Teaching Tools & Methodologies

Teaching the Workshop

The Ostrom Workshop has been an epicenter of groundbreaking interdisciplinary research since it was founded by Elinor (Lin) and Vincent Ostrom in 1973. Over the preceding decades, Workshoppers have developed a wide range of methodologies and tools to study diverse topics such as the governance of common pool resources.

Interested students and faculty can find the collected work of the Workshop the means to make it accessible, inspiring, and informative to a new generation of Workshoppers.

Watch an introductory video on YouTube

Tragedy of the commons

The theory all common-pool resources (CPR) are finite and are thus in danger of exploitation and eventual destruction.

Bloomington School

The entire research agenda of the Ostroms and their associates, which is pursued in various research centers across the globe.

Ostrom design principles

The underlying “best practices” or factors that characterize robust institutions for the governance of common-pool resources (CPR)

Polycentric governance

A core pillar of the Bloomington School that’s a simple idea but complex in practice.

Institutional analysis development framework

The IAD framework includes analyzing actors, norms, institutional settings, incentive structures, rules, and more.

Social-ecological systems framework

In this framework, an SES has multiple levels of nested systems.

Knowledge commons

The IAD framework is not sufficient to study knowledge commons. Thus, the IAD framework was extended for studying the characteristics of knowledge commons.