BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (Reuters) - The path to the first Nobel prize in economics shared by a woman wound through forests in Madagascar, rangelands in East Africa, irrigation systems in Nepal and the jails of the United States.
Elinor Ostrom, 76, a multidisciplinary academic at Indiana University, told reporters on Monday that her research found the best solutions to global problems like deforestation and depleted fisheries often lie with local people.
"One of the absolutely key, most important variables as to whether or not a forest survives and continues is whether local people monitor each other and its use. Not officials, locals," Ostrom, who is considered an expert on collective action, said.
"What we have ignored is what citizens can do," she said. "There's lots of indigenous knowledge that we need to respect. Simply allowing people to communicate and discuss about what they can do ... makes a huge difference."
Ostrom shared the $1.4 million prize with University of California, Berkeley, professor Oliver Williamson, an expert on conflict resolution.
She said she had found through her field work that local communities do better than governments or corporations at managing watersheds, fisheries and forests.
Her work has taken her and her "family" of graduate students -- many of whose children call the bespectacled Ostrom "grandma" -- to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Bolivia, Mexico, Nepal, and her own backyard in nearby Indianapolis.
"Deforestation and global change, loss of fisheries, all of these things are because of short-term rather than long-term thinking," she said.
A student of law enforcement and game theory -- which studies how people make choices in strategic situations -- Ostrom said small police forces perform better than large ones.
"I've probably been in more jails than any other Indiana University faculty member," she joked.
CALIFORNIA'S WATER
Her first project as a student, still going with one of her graduate students, has been to study water usage in Los Angeles. Her work helped authorities counter the risks of ocean water seeping in and ruining the dropping fresh water table.
Ostrom, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, said she was honored to be the first woman awarded the economics prize.
"The advice to me when I entered graduate school was 'well, you've got a professional job,' which I had. I was working in business. 'Why would you try for a PhD? You can't possibly get a job that is anything but teaching at a city college somewhere and you've got a better job now?'
"So I entered it for love, I didn't enter it to get a job, because I was warned I wouldn't get one," she said.
Her next book, entitled "Working Together," is likely to provide a theme for her address in Stockholm in December.
Ostrom said she had nothing personal to spend the prize money on, and planned to use it to build up the endowment for the workshop in political theory and public policy she founded at Indiana University in 1973 with her husband, Vincent Ostrom.
Her first response to receiving the surprising early-morning call informing that she had won was to yell to her 90-year-old husband, to 'wake up.' "He's deaf," she noted.
(Writing by Andrew Stern; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
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