Thinking globally small

When Elinor Ostrom was riding around Marion County in squad cars in the 1970s, she made a simple observation with profound implications.

Getting an interview with the chief of the then-Indianapolis Police Department "took forever," even for an Indiana University researcher. Lining up talks with the Beech Grove and Speedway chiefs, on the other hand, was a snap.

Unsurprising, you might say. But what she went on to confirm was that the personal touch is not just a nostalgic luxury in a world grown too complex for governance on a small scale. To the contrary.

In her team's scrutiny of 80 urban areas, "We did not find that any large department outperformed smaller departments in face-to-face, immediate response areas."

Therein lay a lesson she has relearned and retaught throughout the world, all the way to Stockholm, 2009.

The 76-year-old political scientist became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics on the strength of a mountainous body of work that defies the wisdom by which modern government would have most of us live.

Hoosiers know the doctrine well. It holds up two alternatives, government consolidation and privatization, as the means of managing common resources. Local, much less neighborhood, control is dismissed as inefficient and naive about human selfishness.

Think the police-sheriff merger. Think abolishment of township government. Think the leasing of the Indiana Toll Road, and the (failed) experiment in turning over welfare processing to a for-profit company that replaced caseworkers with computers.

To be fair, Ostrom gives none of these a thumbs down as such. She and the I.U. Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, which she operates with her husband, Vincent, study cases in great depth before making definitive pronouncements. She would ask only that the poobahs do the same.

Take township trustees, venerable targets of reform in the name of streamlined county government.

"Some are a little outmoded," Ostrom acknowledges. "But in rural areas, man, they're important. This sweeping 'All townships are outmoded' -- we have to get people thinking more analytically."

There are no panaceas, she insists, no high-tech brave new world on the one hand and no return to a world of villages on the other. "There are economies of scale and there are dis-economies of scale."

And there is the need for government.

"The assumption that private means efficient is wrong. If a company has a long-term contract and no competition, why should it be efficient?"

For a top-tier scholar who is sorting through a stack of speaking invitations from all over the world, Ostrom is as down-to-earth in her scientific focus as she is in personality. She's distressed by consolidated school systems and large high schools, for example, because kids can slide through without involvement.

"How can we sustain a democracy when people don't learn ways of solving problems?"

In the glow of an historic honor, Ostrom continues to direct social and ecological studies worldwide. Meanwhile, she's using the Nobel as a vehicle, bound for Beech Grove.

"I hope to be able to get a slight change in perception. It's not just elected officials and top executives who are brilliant. There are many individuals who have pretty good insights. I want to enable them."