allocations to the common-pool resource, and (2) a rule for allocating the target input allocation across appropriators, and they must create (3) the necessary “social capital” to attenuate cheating…”
“… communication remains a powerful mechanism for promoting coordination… “
“In self-organized field settings, participants rarely impose sanctions on one another that have been devised exogenously…”
“Participants are willing to promise others whom they assess as being trustworthy that they will adopt a joint plan of action. Most individuals keep their promises (in situations where substantial advantage can accrue for breaking the promise). If agreements are broken, individuals become indignant and use verbal chastisements when available. They are also willing to use costly sanctions when they have the opportunity to select this option, and even tend to overuse them.”
“When given an opportunity to communicate, craft their own rules, and sanction nonconformance to these rules, some groups were willing to do so. Through their own efforts, these groups achieve close to optimal results. Those who forego such an opportunity are not able to sustain a high level of performance.”
“When we indicate that people share a culture, it is a shorthand way of indicating that the wide diversity of mental models that individuals have invented has been reduced to a smaller set within those sharing the culture. Culture may also be viewed as an intergenerational transfer of past experience.”
“Unless there is open and active communication among participants over some time, they may simply use different mental models when interacting in the same external situation. This can lead to gross misunderstandings and disappointments or even to major violence.”
“… ‘paying attention’ is costly.”
“Frohlich and Oppenheimer single out two properties of a situation as most important in affecting the way a situation is perceived. ‘The first property is the salience of the elements in a choice situation,’ by which they mean ‘the degree to which an element is linked to possible changes in the welfare of the decision maker’. The second property is the vividness of the situation or the ‘amount and quality of the sensory details of the objects encountered’. These attributes are important in gaining attention given the variety of signals an individual receives. ‘In order for something to grab one’s attention it must displace something else to which one is attending. To accomplish this, a new focus of attention must have a higher claim. Attention shifts from one object of attention to another as if there were a threshold of value attached to the former which has to be surpassed for the competitor to displace it’.”
“… human emotions underpin a commitment to reciprocity so that humans feel good when achieving mutual cooperation and feel bad when defections (their own or others) occur.”
“… “envy, vengeance and the desire to dominate are not less intrinsically motivated than altruism, conscientiousness, and love. All of these motives contribute to immediate satisfaction rather than to achieving externally set goals.”
“… intrinsic motivation can be crowded out in situations where individuals do not perceive themselves to have sufficient self-control over the actions they take.”
“External interventions crowd out intrinsic motivation if the individuals affected perceive them to be controlling. In that case, both self-determination and self-esteem suffer, and the individuals react by reducing their intrinsic motivation in the activity controlled. External interventions crowd in intrinsic motivation if the individuals concerned perceive it as supportive. In that case, self-esteem is fostered, and the individuals feel that they are given more freedom to act, which enlarges self-determination.”
“… norms are prescriptions held by an individual that an action or outcome in a situation must, must not, or may be permitted. Norms can be represented in formal analyses as a delta parameter that represents the intrinsic benefits or costs of obeying a normative prescription in a particular situation.”
“… conditional reciprocity can lead to cooperation to overcome social dilemmas.”
“… institutions are among the tools that fallible humans use to change incentives to enable fallible humans to overcome social dilemmas.”
“… not only are humans complex systems; so are the structures they build.”
“If the dilemma involved many individuals located in diverse settings around the world who have little opportunity to communicate and share no common rules—like an open-access ocean fishery or the global atmosphere—then the best predictions and explanations of behavior would be derived from assuming that most participants are rational egoists.”
“Conditional cooperators can do little without an appropriate institutional structure to support their norms. Those who would like to cooperate with others find themselves unable to do anything but follow the dominant strategy.”
“ If individuals face a social dilemma situation repeatedly and they have the autonomy to change the rules that structure it so as to enhance the probability that the proportion of conditional cooperators and willing punishers can grow over time, many individuals have crafted ingenious institutions that help them reach mutually productive rather than mutually unproductive outcomes.”
“Learning to craft rules that attract and encourage individuals who share norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness, or who learn them over time, is a fundamental skill needed in all democratic societies.”
“Rights are subject to limits.”
“… analysis demonstrates that simply introducing norms or monitoring is not sufficient to change predicted results in a Prisoner’s Dilemma base game, and that a change in predicted results is not always socially beneficial. The only equilibrium regions where players 1 and 2 select a pure strategy of cooperating is when internal norms generate high internal cost parameters relative to the advantage of defecting.”
“Boundary rules—frequently called entry and exit rules—define (1) who is eligible to enter a position, (2) the process that determines which eligible participants may enter (or must enter) positions, and (3) how an individual may leave (or must leave) a position. Some entry rules, then, specify the criteria to be used to determine whether an actor is eligible to fill a particular position. Ascribed and acquired attributes are frequently used in this type of entry rule.”
“In two-player repeated social dilemma games, the capability to exit—leave the situation and the position of player—has consistently been shown to make a big difference in the rate of cooperation reached over time.”
“Boundary… rules affect how easy or difficult it is to monitor activities and impose sanctions on rule infractions.”
“Appropriators who trust one another to keep agreements and use reciprocity in their relationships with one another face lower expected costs involved in monitoring and sanctioning one another over time.”
“Neither size nor heterogeneity are variables with a uniform effect on the likelihood of organizing and sustaining self-governing enterprises.”
“If a group of users can determine their own membership—including those who agree to use the resource according to their agreed-upon rules and excluding those who do not agree to these rules—the group has made an important first step toward limiting access and developing greater trust and reciprocity.”
“Few long-surviving resource regimes rely primarily on endogenous levels of trust and reciprocity among appropriators to keep rule breaking levels down.”
“Most long-surviving resource regimes select their own monitors…”
“Here is a list of five threats to sustainable community governance of small-scale resource governance systems that I have come across in different contexts”:
- 1. rapid exogenous changes;
- 2. transmission failures from one generation to the next of the operational principles on which community governance is based;
- 3. programs relying on blueprint thinking and easy access to external funds;
- 4. corruption, rent-seeking, and other forms of opportunistic behavior; and
- 5. lack of large-scale institutional arrangements related to reliable information collection, aggregation, and dissemination; fair and low cost conflict resolution mechanisms; educational and extension facilities; and facilities for helping when natural disasters or other major problems occur at a local level.
“Norms of reciprocity and trust are necessary for the long-term sustenance of self-governing regimes. Norms alone, however, are not sufficient to support individuals facing the temptations of social dilemmas. Rules that are fair, effective, and legitimate are necessary complements to shared norms for sustaining self-governing institutions over time. And, in turn, self-organizing arrangements enable people to learn more about one another’s needs and the ecology around them.”

