Bloomington School

Definition

The Bloomington School of Public Choice and Institutional Theory created by the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics corecipient, Elinor Ostrom, and Public Choice movement co-founder, Vincent Ostrom, have contributed to the theory of collective action, the analysis of metropolitan administration, to governance theory, the theory of goods and their production, to the empirical study of natural resources management and of the commons, to the nature and role of social norms, and to the problems of constitutional political economy and institutional design. It also advanced significant methodological contributions to the study of polycentric, multilevel, dynamic institutional arrangements. In addition to the empirical, theoretical, and methodological research, the Bloomington school has been associated to a broader philosophy of social order and change centered on the “human condition” and the artefactual reality created by fallible but capable human beings in their process of...