The Bloomington School is a research tradition in institutional political economy that emerged in the mid-20th century at Indiana University Bloomington, developed by Vincent Ostrom and Elinor Ostrom together with their colleagues and students. It approaches governance, collective action and institutional diversity, particularly the management of common-pool resources, through the polycentric argument that multiple, overlapping and autonomous decision-making centers can outperform a single monopoly authority, a position aimed directly at Garrett Hardin's 1968 tragedy-of-the-commons thesis that shared resources are inevitably overexploited without either privatization or centralized state control. The Ostroms founded the school's institutional home, the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, in 1973; Elinor Ostrom's Nobel-winning fieldwork on real-world commons governance is its most prominent expression.
Facts
Core TenetMultiple, overlapping and autonomous decision-making centers, a structure the school calls polycentric governance, can improve efficiency, accountability and problem-solving compared with a single centralized authority, and case studies of communities worldwide show common-pool resources successfully self-governed through local institutions rather than through privatization or top-down state control. 1 Bloomington School
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Ostrom co-founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis with her husband Vincent Ostrom in 1973, the school's institutional home; her Nobel-winning work on commons governance is its most prominent expression. This is a second, separately recorded associated-with-school edge alongside her existing one to New Institutional Economics, the same multiple-membership convention already used for e.g. Joan Robinson.
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Both schools share the Bloomington/Virginia-adjacent rational-choice institutionalist tradition and analyze collective decision-making through the same methodological individualist lens.
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Wikimedia FoundationBloomington school, Origins and development section
The Ostroms founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis in 1973, which became the institutional home for research on self-governance and institutional diversity.
Bloomington school, Polycentric Governance section
Multiple, overlapping, and autonomous decision-making centers can improve efficiency, accountability, and problem-solving.
Associated With: Public Choice Theory, Bloomington school, Public Choice and Constitutional Governance section
The Bloomington School is closely aligned with public choice theory.
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