Final Thoughts

Elinor Ostrom’s intellectual legacy reveals a profound truth about human cooperation: we are neither doomed to tragedy nor dependent on external control. Through meticulous fieldwork and rigorous analysis, she demonstrated that communities worldwide have successfully managed shared resources through self-governance, trust, and carefully crafted institutions. Her work challenges the false dichotomy between state control and privatization, offering instead a nuanced understanding of how people organize themselves to solve collective problems. The quotes collected here illuminate her core insight that “a resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory”—a revolutionary inversion of traditional academic thinking that honors the wisdom embedded in functioning communities.

What emerges from these passages is Ostrom’s deep appreciation for human complexity and institutional diversity. She recognized that successful governance depends not on universal blueprints but on context-specific solutions that account for local knowledge, cultural values, and social relationships. Her emphasis on monitoring, sanctioning, and boundary rules might seem mechanistic, but she understood these as organic extensions of community norms and reciprocal relationships. The repeated themes of trust, communication, and conditional cooperation reveal her view of institutions not as external constraints but as tools that “fallible humans use to change incentives to enable fallible humans to overcome social dilemmas.”

Perhaps most importantly, Ostrom’s work carries an urgent message for our interconnected world facing climate change, resource depletion, and social fragmentation. Her research proves that humans possess the capacity for self-organization and sustainable resource management, but this capacity must be cultivated and protected. The five threats she identifies to community governance—from rapid change to corruption to lack of supportive large-scale institutions—remain painfully relevant. As we confront global challenges that require both local action and international coordination, Ostrom’s insights about polycentricity, institutional diversity, and the interplay between rules and norms offer both hope and guidance. Her life’s work stands as both an intellectual achievement and a practical roadmap for building resilient, self-governing communities in an uncertain future.

Thanks for reading!