Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom (1933–2012), political scientist and Nobel laureate, dismantled the inevitability of Hardin’s tragedy. Through decades of fieldwork, she demonstrated that communities can—and often do—govern shared resources sustainably without relying on markets or states. At her Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, she fostered a collective mode of inquiry, where governance was studied as practice, not abstraction. Her work remains a quiet yet radical counterpoint to technocratic and deterministic views of human ecology, grounding politics in the lived pragmatics of cooperation.

In the current debate about climate change and its disruptive effects on the health of people and ecosystems, the reclamation of the ‘right to the environment’ has gained momentum, both in theoretical accounts and in legal documents. Yet, it is useful to make a first distinction between the right to the environment and the right of the environment.

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