Elinor Ostrom, the 2009 Nobel Laureate in economics, and her husband Vincent are not household names among foreign policy practitioners. But they should be. The cross-disciplinary research program that they built together at Indiana University, Bloomington (hence the term “Bloomington School”) offers important insights about the international order that can reinvigorate demoralized internationalists on the center-Right both in Europe and in the United States, providing them with a fresh agenda for the 21st century.
The Bloomington School, developed initially to shed light on natural resource economies and local public goods provision, takes a modest, down-to-Earth approach. Institutional arrangements “that work in practice can work in theory” goes the informal “Ostrom's Law.” Instead of providing complex accounts of how the world ought to work in theory, the Ostroms engaged primarily in field work and documented how communities solved various challenges—from policing in the town of Speedway, Indiana, through farmer-organized irrigation systems in Nepal, to the management of inshore fisheries in Nova Scotia. What the Ostroms saw were bottom-up, rules-based structures with multiple nodes of decision-making: “polycentric orders,” or “open systems that manifest enough spontaneity to be self-organizing and self-governing.”
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